MacWEEK

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

~ the goodbye ~

MacWEEK was a controlled-circulation trade weekly, which is a publishing arrangement that has mostly stopped existing. You did not buy it. You filled in a card proving you were a professional who bought Macintosh equipment in quantity, and if the publisher agreed, the paper arrived every week for free, funded entirely by advertisers who wanted to reach exactly the person holding that card. Five people started it in San Francisco in 1987. Ziff-Davis bought it the following year.

Its actual importance had little to do with the trade-press business model. MacWEEK became the record of what Apple was doing before Apple said so, and it did it through a back-page rumor column bylined Mac the Knife, a pseudonym with no fixed human behind it. Executives inside Apple, following Jean-Louis Gassée, referred to the paper as MacLeak. That was a complaint. It was also an accurate description of the workflow, because a meaningful share of the leaks were coming from Apple staff on purpose.

The reasons for that are the interesting part. Engineers leaked to MacWEEK to get their own projects noticed by executives who would not read an internal memo, and managers leaked to signal roadmap decisions they were not allowed to announce. Then everyone read the result to find out what was happening two floors away in their own building, because Apple in that era compartmentalized so aggressively that a trade weekly in San Francisco often had a better view of the company than the people inside it did.

This was never going to reach me. It was a free American trade paper that you had to be professionally qualified to receive, about a platform that in Turkey in the nineties existed mostly in advertising agencies and print shops. By 1998, when I got a modem, MacWEEK was already nine months from being renamed out of existence. The Mac web I eventually read was the generation that replaced it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ mac the knife ~

The column ran on the back page and traded in items too thin to run as news: a codename nobody was supposed to have, a product that had quietly lost its team. It was written in a knowing tone that assumed you already followed the cast of characters, and it was wrong often enough to be readable and right often enough to be load-bearing.

That format did not survive the arrival of the web, but its function did. Every Apple rumor site that came afterward is running the Mac the Knife play with a faster publishing cycle and a comments section. The difference is that a weekly print column had to be edited down to the few items worth the space, and a site does not, so the good version of this ended up being scarcer after the tools got better.

~ the decline ~

In 1998 Ziff-Davis decided the Macintosh was too narrow a beat and relaunched the print edition as eMediaWeekly, covering digital media production generally. The strategy had a defensible logic on paper and it went wrong immediately. Longtime advertisers who had been buying access to Macintosh buyers pulled their money rather than pay for a broader and vaguer audience.

eMediaWeekly published from 24 August 1998 to 1 February 1999, five months, and then stopped. The MacWEEK name survived only online, first run by the old staff and later handed to former Macworld editors, which is the stage at which a brand is being kept alive because the domain has traffic rather than because anyone still has a plan for it.

~ how it actually ended ~

Mac Publishing owned both macweek.com and MacCentral by 2001 and decided it was paying twice for the same readers. On Monday 5 March 2001 macweek.com's content moved into MacCentral, with roughly seven people cut in the reorganization. Headlines would live at MacCentral and longer coverage at Macworld. There was no room in that arrangement for a third name.

Eleven years in print and two more as a website, and the thing that ended was a specific relationship between a company and the paper that covered it. Apple after 2001 got very good at closing every one of those channels. The leaks moved to the supply chain in Asia, where nobody can be fired by Cupertino for talking, and nothing since has had the particular quality of MacWEEK, which is that the people leaking to it worked there and wanted their own company to read it.

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