PC Magazine (print)

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

~ the obituary ~

pc magazine first shipped in march 1982 out of a converted apartment in san francisco. david bunnell put the title together with cheryl woodard and jim edlin to cover ibm's brand-new pc, which had launched the previous summer. ziff-davis bought it within a year. by the late 80s it was the magazine on every corporate buyer's desk in the english-speaking world, with an editor's choice award badge that vendors put on their boxes the way restaurants displayed a michelin star.

the 1990s were the peak. paid subscribers hit 1.2 million. ad pages were stacked so deep that the magazine arrived in mailboxes the size of a small encyclopedia. john dvorak wrote the back-page column for years, and the editor's choice winners on motherboards and laser printers were the closest thing the pc industry had to canon. ziff-davis spun the magazine into a global brand with licensed local editions across europe and asia, including a turkish edition that ran on its own schedule.

the bottom fell out fast after 2007. the corporate-buyer audience moved to specialist b2b sites while the consumer audience moved to gizmodo and engadget. the ad market that filled the inch-thick issues stopped paying for newsstand magazines. ziff-davis announced in november 2008 that the january 2009 issue would be the last on paper. the editorial team continued at pcmag.com, which is still publishing reviews today, but the object the brand was attached to went away with that final issue.

i was on the turkish end of the franchise. pc magazine türkiye sat on every metro newsstand i passed during high school and the early university years, alongside chip türkiye and pc net. the us edition itself i only saw as imported copies in big-city bookstores in ankara, where one issue cost as much as four turkish-edition issues for the same content tuned to a market i was not in. the brand i recognize is the local one. the brand that died in january 2009 is the parent.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

pc magazine in the 80s and 90s did something most magazines did not: it ran a full hardware-test lab. pc labs in new york benchmarked every motherboard and every video card that came through the door, with printers and monitors tested on a separate rotation. the methodology was published in the magazine itself and the results were standardized into reusable tables. editor's choice winners stayed on corporate procurement desks for entire fiscal years. it was buying-guide-as-publication, run with the discipline of a research outfit.

the magazine's other unmistakable feature was its mass. an issue from november 1996 ran 470 pages, most of them advertising. the joke that pc magazine could stop a bullet was not really a joke; the printed object had a physical heft that signaled the size of the market it served. that mass collapsed faster than the editorial quality did. by 2007 the same magazine was running 120 pages on a good month.

~ the slide ~

the b2b corporate-it buyer who had used pc magazine as a procurement reference moved to gartner and to specialist sites like anandtech. the consumer-pc buyer who had used it to pick a new laptop moved to cnet and the verge. ziff-davis tried to keep both audiences with a digital edition that mimicked the print layout, then with separate pcmag.com vertical sites, but neither move recovered the lost ad revenue.

the magazine made the digital-only call relatively late compared to its peers. by the time the january 2009 issue went out, computerworld had already moved to digital and byte magazine had been dead for a decade. the consumer competitor pc world had another four years left in print before idg pulled its plug. ziff-davis took the brand fully online with pcmag.com and a paid digital issue. the digital issue itself was killed in 2022.

~ what it became ~

pcmag.com today is a competent online review site under the j2 global / ziff davis llc corporate descendant. it still runs editor's choice badges and still tests laptops. the underlying business is affiliate commerce and display ads on a content-marketing schedule. that is a recognizable trajectory for any web-era publisher: the brand survives, the form does not.

the print object meant something specific that no website can carry. it was the buyer's reference that you could underline or leave on a desk for a coworker, with the issue date attached as an implicit citation. pcmag.com publishes the same kind of content but it does not occupy the same physical location in a workplace. that location is gone now along with the printed thing that used to fill it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »