"the dead-tree era of computer journalism is officially over"

April 17, 2023 4:42 AM

Maximum PC and MacLife have stopped producing printed copies. Harry McCracken posts a eulogy to an era in computer journalism.
posted by Grinder (34 comments total)

It's funny, I don't even remember the last paper magazine I subscribed to. I want to guess it's been more than 20 years..... no. I subscribed to Fine Woodworking for a while in the 00s. That was a really well done magazine. Back in the day and on topic I have fond memories of Byte and Computer Shopper
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:31 AM on April 17, 2023

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posted by lalochezia at 6:10 AM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Sad to see this.

I owe a lot to dead-tree computer magazines, and I miss writing for them and being part of the publication process. There's a kind of perverse fun being up against deadline and going over galleys and layouts with people over the phone. And there's a lot more satisfaction seeing your name on a cover or in print than on a website, even if the content itself isn't any different.

Print computer magazines aren't entirely dead, there are some publications out of Europe that are still doing well (as I understand it) if not swimming in cash. But they are run by tenacious true-believers who could probably make a lot more money if they applied their talents to a more lucrative venture. (I am not arguing that they should, mind you, only that they could.)

Back when one of my friends was still working for said magazine, I'd tease her with the "print is dead" argument but never really meant it and certainly didn't want it. (I could tease because I knew they were doing OK.)

But, print magazines are a bit like vinyl records these days. They're utterly impractical and largely kept alive by nostalgia. I still buy both, but the vast majority of my music and news consumption are via digital.

Not sure what my point is or if I even have one. It just kind of sucks to live in an age of such rapid obsolescence, having learned a lot about a trade that's gone out of style just as you got good at it and its replacement being soulless and ephemeral.

The good news is that I met a lot of wonderful people in the process, and some of those relationships endure even if the publications didn't. Reminds me that I owe one of my old publishers a call, it's been ages since we talked (and even longer since his publication went out of print).
posted by jzb at 6:27 AM on April 17, 2023 [15 favorites]

No love for RUN?
posted by MtDewd at 6:41 AM on April 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I remember learning the word "dead tree" in the jargon watch section of a copy of Wired magazine I bought from the grocery store around 1993 bc it looked cool. I scoffed at it (with the wisdom of a teenager) but thirty years later, it's definitely caught on. I think some grocers still sell paper magazines but it's definitely not the norm it used to be.

I still enjoy my hard copy subscription to Science News, paper magazines have a whole slew of ergonomics that you just can't get on a screen. I'd like to see more/better/easier e-ink readers and magazines, but I still don't think it would be something I'd want to casually drip my morning coffee on like I can do with print.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:56 AM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

In the 8-bit and 16-bit era, magazines were a foundational part of my and probably a lot of others' experience of microcomputing. You had programs you could type in. Advertisements actually introduced you to products you might not otherwise ever encounter, reviews of things could help you make what might turn out to be essential decisions about your computing experience. They were in many ways a kind of community.

Byte, 80 Micro, RUN, even the preciously earnest Compute! and CG: these things defined an era of letting me see things I didn't know, didn't have, or could start to learn. They gave me awareness of things that were both within and fully outside my reach.

I think I wound up reading my last issue of Byte in 91. I leafed through a MacWorld a few times since then, though the products were economically well out of reach until long after the information contained within was too general-purpose to be of interest to me.

Maximum PC was, as far as I know, just about the only thing going that started with a significant editorial effort to cater to the enthusiast. The general audience publications, the stuff an IT manager who thinks himself savvy might look at, really kind of fell away due to advertiser capture as much as anything else. The money was clearly getting scarcer and the editorial scope -- never bold with most of those folks -- ever narrower out there.

It's a shame. It's a real shame. Print is so expensive to do, the demand is so low, and journalism costs money. Technology journalism of the classic kind, even more so. Technology journalists who know what they're talking about are scarce.

It's a real shame.
posted by majick at 6:57 AM on April 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

I miss print in terms of magazines and newspapers. There was and is something about being able to hold a physical object in your hands and say "I was part of making this. It's done and finished, look at it."

I could have gotten into web design, but it held no interest, though I was around at the beginning of it. It was very very clear that it would be a medium of endless fiddling, where the higher ups would be wanting to make endless changes, while paying less and less.

