The announcement in April of the demise of the print edition of InfoWorld seemed in keeping with the general editorial malaise in vertical industry magazines, where monthly newsholes have been shrinking for sometime in tandem with the decline in print advertising revenues.
The announcement didn’t signal the death of the magazine, however, but rather its transition into the digital age, an era in which decades-old industry stalwart publications like InfoWorld are forced to follow the migration of adspend online, like sad old plains hunters seeing the herds move on to new pastures, far afield from the traditional hunting grounds.
Still, the news last month of the “restructuring” of tech magazine publishing monolith CMP — shutting down SysAdmin, turning VARBusiness into a monthly, CRN into twice-monthly, folding Network Computing and Optimize into Information Week, and slashing 200 jobs in the process — while in keeping with what might expect in the ad-strapped print publishing world, was nevertheless surprising in its scope and significance for many observers.
Advertising may be the tail that’s wagging the editorial dog here, but it’s clear that advertising shifts from print to online are in keeping with changing perceptions about which media are most effectively capturing and influencing readers/listeners/viewers in the new “live web” media environment. It’s also clear that metrics on how to measure who is paying attention to what, for how long and why are being completely revamped on the march.
It’s still a somewhat fuzzy window into a clouded crystal ball of the print and digital media future, but follows are some recent pieces that provide a few clues as to the state of current and future print advertising, the shift to online adspend and the new metrics that are evolving, even as we read:
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The latest annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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Hat tip to The Editors Weblog for pointing us in the direction of this analysis piece at followthemedia.com
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Forbes‘ Lewis Hau on the Nielsen/NetRatings ad the aging page-view metric.
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Kate Kaye at ClickZ News on how Ajax is giving traditional Internet ratings suppositions a good scrub.
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Kendra Marr at the Washington Post on how the new metrics drop Google to fifth from third by page-view ranking.
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10 March, 2008 at 5:28 pm
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