End of a (Dead Tree) Era

Ziff Davis, the tech/gaming media company that recently exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is now taking the brave but inevitable step of closing down the print version of PCMag to focus its energy on its growing PCMag online network of sites, led by flagship PCmag.com. The magazine, which was started in 1982, has a storied history, but its print base eroded over the years as its core brand of journalism—news you can use while shopping for computers—moved online. It cut back from bi-weekly to monthly earlier this year. PCMag, which literally invented the idea of comparative hardware and software reviews, at one time during the 80s averaged about 400 pages an issue, with some issues breaking the 500- and even 600-page marks, according to this Wikipedia history.

Indeed, as I well remember when I was Editor and Publisher of the first UK edition of PC Magazine at the beginning of the 1990s - before Ziff Davis spent enormous sums themselves trying to launch it here. I still remember the annual printers issue - which ran to hundreds of pages, filled with the most boring computer journalism known to mankind - with a kind of dread....

The Incorruptible Blogosphere

John Dvorak is the original angry old man of computer journalism. I've been reading his stuff for decades now. It's striking that he's increasingly off-beam compared to the "good old days" of his column in PC Magazine, when he more than anyone had his finger on the pulse of personal computing. But he's still a good and entertaining journalist (after all, when has being right ever been that important in this business?).

Here's a good example of Dvorak at his best, writing about the essential incorruptibility of the blogosphere - not, be it noted, of bloggers, but of the totality of them:

While many bloggers seem eagerly corruptible — almost inviting it — it's not going to make any difference because there will be 10 to 100 bloggers pointing the finger at them and another 1,000 analyzing the finger-pointing.

Spot on; this another reason why open, non-hierarchical systems work so much better than closed, centralised ones in these kinds of situations. (Via Smart Mobs.)