FamilyPC

» see familypc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

familypc never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a us-coded magazine for a us-coded category. the american family of 1994 buying its first home pc for the children's homework, with mom and dad as the prospective sysadmins, was not a market the turkish home computing scene of the same year was anywhere close to. turkish pc households in '94 were tiny, mostly hobbyist-engineer parents who already read chip turkey or one of the import-only pc magazines that landed in istanbul a month late. familypc was a brand i first saw in 2003 or so, in a stack of old us magazines a friend had brought back from a summer in the states.

the joint venture between disney publishing and ziff davis was announced on 5 january 1994. the launch issue hit american newsstands in august of the same year. robin raskin was named founding editor-in-chief. jake winebaum was the disney executive who had pushed for the partnership, partly to give disney a foothold in the educational-software market that was about to expand alongside the pc explosion. the editorial brief was unambiguous, the magazine was for parents and children together at the family computer, with the parents as the article audience and the children as the implied user.

the formula was reviews of edutainment software, kids' game roundups, advice columns for non-technical parents on how to set up windows 95 for safe family use, recipe-style projects for parents and kids to do at the home pc on a saturday. the recurring "best of the best" annual awards became a real signal in the kids-software market through the late nineties, where a familypc cover sticker on a product box meant the difference between selling out the christmas channel and not. circulation peaked around 700,000 by 1998 according to ziff davis's published audit numbers.

the kill was structural. by 2000 the consumer pc was no longer a discrete family purchase to plan a year around. it was a refresh of a machine that had been in the household for five years, mostly bought with a tax refund and minimal research. the educational-software industry that supported half the ad pages had collapsed into the post-baby-eisenberg consolidation, with broderbund, learning company and davidson all eaten or shuttered by mattel interactive. ad revenue cratered through 2000 into 2001 alongside everyone else's. ziff davis killed the title in summer 2001 and migrated the active subscriber list to pc magazine for the remainder of their paid term.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch was helped by disney's distribution muscle. familypc was carried in supermarket checkout lanes and big-box electronics aisles in a way that ziff davis's other technical titles, pc magazine and pc/computing, mostly were not. that placement put the magazine in front of the parent buyer instead of the enthusiast browser. the disney logo on the masthead was a real comfort signal for parents who associated the brand with safe kids' media, which made the magazine a legitimate purchase for a household that had never bought a computer magazine before.

raskin's editorial voice was the part that worked. she wrote and edited as if the reader was a competent adult who happened not to know what ram was, instead of as if the reader was a child who needed simplified vocabulary. that tone difference set familypc apart from the pc magazine house style, which was written for the buyer evaluating a $3500 dell at the office. familypc was written for the buyer choosing between a packard bell and a compaq presario at circuit city on a saturday afternoon.

~ the long tail ~

the editorial category familypc occupied did not survive the magazine. the family-pc-as-event purchase pattern dissolved by the mid-2000s into ubiquitous laptops, then phones, then tablets. the kids-software-review niche moved online to common sense media and a handful of mom-blogger circuits. the parents-as-sysadmin advice migrated to support forums and youtube how-tos. nothing replaced familypc as a single monthly editorial product because the category itself stopped being a category.

raskin went on to write for usa today and to run various consumer-tech panels at ces. jake winebaum left disney to run buzzsaw.com, a construction-industry b2b portal that flamed out in the dot-com crash a few months before familypc was killed. the ziff davis consumer-magazine portfolio that familypc sat inside kept shrinking through the 2000s and was absorbed in pieces by various owners. the disney publishing co-venture model never really came back for technology titles. that is roughly the dignity owed to a 1994 launch that landed cleanly, did its job for seven years, and got buried by a structural shift in how families bought computers rather than by editorial failure.

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