PC Magazine Will Cease Printing a Paper Version

PC Magazine, a Flagship for Ziff Davis, Will Cease Printing a Paper Version

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

Published: November 19, 2008

Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only.

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PC Magazine’s circulation was 1.2 million in the late 1990s.

It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises.

“The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.

While most magazines make their money mainly from print advertising, PC Magazine derives most of its profit from its Web site. More than 80 percent of the profit and about 70 percent of the revenue come from the digital business, Mr. Young said, and all of the writers and editors have been counted as part of the digital budget for two years.

The change will not require much of an adjustment, because the focus has been on getting articles to the Web first, said Lance Ulanoff, the editor of the PCMag Digital Network, which is what PCMag.com and its accompanying Web sites were renamed on Wednesday. “All content goes online first, and print has been cherry-picking for some time what it wants for the print edition,” Mr. Ulanoff said.

Circulation at PC Magazine has been declining since the late 1990s, when it hit a peak of 1.2 million. This year, the magazine’s rate base was 600,000.

Mr. Young said that while the print magazine would be profitable in 2008, he forecast that it would lose money in 2009 because of fewer advertisements and rising costs. The final print edition will be the January 2009 issue.

“Obviously, the macroeconomic condition is putting pretty significant pressure on all forms of advertising,” Mr. Young said.

Seven production, circulation and advertising employees will be cut as a result of the move, out of a total of about 140 who work on PC Magazine and PCMag.com. Mr. Young said the company was considering taking its other print magazine, the video-game publication Electronic Gaming Monthly, into an online-only format, but would not make a decision before the end of the year.

Other publishers have also moved publications online only.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a small publication that was established in 1945 and won a National Magazine Award last year, recently announced it would go online only beginning in January. “We’re trying to deal with the cost pressures,” said Jonas Siegel, the Bulletin’s editor, in an interview.

The Christian Science Monitor announced in October that it would cease printing its paper weekday edition in favor of its Web site; also in October, the Hearst Corporation closed CosmoGirl but kept its Web site.

“If you look at the list of the magazines that have gone to online, almost all of them have been magazines in trouble,” said John Fennell, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “Magazines in general are going to be dependent on print advertising for a long time into the future,” he said.

But magazine and newspaper publishers have been contending with a decline in advertising at the same time that their costs, including ink, printing, and distribution, are rising.

Advertising pages for the December issues of monthly magazines are down more than 17 percent from the December issues of 2007, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, and that is leading to layoffs and the closing of titles.

On Tuesday, Time Inc. said that it would shut down Cottage Living, part of the Southern Progress division of Time Inc., along with the CottageLiving.com Web site. Nine of the 47 staff members will get jobs elsewhere in Time Inc., and the 38 others will be laid off, said Debra Richman, a Time Inc. spokeswoman.