Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Infoworld Stops Killing Trees

The ongoing saga of how the online revolution affects journalism took an interesting turn yesterday as longtime tech-industry stalwart InfoWorld announced that it will stop publishing a paper edition and become an online only enterprise (plus live events, of course).

In the announcement, Editor-in-Chief Steve Fox bravely contends that InfoWorld "is not dead," and I'm sure he means it. But the history of this kind of thing is not encouranging. Some 5 years ago, CMP stopped publishing InternetWeek's paper edition, and I ended up in charge of carrying on the Web operation. We did so, and I believe continued to publish useful information for many years. But eventually, lack of interest from CMP corporate, a lack of resources, and lack of traffic let the once significant brand fade away. Go to InternetWeek.com today, and you end up on the ebusiness section page of InformationWeek, which retains its print component.

InfoWorld's own Ed Foster addressed the significance of the move, not just for InfoWorld, but for tech publishing in general. There's less money to go around, Foster says, and much of what there is goes to Google and Craigslist and such. So, like his colleagues in the daily newspaper business, Foster wonders where the money's going to come from to create content in the brave new world of the Internet.

As a professional content creator, among other things, I worry too.

(Full disclosure: way back before the Net bubble, I used to write notebook reviews and other stories for InfoWorld, and I still count as friends many of the folks that work there.)

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