CURRENT ISSUE
Contests
Priority IntErrupt
|
|
Issue #225 April 2009
Print Is Dead—Long Live Print
by Steve Ciarcia
I’m one of those good guys who goes shopping with his wife and doesn't complain. Our trips include both mutual and independent destinations. She rarely accompanies me into RadioShack, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in Joann Fabrics or Michael’s. On those occasions, I don't pout or honk the horn after 10 minutes. Instead I tell her to take her time and I read magazines. The bad news is that the pile in the car keeps getting smaller.
Aside from 32-page trade journals and half-sized Wired and Fortune magazines, two biggies on my parking lot reading list, US News and PC Magazine, have gone digital. Should I take this as a sign that it is a brave new world or that I’m just the last of a dying breed?
A lot has been written lately about the reasons. Dan Costa, a columnist for PC Magazine, wrote an editorial titled “Print is Dead. Long Live Print” (12/11/08). He explained that ceasing the print magazine after 27 years was inevitable and necessary. Besides the economic pressures, he suggested that, because anyone can publish these days (true, but that doesn’t mean it’s quality article content), printed magazines are an environmental nightmare (and all these computers aren’t, Dan?), that print-delayed news and product reviews can't compete with a real-time web (true, if that's what you are looking for), that traditional print publishing is dead.
The real epiphany in the editorial was his conclusion about the other side of the coin: “Print businesses aren’t dead. They just need to change. Printing should be reserved for archival information—artifacts you’ll hold onto for years instead of hours or days.” Thank you, Dan Costa, and welcome to our world.
Unlike newspapers and trade journals, Circuit Cellar content is not time-critical and our readers aren’t conventional. Rather than read Circuit Cellar and then give it to someone else, our readers hoard every issue and archive them for years. The chips may have evolved since an application was published in January 2001, but the tutorial example of the engineering thought process detailed in the article hasn’t. Archiving past issues of Circuit Cellar into an engineering reference library is the norm, not the exception, for our readers.
I think of Circuit Cellar as a community, not just a business enterprise. While I’m completely aware that there is a significant cost savings in distributing a virtual magazine versus printed paper, I also know that Circuit Cellar’s status and credibility was built on print and it will be over my cold dead ... Sorry, I get carried away. Basically, we’re caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to content expansion. While other pubs have been biting the dust, Circuit Cellar's overall circulation and popularity has increased. There has been a demand for more Circuit Cellar articles, not less.
Under the heading, “teaching an old dog new tricks,” the undeniable path to cost-effective content expansion is a new and better digital presence that we call Circuit Cellar Digital Plus. Digital Plus replaces our Electronic Edition (EE) and adds a lot more. Like our former EE, Digital Plus is an exact online replica of the print magazine with additional full-length Circuit Cellar-quality content along with project “shorts” in a special bonus section. Our objective with Digital Plus is to provide more space for good authors and great applications without raising our subscription prices into the stratosphere or breaking the bank with other methods.
Digital Plus enhances the print magazine experience with special features that we can only do online. Articles in Digital Plus may include video demos and downloadable supplements. Even the ads can include “see before you buy” video demonstrations. The best part is that Digital Plus will be less complicated to view than most other online magazines. Of course, if you are still an EE loyalist, you won’t even have to download a special program like Zinio to view it offline. Like our former electronic magazine, you can still simply download a PDF of the whole issue.
So what’s the damage for all this? Not as bad as you think. For us, it’s about serving the community and increasing our online presence without sacrificing print to do it. Other electronic magazines might immediately raise prices while giving less, but we plan to do it incrementally, if at all. For starters, the April issue of Circuit Cellar Digital Plus will be free to everyone—including print, EE subscribers, and lurkers—so you can see what I’m talking about. (We’ll bump all paid digital subscriptions to make up the difference for any free months we offer.) The one-year price of the electronic edition subscription was $15. If you are a print subscriber, you could get it for $5 per year. Right now, you can extend either subscription or start a new Digital Plus subscription at those same prices until May 31, 2009. After that, the Digital Plus prices will be higher. And, before you e-mail me asking if print-only subscribers are now second-class citizens (i.e., no access to the bonus section), please note that we’ve fixed that too. Print subscribers can go to our web site and see all of the bonus sections posted for free, although on a delayed basis.
So, I admit to being an old dog learning some new tricks, but that doesn’t mean I have to be radical about it. We’re not dumping the old. We’re just trying to create a happy medium by implementing something new. Go take a look at Circuit Cellar Digital Plus and join our latest venture into tomorrow.
Priority Interrupt Archive List
|
