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Farewell IT Week

Posted by Danny Whatmough on 25th July 2008

So, that’s it. As predicted last week, IT Week is to cease publication and merge with Computing with the Computing website handling breaking news and the ‘new look’ magazine containing a news round-up alongside more in-depth comment and analysis.

This comes as no surprise seeing the congestion of having two very similar weekly publications in the Incisive Media stable. IT Week was a good magazine with some good writers and the (much needed) redesign suggested that it was still evolving and moving forwards.

And yet, money makes the world go round and the media is dependent on those advertising pounds. Tim Weller, group chief executive of Incisive Media:

Our advertisers want the demand-generation benefits of online, yet the reassurance of print. Delivering the right content in the right medium increases its chances of being read, offering advertisers greater opportunities to interact with audiences.

This brings about an interesting question about the sustainability of print publications, especially in the trade press. This is not a new debate with, for example, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer recently suggesting that in 10 years there “will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form.”

Interesting too that this comes within a month of IT Pro’s editor, Chris Green, disclosing that every few months he runs a contributor/traffic analysis to measure the site’s “page impressions (PIs) and unique user visits (UUs) generated by author, rather than by article type or section.”

Chris adds: “The end result is that we have the traffic generated by an author alongside how much we’ve spent with them over the given period.”

Traffic, popularity and page impressions is where it’s at!

Time will tell just how this one plays out and too much forward-looking analysis is perhaps dangerous (even headline-grabbing statements from Microsoft CEOs). It will be interesting to see how Computing evolves and manages the print v. online conundrum and also how PR evolves as a result.

This debate still has legs. I wonder who will be next…

Picture credit

Danny Whatmough