Personal Computer Magazine

» see pcmweb.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Around 400,000 copies an issue. That was Personal Computer Magazine in the early 1990s, in the Netherlands, a country with about fifteen million people in it at the time. Sandra Dol was editor in chief through those years. The magazine had started in October 1983 under VNU Business Publications, which means it arrived when owning a personal computer in a Dutch household was still a decision you had to justify to yourself, and it got very large by explaining the machine to people who had just bought one.

It ran on a straightforward formula: tests and buying advice, with enough depth that professional users read it alongside the hobbyists. The Dutch and Flemish market supported a whole shelf of these, and PCM was the broad one. Its Belgian counterpart, Computer Magazine, was eventually owned by VNU as well, and the two shared a chief editor without telling anybody, which Bart De Landtsheer admitted in the October 2005 issue at the same moment he announced the Belgian title was being closed and folded in.

Ownership then became the story. VNU sold the magazine to HUB Uitgevers in November 2007. HUB went bankrupt, and from September 2013 the title was published by Reshift Digital, which restarted the biggest brands out of the bankruptcy. Circulation by then was a bit over 50,000 a month, one eighth of the peak, and still the largest Dutch computer monthly on the rack. The 2017 restyling moved part of the content away from the PC toward technology in general, which is what magazines named after a product category do when the product category stops being interesting on its own.

The final issue was dated July 2022, and Reshift stopped publishing it. The tagline on the cover by then was Voorop in Tech, out in front in tech, which held up on a masthead for thirty eight years.

~ the dossier ~

~ four hundred thousand ~

The peak figure deserves a second look, because print circulation at that scale in a language with roughly 25 million speakers is a density that Turkey has never seen. Eighty five million people here, and a computer press in the 1990s that never came close to 400,000 copies a month. When I started reading about computers the material worth having was already in English and on the web, and it cost nothing.

What the Dutch number really measures is how briefly the home computer was a mainstream consumer mystery. Hundreds of thousands of households needed a monthly guide to a machine they had just spent a month's salary on. Within fifteen years the machine was ordinary and the guide was optional.

~ three mastheads, one shelf ~

PCM was not alone under any of its owners. Computer Idee and Power Unlimited came through the same bankruptcy and restart, so by the 2010s a single publisher held most of the Dutch consumer tech print market. Concentration like that reads as strength until the point where one decision takes out several titles, and the print half of that portfolio has been contracting since.

~ what pcmweb.nl is now ~

Type pcmweb.nl today and you land on id.nl, which is the publisher's surviving tech site. The archive of reviews is still there in some form, and some of the bylines still carry a redactie PCM credit. Nothing on the page announces that a 38-year-old monthly ended, and there is no final editorial to go and read. The thing that replaced the magazine had been running for years while the magazine was still alive.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »