Computer Zeitung

» see computerzeitung.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In 1970, for the first CeBIT, Konradin Verlag Robert Kohlhammer in Leinfelden-Echterdingen started a weekly newspaper about computers and gave it the plainest name available. It was the first computer newspaper in West Germany. The East had been ahead of it by six years: a journal called rechentechnik/datenverarbeitung had been appearing since 1964 and had already grown into a serious trade publication.

None of it was built to travel. It was German-language and it arrived on Monday in the Berliner format, which is a newspaper page size rather than a magazine one, printed on newspaper presses to match. I never saw a copy. The imported computer press that reached Ankara was English, because that is what the shops ordered.

The circulation figures explain the business better than the editorial line does. Toward the end it reported roughly 59,800 copies in distribution against a print run near 60,000, and about 24,000 of those were addressed to members of the Gesellschaft für Informatik. Actual paid sales in the first quarter of 2009 came to 22,000.

On 26 May 2009 the German trade press reported that Konradin saw no perspective for the title and was parting with it. Production stopped two months later. The last editor-in-chief was Rainer Huttenloher.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the subscriber list ~

A trade weekly that ships 24,000 of its 60,000 copies to a single professional society is in a particular kind of business. The society pays and the members receive, and nobody in that loop has to want the paper badly enough to go buy it. The arrangement holds a title up for decades, and it also means the floor underneath the title belongs to somebody else. When the 22,000 genuine sales turned up in the 2009 numbers, there was not much left to argue with.

~ the last monday ~

Konradin stopped producing the printed Computer Zeitung as of 27 July 2009. The news reached most of its readership the way the paper itself had: through the Gesellschaft für Informatik, whose president wrote to the membership about it.

The website carried on alone into the autumn. On 17 October 2009 that was switched off too, and computerzeitung.de started redirecting to Bild der Wissenschaft, a popular science magazine out of the same publishing house. The ISSN was 0341-5406.

~ the domain is for sale ~

Both computerzeitung.de and computer-zeitung.de resolve today. They serve 5 KB of a broker page announcing that the domain is available, with a copyright line reading 2019.

Underneath the sale notice, as filler, somebody pasted the German Wikipedia article about the magazine. So the paper's own obituary is now the search-engine bait that makes its address worth selling.

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