MacWeek gets the Axe
What can I say? MacWeek, one of the oldest and proudest Macintosh publications ever, has closed its doors. And the Macintosh world is the sorrier for it. Or are we?
Some History
When I first started reading MacWeek, it was a weekly trade print publication. It was, and retains the title even today, the best Mac related publication ever. It had reviews, columns, investigative reporting, an excellent layout, and best of all, a pro-Mac approach. It was written for the professional user, which I was slowly becoming at that time. (I publish My Mac in my spare time, but I am an Information Technology Manager in a Macintosh studio full time.) MacWeek, in many ways, helped me make the transition from Mac user to Mac professional.
MacWeek was also a free publication. I believe you could subscribe to it, though it would cost you over $100 a year. But it was free to qualified Macintosh processionals. So when I started reading it, I had to lie about what I did for a living to get the free subscription. Bad Tim, bad! But like I said, MacWeek helped me become who I am today, and for that, I thank all the staff of that fine magazine who came before.
It was a sad day back in 1997 when Ziff Davis and International Data Group (IDG) joined Mac publishing forces. It was really the end of the golden age of Mac print magazines. The joint venture, forevermore called “Mac Publishing, L.L.C” seemed a great move at the time. But it quickly turned, for me at least, to be the harbinger of bad things to come. Their first move, stop publishing my favorite magazine, MacUser. Many Mac users today don’t even remember MacUser, but it was far and away the best Mac magazine out there. (MacUser, like I said, was a weekly trade publication, not a magazine.) In closing down MacUser, Mac Publishing, L.L.C was trying to consolidate the two publications by rolling what was then MacUser into Macworld magazine. The first two issues of the new MacUser/Macworld were great, and seemed to really be two magazines in one. It had all that I loved from both! But quickly, within a few months, it went downhill. Macworld became more and more like the Macworld of old, and everything I loved so much about MacUser was fading from sight.
Ziff Davis was the owner of both MacUser and MacWeek. At the same time of the Macintosh publications merger with International Data Group (IDG) and their decision to axe MacUser, they also stopped publishing MacWeek as a trade, and moved it to web-only publication. This, I knew, was the end of MacWeek. And while it may have lasted from 1998 to 2001, a run of close to four years, the web edition of MacWeek was never the same as the print version. It was not even close. It had, at most, 10% of the content that the print MacWeek had, but more importantly, it was lost in the avalanche of other Macintosh websites at the time, such as MacCentral, MacTimes (RIP), MacObserver, and many other Mac news sites. Gone was the main source of revenue for MacWeek, its countless pages of advertising, which was as important to the Macintosh professional as was the news and reviews section of the magazine. (How else does one fine other Mac vendors?) By moving to an online publication only, MacWeek lost it ability to garner advertising as it had in print. Now it had to compete with many other Mac websites for the same piece of the advertising pie, a piece which was (and still is) growing smaller every day. As a weekly trade print publication, with an established number of subscribers, MacWeek had a chance to grow. As a web only publication, they lost that.
Andy Gore wrote a fine farewell to the publication, which you can read here. It was touching for someone like me, who read both the online and print versions of MacWeek, and recognized some of those long forgotten names of contributors.
It is a sad day to see MacWeek go. But is it really?
MacWeek had long since lost its prestige as a publication in most Mac users eyes. They were little different than many other Mac websites, and in fact worse than some. Their daily news section was taken away from them when Mac Publishing, L.L.C purchased MacCentral away in 1999 from its creator, Stan Flack. (Stan took a position in Mac Publishing, L.L.C after the purchase, however. You can read an interview with Stan I conducted before the sale. Sure, they still had news, but nothing like the hard-hitting investigative reporting of the past. In fact, much of the “news” at MacWeek was nothing more than regurgitated press releases, which is the norm; it seems, for what most Mac web sites call “news” today. (This web site is NOT a news site, which is why you don’t read press releases here) You could also count on reading at least five to ten reviews in each issue of MacWeek in print, but web edition? Few and, sorry to say, far between.
So perhaps it is not so bad to see MacWeek closing its doors. It was not as good as it had been. That was not the fault of the people who worked for MacWeek in the last few years, such as Stephen Beale , Wes George, John C. Welch, David K. Every, Tony Smith, and others. I think that MacWeek was hamstrung from the fact that they were owned by Mac Publishing, L.L.C, a company who tends to buy it best competition (MacCentral) and water down its hard hitting journalism (MacWeek).
Farewell, MacWeek. Some of us will miss you, and have for four years now.
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