Reading Market, Macweek to Morph Into eMediaweekly
After a couple of humbling years, the news about Apple Computer these days has been so encouraging that many Mac enthusiasts have become outright giddy. I even detect a whiff of that old superiority complex here and there.
The company has introduced some compelling new products and shown a profit for three straight quarters. With a coherent operating system strategy in place at long last, software and hardware developers coming back into the fold, and even market share ticking up slightly, it’s no wonder that Apple stock is surging.
Only one piece remains to get Apple firmly back on track: growth. Revenue and unit sales are down from this time last year. Interim CEO Steve Jobs says the iMac will soon correct that little problem, and he’s been right about a lot of other things lately.
So it’s ironic that a fixture of the Mac community will soon become a casualty of the Mac’s past problems. On Aug. 24, Macweek, a lonely trade publication devoted solely to the Mac, will transform into eMediaweekly. The market could no longer sustain a weekly publication devoted solely to Macintosh computing. The magazine will still cover the Mac, but as part of a cross-platform digital media focus.
“It became absolutely clear that to have a successful business plan going forward, we’d have to move beyond the Macintosh,” said Colin Crawford, chief executive of Mac Publishing Inc., holding company for eMediaweekly as well as the leading Macintosh monthly, Macworld. eMediaweekly’s target, digital media professionals, need a magazine covering both Mac and Windows NT. “We think longer term, our business is better served by being cross-platform,” he said.
Don’t blame Crawford. Apple forced his hand when it decided to end Mac OS licensing last year. Cloners were a huge source of ad revenue for all the Mac magazines, and when that dried up, it was only a matter of time before Macweek died or changed its scope.
“The good news is that we’re not abandoning the Mac platform. We’ll have a significant amount of Mac coverage,” said Crawford, who also promises cross-platform performance comparisons--something I’d personally welcome since no one today faces Macs off against PCs consistently. And Macweek online will continue.
So what’s left is far better than nothing. But the loss is still great symbolically. It shows that the Mac’s status as a platform has become so small that it can’t support a single large weekly.
The loss also looks great in practical terms. With a more narrow focus, eMediaweekly won’t cover education, home users and other key markets with nearly the focus they require. It won’t offer the same range of technology scoops and obscure news items that people in the industry must have to understand the competition and fine-tune product plans.
And the new magazine will inevitably ignore things that have been the Mac’s hallmark: stories about the little companies in a multitude of realms outside digital media that can’t get attention anywhere else, but have killer products that move the Mac forward.
Macweek never offered the highest quality or most compelling read in computer journalism. But it was an honest broker of information.
Given that the key PC trade publications such as PC Week, Computerworld and Infoworld virtually ignore the Mac, it hurts to lose Macweek. The remaining smaller Mac news publications lack Macweek’s range and clout.
The monthly or semimonthly Mac consumer press remains a lively bunch. Unfortunately, most of those magazines are so avowedly partisan (with names like “Mac Addict” and “Mac Today: A Totally Biased Look at the Macintosh,” you get the idea) and so dedicated to pumping up the Mac market that their credibility is at best suspect.
Macworld once was a fierce reader advocate. The magazine praised Apple’s good products, but it challenged the computer industry on a range of issues and castigated the crummy products Apple specialized in for a while. Apple got so mad that it nearly cut off Macworld’s supply of pre-release product information. (Full disclosure: I was an editor at Macworld for several years during that period.)
Macworld has also fallen prey to the declining ad market, though in a different way. Last year Macworld absorbed MacUser, its chief competitor. There were simply not enough advertisers to sustain two large monthlies. When the competitors merged, readers lost diversity of course, and the competition that drove ambitious editorial plans and innovation.
Macworld is still respectable and useful, if more svelte than in its heyday. But it long ago lost the hard-hitting edge that a great consumer magazine has to have. So as for me, I’m hoping that the Mac market grows fast.
No doubt many of you will now write to me about your favorite Mac publications. If you convince me that they offer something compelling and notable, I’ll revisit this topic in a future column.
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Times staff writer Charles Piller can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].
