Julie Balise blogs at the San Francisco Gate:
Macworld executive editor Dan Miller tweeted on Wednesday that the magazine's print edition is "going away," but its website will continue with a "reduced editorial staff."
Miller said he will remain with the company for a month to help with the transition.
Jason Snell, editorial director for Macworld, also announced his departure via Twitter:
A personal announcement: I'm leaving Macworld after 17 years. http://t.co/gozwnjN0z5
--- Jason Snell (@jsnell) September 10, 2014On his personal website, Snell wrote that his time with Macworld was "a great ride."
"Unfortunately, many of my colleagues lost their jobs today," he wrote. "If there's anything I can do to help them, I will. I have had time to plan for this day, but they haven't. You probably know some of them. Please join with me in giving them sympathy and support."
The San Francisco-based magazine was launched in 1984, the same year Apple introduced the Macintosh.
The cuts were part of a major reorganization at IDG Communications, according to Folio Magazine. A new U.S. Media group was created. The company did not tell Folio Magazine how many employees were let go.
The Boston Globe's report notes that November's will be the last dead-tree issue and that Boston-based International Data Group has previously gone through similar moves with their other properties, Computerworld and PCWorld.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:21AM
... I'm more surprised to hear they were still around, than that they're going out of business (or moving online in this case).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday September 17 2014, @03:34AM
I've been to their website often, but I never knew there even was a print edition.
(I never even look at the magazine stands, for at least the last 10 years, so unless someone drops on on my desk I'd never know).
I know a lot of mac-heads and have never seen this rag in anyone's office.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday September 17 2014, @04:12AM
Because if they did to it what they did to PCWorld it wasn't worth having. My ex gave me a 5 year subscription to PCWorld which ended about a year before they stopped printing the mag and...can I have a MAGAZINE with my ads please? I swear the last 3 years you'd have to open the magazine over a bin when you got it so all the shitty inserts would fall into the trash and then you'd get the "pleasure" or reading stories a good 6 months behind taking 3 times as many pages as needed (often splattered across the mag so you'd have to jump back and forth to read the damned thing cover to cover) because each page was so spammed with ads it looked like the AOL portal circa 2001.
So yeah not really surprised these mags are going under and it don't have shit to do with "oh people are going online" because there will ALWAYS be places where having something to read is gonna be nice, its because the owners got too fucking GREEDY and ruined it! Its why I have zero fucks to give for these websites that say "Ohh we're so poor we can only survive with ads, won't you purty pwease whitelist us?" to which I always retort "do you follow best practices? Do you insure there will be ZERO viruses and malware from your ads?" and when they of course say no because they are lazy greedy piggies I can tell them to go DIAF with a feeling of smug self superiority warming my little black heart!
Because once upon a time these mags got by with normal non story breaking ads, just as websites got along just fine with basic txt and jpg ads, but then along came the MBA (Master of Being an Asshole) that said "Why you aren't monetizing the peasants enough, if we quadruple the ads and make 'em as irritating as possible we'll make mad bank!" and we see where that has gotten us, dead mags and adblock everywhere. This is what happens when you care about short term profits more than your customers, you strangle the goose that lays the golden eggs just so you can squeeze that extra dime out, gotta make the quarterly earnings ya know!
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Shimitar on Wednesday September 17 2014, @05:54AM
Man you have some bitterness there....
I tend to agree mostly. But indeed i stopped reading paper publications a while ago and just because... just because. I dont know it does not fit my ways... anymore. It used to.
We buy them at work, but that's for the dvd with linux distros on them since we have limited internet speed.... but wait, since we got finally a better connection, we stopped that too...
Coding is an art. No, java is not coding. Yes, i am biased, i know, sorry if this bothers you.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday September 17 2014, @07:20AM
Its because I'm sick and damned tired of being BLAMED for failed business practices! "Oh we didn't sell enough copies, that is why we fired everyone and turned into another shitty site" "Oh we had to start putting our content on 40 pages or behind paywalls because too many were blocking ads ", to quote the Spooney one " Buuuuulllllsssshhhhiiittttt!"