Plus Internet Explorer was a dogshit browser and who wants to work on something that will intentionally break of Microsoft's desire to try and rule everything? CSS was pretty cool though.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 7:02 AM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

For me, it was over when they stopped printing Doctor Dobb's Journal.
posted by mikelieman at 7:03 AM on April 17, 2023 [10 favorites]

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Sigh, at one point from 1993 until 1999, I would routinely purchase dozens of tech magazines monthly, with a focus on coding and electronics, and have been watching print slowly die for more than a decade. But, there is far more information available now, for free - except for bitrot (which still at least is sort of searchable, you will find links to dead articles via search engines, so you know there is information, which is information of a kind as well) - and now the evolution/movement from articles to posts on ephemeral things like Discord, Slack and Teams... "It's on the discord", means a search for one specific "server" and then trying to make sense of random posts.
posted by rozcakj at 7:13 AM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

It just kind of sucks to live in an age of such rapid obsolescence, having learned a lot about a trade that's gone out of style just as you got good at it and its replacement being soulless and ephemeral.

Thank you for articulating my aging angst so well.
posted by JanetLand at 7:22 AM on April 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

I bought 2 years of Dr.Dobbs and a couple of issues of Byte last year for research for a (rare) print issue we are doing of a computer magazine I write for. I love the super technical focus of those magazines, there is no way I could imagine them surviving today, tech folks today don't have the chops to read this stuff. It is very dense.

I still like paper, I don't vinyl is a fair comparision, in many ways a paper magazine is better than anything on my phone or computer. I don't think vinyl has that.
posted by adventureloop at 7:47 AM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I am reminded that the first money i made doing 'puter shit was the $400 i got from Compute! in 1984 for a game I wrote and sent in. So yeah, thanks paper magazines, probably for the realization that one could make money banging on little keys, not just pew pew Star Raiders sounds.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:53 AM on April 17, 2023 [9 favorites]

in many ways a paper magazine is better than anything on my phone or computer. I don't think vinyl has that.

I mean I think this is a terrible place for a derail on audiophile snobbery enthusiasm, but suffice it to say there's plenty of people who would strongly assert that their vinyl collection offers myriad ineffable benefits that cannot be had in digital media, and in that sense I think the analogy is fairly apt.
posted by SaltySalticid at 8:06 AM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

Around 1985 I entered Computer Gaming World's spaceship design contest for SSI's game "Cosmic Balance," sending in a diskette with my warship, the Triceratops. I finished somewhere in the middle of the entrants after betting too heavily on Klingon-style disruptors.

My childhood love for computers was so intertwined with print journalism: Spinnaker's The Newsroom let us make our own publications with funny clip art, there would be the program listings in Compute! mentioned above (or in MAD!). There would be lag time between seeing a blurry screenshot of "Defender of the Crown" in CGW and being able to see a joust in full motion color at the showroom next to Waldenbooks. Even the people who made Blade Runner, which starts with Harrison Ford reading the paper, assumed print would still be going strong. I don't have anything deep to say about it except that as an ex-journalist all of this world giving way to blue tickmark controversies is such a bummer!
posted by johngoren at 8:11 AM on April 17, 2023

Just to chime in and tweak your nostalgia for old computer rags... Jason Scott just bought a collection of Computer Shopper magazines on eBay and is now working on a way to get all of them scanned and into the archive. If you've ever read one of these, they were massive publications. This will take a lot of work.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:13 AM on April 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I still get some dead tree magazine subscriptions -- they're generally related to home improvement and I like having something to sit on the couch and browse through.

Probably the best magazine I get is the Journal Of Light Construction, which I'm not sure how I got on their list but I recieve completely free (probably because, as someone who is renovating a home, I'm on mailing lists for building materials), which is a capital-letters Home Improvement magazine -- not in the "this month's color is 'ocean sunset'; how to decorate your home with typewriters" vein, but in the "how to build stairs from scratch" way.

One I miss is Interview Magazine -- originally started by Andy Warhol, it always had something creative or interesting in it. I think they shut down for a while and are now back in print quarterly I think? But I haven't looked into subscribing again.

If you want to get free random stuff, Mercury Magazines lets you subscribe to weird industry journals, many of which are still available in paper editions. Nobody verifies what you enter, you just fill out forms and magazines start arriving in the mail and never stop, even if you think you've unsubscribed.

RE: Computer Shopper: man, I loved that phonebook-sized magazine, the Vogue September Issue but for nerds, back in the early 90s, and did build computers from parts ordered there. But, also marvelling at the high end used stuff. Like, if I saved up I could buy a PDP-11 for a couple grand? Sparcstations for $200? I barely knew anything about computers then but there was so much potential in those magazines.
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:26 AM on April 17, 2023 [4 favorites]

I think the MagPi still has a print edition - it probably keeps up interest by occasionally sending everyone a new raspberry pi of some flavor or another. Looks like these days you get a free pi microcontroller with a subscription.
posted by kaibutsu at 8:52 AM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

seanmpuckett, I found your game, a Reversi implementation called Reflection, in Compute! issue 54! You're in good company, both Commodore legend Jim Butterfield and columnist Fred D'Ignazio were writing for Compute! at that time, and are in that issue!
posted by JHarris at 9:21 AM on April 17, 2023 [6 favorites]

