IT-Branchen

» see itbranchen.dk as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

International Data Group announced IT-Branchen on a Business Wire release out of Boston, calling it the first IT channel publication in Denmark. The premier issue was set for 17 May 1999. The launch took IDG to eighteen channel titles in Europe and thirty worldwide, and it completed the Nordic set, giving advertisers Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark in a single buy.

Preben Engell, IDG's country manager in Denmark and a sixteen-year veteran of the company there, took it on as publisher. The editorial side went to two people out of Computerworld Denmark: Finn Morsing as editor-in-chief, with seven years at the parent title, and Lisbeth Egeskov as managing editor, with nine. Berit Ellegaard art-directed it. It printed in four colors, and the advisory board being assembled was made of managers from Cisco and Ingram Micro.

The subject was the Danish channel, meaning the path a product takes from vendor to customer through distributors and dealers. Print and web launched together, and itbranchen.dk was one of fifteen sites IDG was then running in Denmark. The plan announced at launch was to follow the first issue with an "IT Top 100" supplement covering the whole Danish IT industry.

~ the record ~

~ nine thousand controlled copies ~

Controlled circulation works in the opposite direction to a newsstand title, and the whole business follows from it. Nobody subscribed to IT-Branchen in the ordinary sense. IDG decided who got it, and the nine thousand names on that list were distributors, dealers, marketing managers and product sales staff, plus the e-commerce developers Denmark had started producing by 1999. A magazine built this way sells the reader list to advertisers, so the nine thousand is the product being quoted in the launch release.

The cadence is readable off the magazine's own site. A page captured in August 1999 announced that issue three would arrive on Monday 13 September, and by late November the homepage was cross-referencing "IT-Branchen 5/99". Five issues between May and the end of November works out to monthly with the Danish summer taken out.

~ the other it-branchen ~

One thing has to be said plainly, because the name did not die with the magazine. There is a live organization in Denmark called IT-Branchen, sitting at itb.dk, and it is the trade association for Danish technology companies rather than a publication. Danish Wikipedia's IT-Branchen article is about that body, not about this magazine. The phrase itself is ordinary Danish for "the IT industry". Two different organizations claimed the name. Only the magazine is dead.

~ what n-com bought ~

By June 2002 the masthead had been folded into the parent brand and the subscription page was selling "Computerworld IT-Branchen". The website went next. Article URLs on itbranchen.dk were still serving their own pages on 22 August 2002, and by 24 August every one of them was answering with an external redirect to computerworld.dk. The gap between those two captures is two days.

The trade press caught up on 5 September 2002. n-com, which published Computer Reseller News in Denmark, had bought its competitor from IDG Danmark, and the report has the editorial and advertising staff remaining with IDG. Aksel Brinck, who edited Computer Reseller News, put the outcome on the record without any of the usual softening: "IT Branchen is closed completely, and the only Danish IT reseller magazine now is Computer Reseller News." That is the acquiring publisher's own editor describing the purchase by what it removed.

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