I was there from the time of BBSes, and I'm old enough to have bought mags with programs written out as fricking code as a selling point and ya know what? We put up with ads on the net for a better part of a decade without adblocking even crossing anybody's mind because they weren't douchebags sucking bandwidth with giant flash ads that infect your PC, blast your eardrums, and jump out in front of shit like a used car ad at 3AM on public access, and by that same token I bought mountains of mags as late as 2007! Did I not have the net then? Of course I did but there is many times where having a cheap portable reading material that you don't have to worry about killing the battery or getting it stolen is DAMN handy but again they became douchebags and started leaving mounds of insert crap and filling it with more ads than a 90s porno mag so you got a few half assed stories and the rest? Obnoxious bullshit! And yeah it makes me pissed but frankly you should be too because it blames the user instead of where it belongs, the douchebags in charge!
BTW what do you need multiple Linux distros for? Most folks pick one and stick with it until it breaks so what's with the distropaloza?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Wednesday September 17 2014, @08:32AM
Yeah. Bitterness is pretty understandable even ignoring the bit about people trying (and failing, miserably) to guilt trip others that don't want ad infestation with their "internet runs on ads" crap. Besides that the content just went to crap. They're basically long "sponsored articles" dealing with showing off a company's latest overpriced hardware without any actual technical stuff and when it's not that it's (as you said) content six months out of date. Also I don't know what he was talking about re. linux distros but I do remember there being CDs with slackware tarballs on them. That was always useful.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 17 2014, @01:01PM
If he's that angry about his magazine subscription from 10 years ago, and now their free online editions, I recommend not asking him what he thinks of his CATV provider.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Wednesday September 17 2014, @01:38PM
It isn't that there are ads in themselves (though that doesn't help either), it's that there is a literal infestation of them plastered over content not worth the distraction. Again, see the "sponsored articles" that tend to pop up whenever Sony or Apple releases something. They're thinly veiled advertisements.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1) by pnkwarhall on Wednesday September 17 2014, @05:02PM
content not worth the distraction
"Content" is never worth the distraction, because it's barely worth any attention itself.
Most visitors to Soylent News don't read or post "content" -- we come to participate in discussions. (I would take offense if you called my comments "Content"!) So what is "Content"?
Ads are Content. "Sponsored Articles" are Content. Everything on the front page of Yahoo is Content. Many of the articles linked to by Soylent stories are Content. Linkbait is Content. I could go on and on, but I've found an easy test that (usually) separates "Content" from, you know, a work of value that actually took some time and thought to construct. The test is simple:
If it comes with more than one or two ads, it's probably Content. (Birds of a feather....)
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 3) by Lagg on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:18PM
Cut the crap. The stuff that you read it for is the content. Everything else is side matter /or fat. Your buzzwordy use of a term does not make that any less true. This has been a term used in this context since around the mid 90s or whenever the "I'm going to put gifs everywhere" fad started when it was known as content-focused design. This is really not that hard to understand. The only people who don't get it are trying to justify use of ads by claiming that they're just as important as the rest of the page.
and yes. Your comments are content too. Deal with it and stop buying into buzzword bullshit.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1) by pnkwarhall on Wednesday September 17 2014, @08:49PM
If you don't like the word 'Content' to describe what's created when a professional writer is tasked with creating a half page of BS on a certain theme or product solely to fill up space and create an audience for advertisements (or, in the case of "sponsored content", propaganda), then propose a better replacement. I know that this product has been being created for a loooong time before the creation of the Internet, but I argue that it's become much more prevalent in the Internet age of cheap-easy-quick publishing, and we need a term to describe this valueless trash.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:32PM
Excellent, not just me then. I agree with everything you just posted above.
Adblock was non-existent back in the early days, because it wasn't needed - now the whole world seems to be about making money quickly and screwing customers just for the short term gains.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:30PM
I was literally there at the beginning, with a 286 running Netscape fricking 1 and ya know what? All through the 90s the thought honestly never even crossed my mind to block a single ad because they weren't giant assholes about it with ads being simple txt, jpg, or if they wanted to be REALLY fancy a tiny GIF link.
