Man Bites Dog! Some magazines are actually not in trouble

Posted by Al Perlman

Magazines, as a medium, are in trouble. There’s a fun blog called magazine death pool magazinedeathpool.com that predicts which magazines are next likely to disappear next. Business 2.0 is currently a top choice, quite appropriately. In the tech space, the need for all of the myriad magazines that used to exist is gone, obviated by the ubiquity of information on the Web. But, in some markets, magazines remain a viable medium, primarily because they either lend themselves to newsstand sales—such as the celebrity magazines—or because print is still the best way for advertisers to show off their products. Here’s a case in point…

Who Cares About Portfolio?

Posted by Al Perlman

Another interesting thing going on in the magazine world is the inordinate amount of attention being paid to Portfolio, the new business magazine from Conde Nast. It’s the Paris Hilton of the publishing world, a well-financed, highly visible celebrity that hasn’t done much yet other than call attention to itself. Perhaps it’s because I’m in the media business and because I’m in New York that I see so much stuff about Portfolio, but, really, does anyone outside of those two circles really care? Do I think Portfolio has any chance of success? Nope. It’s way too print-oriented, it’s expensive to produce and, most importantly, it doesn’t serve an unfulfilled need for a growing or underserved community. I learned long ago that publishing is about the audience-delivery business, and Portfolio will have a tough time trying to establish a need or desire for its targeted audience to read it on a regular basis, especially with so many people turning away from magazines in general.

If We Say So Ourselves…

Today we finally got to see the printed copy of the 25th Anniversary Magazine we’ve produced for CompTIA. A ton of work went into this, but it’s been a great project. It features an oral history from several of the founding fathers of CompTIA, plus views of the future from top executives at Lenovo, CA, HP, N-able, Cisco, Oracle, Red Hat and Kaseya. The magazine is available only to CompTIA members, but we have extra copies if anyone is interested. Just drop me a line at al@microcast.biz and we’ll mail it to you. No PDFs for this one.

Goodbye Network Computing

Many of you probably saw the announcement last week that CMP was laying off more than 200 people and folding several publications. Many of you probably also realize that most of the team here at Microcast worked at CMP at one time in their careers. The CMP announcement hurt a little because some of my friends got laid off and one of my former publications, Network Computing, is being folded. I wrote the original business plan for Network Computing and was the original publisher. It’s also where I met Gary Bolles, my partner here at Microcast. I don’t have any particular insight into what’s going on at CMP, but I know that the President of CMP, Steve Weitzner, is a solid, thoughtful executive and he’s got his hands full trying to reposition the company in the face of the near-collapse of print advertising.