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https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-publication-awkward-goodbye
IMPORTANT NOTICE FROM LINUX JOURNAL, LLC:
On August 7, 2019, Linux Journal shut its doors for good. All staff were laid off and the company is left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity. The website will continue to stay up for the next few weeks, hopefully longer for archival purposes if we can make it happen.
–Linux Journal, LLCFinal Letter from the Editor: The Awkward Goodbye
by Kyle Rankin
Have you ever met up with a friend at a restaurant for dinner, then after dinner you both step out to the street and say a proper goodbye, only when you leave, you find out that you both are walking in the same direction? So now, you get to walk together awkwardly until the true point where you part, and then you have another, second goodbye, that's much more awkward.
That's basically this post.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday August 08 2019, @01:35PM (7 children)
Weird analogy. More like I had a friend around the turn of the century, we drifted apart, I'm pretty sure he died years ago, to my immense surprise he reanimated as a zombie for awhile, and recently got the ole "walking dead" treatment to make it permanent (or only permanent-ish? tune in for the inevitable third sequel?)
I don't know why, but I subscribed to LJ around the time I started reading /. which was around the time it was born and for a couple years I'd read interesting stuff on /. and then a couple months later I'd read something similar yet lighter content in LJ, so eventually I stopped subscribing. Given that their content was analogous to printed and edited /. articles from a couple months ago, it was actually a pretty good magazine, but I just didn't see the point in sending them money for last quarters news.
Also I got nothing out of the magazine ads and there's no free widely distributed ad blockers for magazines. You'd think I'd be pretty interested in hyper-targeted advertisements but nothing got my attention, at least not that I recall.
In the internet era, post 1990s, the business model of printing out some fan boys web page and adding advertisements to it and selling it, is kind of obsolete.
Every morning when drinking my tea to boot my brain up I'll read some sites like here (obviously), hackaday, eevblog, etc, and I don't really see the point in still subscribing to Make magazine, for example. Like I don't really even know why I'm still paying Make for essentially printouts of articles from months ago on hackaday. I guess the only virtue of Make is it is NOT narrowly targeted like LJ was, so sometimes I see some really WTF interesting stuff in Make. Still that cool island destination of "not too bland AND not too specific" must be shrinking as the ocean levels rise and sooner or later its bye bye Make Mag.
An example of something already dead is I used to read the "Amateur Scientist" column in SciAm magazine. Only precocious gen-x and boomers will even remember SciAm much less "The Amateur Scientist" column. Or "Recreational Computing" or Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column. Needless to say that got dumbed down in the magazine merger mania in the 90s and with the web nobody needs a magazine column, or frankly, a magazine, anymore.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Acabatag on Thursday August 08 2019, @02:25PM (4 children)
I thought I recently read (online, of course) that Make had ceased publishing or soon would.
I remember the heady days of the mid 1990s when it was exciting to see anything at all about linux in physical printed form. The first Linux Bible that Yggdrasil published, which was really just a bunch of howtos and man pages printed and bound . Matt Welch's book Running Linux published by O'Reilly. Those were the days when Linux Journal was an exciting must-have.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 08 2019, @03:10PM
> physical printed form
Well, that's the, uh, issue. I also felt excited that the existence of print editions was a confirmation that libre software merited the expense. After years of being dismissed by the powerful as just a bunch of hobbyists, neckbeards, smelly hippies-- I mean, this goes back to why Apple was founded. In the 1970s, IBM didn't believe in the concept of a personal computer. Even if it could be done, they didn't believe in the masses, didn't believe people were ready for computers of their own, seemed to think that people would never be ready. But, it was more that they didn't want computers in the hands of ordinary people. That would disrupt their business.
But at the same time that print served as an indication of success, it seemed so backwards. Worse, it seemed to be saying that, yeah, hackers still needed traditional publishers, and copyright, and could still be controlled. Where was copyleft? The paperless office? The Age of Information? To read LJ in print felt like riding a horse to an automobile show. And in the back of your mind as you rode, you could hear the buggy whip manufacturers whispering that you still needed them.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 08 2019, @03:21PM (1 child)
Maker Faire & MAKE: Magazine Lays off All Staff & Pauses All Operations [soylentnews.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 08 2019, @05:51PM
Oh wow, I missed that one.
Apparently they're back but reduced. [techcrunch.com]
I'm a physical subscriber, I wonder what'll happen to my subscription.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday August 08 2019, @10:02PM
That Linux Bible was wonderful. Granted, all of the information was online somewhere. But when your only computer was running linux except that it didn't work, it was extremely helpful to be able to look up the details of why it might not be working in something that didn't require your computer to be up and running first.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 08 2019, @05:43PM (1 child)
But walk into Barnes & Noble and look at their magazine section. I'm tempted to say 100% of it could be described as, "printing out some fan boys web page and adding advertisements to it and selling it." That's what magazine print publishing was, is, and shall be. It was that before the Internet arrived to challenge its primacy, and will be around for awhile to come.
And magazines have lost their audience and folded up shop long before the Internet was real. New ones will keep coming out in other areas where it's felt that there are reasons to have the information in print as well as online. The BBC's take on it from 2017 [bbc.com]. It contains a particularly relevant quote from the editor of The Spectator, "As newspapers and magazines are finding out, if you can publish writing that is consistently and significantly better than what can be found online, people will pay." It also calls out that in an era of fake news it might be important to rely upon an established source one trusts. That can be online, sure, but it can also be print. It just has to please the customer enough to want it in paper and pay for it, whatever "it" is.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 09 2019, @12:24PM
Not strictly disagreeing but notice that there's not many physical legacy brick and mortar bookstores remaining in business to walk into, and my local B+N is about 1/5 legacy optical media, 1/5 games and legos, 1/5 gift supplies (cards, chocolate bars, wrapping paper). We're rapidly reaching the point where the shovelware aisle at my supermarket will have more printed reading matter than B+N