Hearing last week that PCW magazine is sadly winding up is another stark reminder that the technology publishing and PR industries are fundamentally changing. There were rumours going around saying that the excellent Guardian Technology supplement on Thursday might also be going the same way. Pick up any of the B2B IT mags these days – I’ll resist naming names – and you’re struck by how thin they are.
The ‘problem’, of course, is the internet. With the exception of a few firm favourites, I stopped reading print magazines a couple of years ago, getting most of my content via a set of RSS feeds through Netvibes. In the last year or so, this is become supplemented by Twitter. It’s the same story for most people working in the IT industry, who get most of their content from blogs, forums and news sites.
So, fewer readers > less advertising > editorial layoffs > dead publications. I predict that by the end of 2011 there won’t be a single top tier B2B IT mag in print (a small handful of consumer and vertical sector publications may survive in print for a while longer). Sobering times for the editors and journalists, many of whom are now reinventing themselves as PR people, online editors and blog writers, or just hanging on the best they can.
Amongst other things, I hope this will means that we’ll see greater clarity in the definition of blogs, which, I believe, can be split into three categories:
- Media (e.g. Treehugger)
- Personal (e.g. this one)
- Business (e.g. The Google Blog)
Each has different rules for engagement, quality of editorial and, of course, number of readers. At the moment, it’s a problem when people mix the three up, so you get bloggers like Blogger Dad complaining about the way that PR people deal with them. This will get clearer over time.
Ironically, in the online world, many of the same problems exist for PR practitioners with clients/superiors still questioning why they can’t completely control the message. Exasperated calls of “can’t you just get them (the editor) to print a retraction?” when a press release isn’t printed verbatim are now replaced by “can’t you just get the blogger to take it down, they’re just wrong about that?” Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on your point of view – this means a completely different set of rules of engagement. Ones which those in the journalism industry could be most well placed to exploit in the age of online PR.
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