Butterfield passed many years ago now, but D'Ignazio's still alive at 74!
posted by JHarris at 9:23 AM on April 17, 2023

JHarris, that was my second game. The first was even earlier: Quatrainment. I only got paid half as much for the Reversi clone, probably because it wasn't an original. Or maybe they'd cut their rates. Dunno.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:47 AM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I still feel a shiver of excitement when my paper issue of 2600 arrives in the mail :). I don't think it's going away any time soon (or at least I hope not).
posted by jy4m at 10:00 AM on April 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

As a historian by training, I grieve that we're losing so much information to ephemeral web sources. Not just e-magazines which are basically fancy blogs, but discords and other private fora as mentioned above, which are super unlikely to be documented. A lot of stuff is just being lost and the move away from print, while economically understandable, is accelerating that loss.

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posted by gentlyepigrams at 10:53 AM on April 17, 2023 [7 favorites]

I still subscribe to a couple of narrowly-focused print magazines, all of which have websites with all that content and more. It's anyone's guess when they'll all go digital-only, but it can't be too long.
posted by tommasz at 11:02 AM on April 17, 2023

I miss The New Zork Times, but that's just me being super old.

You know what's still going strong in print? Highlights magazine. Who's Goofus now, dweebs? (In all seriousness, a print computer magazine for kids would probably do okay.)
posted by phooky at 11:35 AM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think the magazine I liked most through my life was Ranger Rick when I was a wee young thing, in that it was the one I was most excited to get. Science News, a weekly, probably second, but of all of them I am mentioning, it's the easiest to have been replaced by a blog. MIT Technology Review was pretty good, but fairly expensive so I didn't keep it for long. I had Scientific American but well past its really primo "fuck you if you don't understand the articles" heyday; they were starting to dumb things down. BYTE for at least a decade, well past its best before date sadly. There was also MAKE Magazine but really just the first couple years were good then things got kinda strange. Also the car magazines but I'm particularly embarrassed by that period of my life.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:52 AM on April 17, 2023

I read niche things like Risc User and BBC Acorn User, their death was almost tied to the scene. I don't think there was ever a paper edition of Linux Weekly News, but I subscribe now and have done for ... nearly fifteen years. The niche can be supported, maybe the people who "can't not write" about computers are recording stuff for video-streaming sites. Paper was good while it lasted.

Simultaneously, it's been about 7 years of paper copies of Delayed Gratification (slow-journalism.com / previousl-uh-that's-me). There's specialist shoppes doing retail of zines and designed-zines, Rare Mags Stockport is one example in my stomping ground.
posted by k3ninho at 1:24 PM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

→ I am reminded that the first money i made doing 'puter shit was …

For me, it was 1988, Amstrad Computer User, a lot less money, and an obvious knock-off of a one-liner published a few years previously for another computer. The most fun was writing for Jeff Walker's Just Amiga Monthly — a “serious” magazine completely produced on an Amiga, output on a Canon inkjet on that special chalky paper.

But my supposed claim to fame was the first person to give a game over 100% in a review.
posted by scruss at 3:26 PM on April 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

If we're trading computer magazine stories, my first earned money was from selling programs to Loadstar, a Commodore 64 magazine-on-disk that survived much longer than you'd expect it'd have: it got started in 1984, the year before the NES was released, and finally closed up shop in 2007. (Loadstar was started by Softdisk Publishing, the same outfit from which Carmack and Romero came before they founded id Software, although by the end it had long ago separated from that company and become its own one-person shoestring operation.)
posted by JHarris at 4:45 PM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Author and MeFi contributor cstross wrote some columns for Computer Shopper a while back. Those vast phonebook tomes kickstarted a whole ecosystem of creators.
posted by meehawl at 9:42 PM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I miss MacAddict.
posted by brundlefly at 2:24 AM on April 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

I won a humor contest run by the inimitable Stan Kelly-Bootle in the back pages of either Unix Review or Unix World, one of 'em. I even got to talk with him and his wife over the phone. Envy me!

Computer Language magazine was a fantastically pleasant way to engorge your mind.
posted by Chitownfats at 12:00 PM on April 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

My entire life is intertwined with magazines in ways which make me feel the end of days is here.
posted by dbiedny at 2:23 PM on April 18, 2023 [5 favorites]

Damn.

.
posted by northtwilight at 4:22 PM on April 18, 2023

One dead-tree computer magazine genre that was bound to lose was the shareware magazine boom of 1990-1992 (aka recession). Trying to sell ads for things that people wanted to spend as little money on as possible was never gonna work.

(I *think* I wrote something for Shareware Shopper, but it's all a blur)
posted by scruss at 5:49 PM on April 18, 2023 [1 favorite]