Now I can take a PC and infect it in less than an hour doing NOTHING but surfing random pages without adblocking, it never fails they will get some sort of malware thanks to drive bys embedded in flash ads. And God fucking forbid you have Java installed (Thanks Notch you rich douche for bringing back THAT ass cancer with minecraft!) because if you think they'll pwn your ass with Flash just try surfing with the Java browser applet installed and see how quick some malware makes you its bitch!
So yeah I have EVERY right to be pissed, because you see I build beautiful systems, perfect little whirring purring pieces of metal and plastic and blinkenlights that before these Masters of Being Assholes came along frankly didn't even need antivirus to be secure, just a bit of common sense was all you needed. Now I have waste MY time running tests every 3 months to find which free AV has the best protection with the lowest footprint so it won't slow down my HTPCs during critical operations (if you are curious as to the result? Comodo IS Free is currently #1, Followed by Avast and Avir with AVG dead last) all because some greedy shitbag looks at the people that dare go to their site as chickens to be plucked! And I'm for bitchslapping the living fuck out of these asswipes when they try to blame the victim, just as I did a few years back when Jim Sterling at The Escapist tried to blame adblock users for the way things are and I retorted with a list of how much fucking malware his douchebag site had served up the past year! I asked him "Is your site gonna pay for those cleanups Mr Sterling? Are you personally gonna pay to have their bank accounts monitored and for their time cleaning up the messes YOU made sir?". Needless to say they erased that post but not before a good 30 guys had picked up the flag and kept asking the same questions and posting the same malware stats, made my little black heart grow three sizes that day it did!
And the bitch is I'm in retail so I KNOW what the results of this douchebaggery are! Did you know the other shops didn't install ABP, most didn't even install an AV when they cleaned a PC? Know why? Because "Heh heh heh it'll let 'em get infected quicker and I'll get more repeat business!"...know where they are now? OUT OF BUSINESS because people got tired of being fucked over! Meanwhile I got people paying me a fricking c-note just to hook up their fricking speakers to their TV because "I know if HE does it it'll be done RIGHT and will fricking WORK!". I end up with their families, their bosses, their friends, simply because I won't fuck them over and am happy to sit down with them and show them how to get their systems to do what THEY want it to do! Hell I'm currently scheduled to do a huge networking job on a doctor's building, know why? Because when one of the doctor's couldn't get his email to connect I got on the horn with the ISP and refused to get off until his fricking email worked!
If you treat your customers with respect and actually give a shit about their experience? Then they will go out of their way to bring you business and support you, do like these mags and sites and treat your customers as Rubes just waiting to be fleeced? Well don't be surprised when they abandon you at the first opportunity because YOU ARE A DOUCHEBAG and deserve it! And sorry if that came off a little ranty but this whole "corporate blames the users" bullshit for not being willing to suck their dick and put up with their asshattery REALLY pisses me off!
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 3) by tangomargarine on Wednesday September 17 2014, @02:52PM
BTW what do you need multiple Linux distros for? Most folks pick one and stick with it until it breaks so what's with the distropaloza?
Ah, and there's the jab at Linux. Not going to throw up the famous Hairyfeet Challenge?
-1 Offtopic
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Funny) by Hairyfeet on Wednesday September 17 2014, @06:01PM
Paranoid much? Lagg said he used to get multiple mags at work for Linux distros and I simply wondered why did his job require multiple Linux distros. Maybe if you were so afraid that your product might not measure up you wouldn't be looking for boogeymen. But you want a jab? Far be it from me to disappoint!
Just FYI the Hairyfeet Challenge is celebrating its EIGHTH YEAR without a single consumer distro able to pass a test that was first passed in Windows with Win2K 15 years ago! Feel free to blow a party horn and fire up a copy of Win2K for old times sake, I'm waiting for Windows 9 which looks like it'll be another Win 7 runaway smash. BTW congratulations are in order, after struggling and giving your product away for 22 years you've managed to surpass other by 0.01%! [statcounter.com] Considering that "other" is usually taken to mean Win9X and Win2K at this rate you should beat WinXP by 2045! Isn't that great? Wow what momentum!
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.