MIT's Technology Review is changing to a bi-monthly print edition combined with a constantly updated website. In short:

[W]e have done what many publishers yearn to do, but dare not: we have turned our business upside down. Technology Review has been a print magazine with a website; from now on, we will be an electronic publisher that also prints a magazine.

The Internet has discomforted many industries, but traditional publishing is particularly unhappy. Readers (especially young readers) are spending more time online: increasingly, they want their information to be timely, searchable, personalized, and part of a social network. At the same time, advertisers are spending more money on interactive media: they are demanding efficiency, accountability, and a measurable return on their investments. The former's preferences would matter less were it not that the latter has sponsored the costs of print publication. Thus, at the very time when the costs of acquiring and retaining print readers are growing, when hiring the writers, editors, and designers has seldom been so expensive, publishers face the contraction of advertising revenues.

. . .

Online, though, was something else. Even though our website did little more than republish magazine stories, more people visited it every month than read our print publication: in one year, millions of people were reading stories on technologyreview.com. And online advertising, while still relatively small, was growing faster than we could manage: sometimes, advertisers demanded more impressions than we could deliver.

Substantively, TR will "focus all our editorial content on the impact of emerging technologies and discontinue our coverage of the business models and financing of new technologies," because "92 percent of [readers] valued our coverage of emerging technologies, but as few as 34 percent liked our stories about technology finance and business models."

This limit on coverage strikes me as a mistake. Attention to finance and business models is an important reality-check on flights of technological fancy, and is essential to any effort to be relevant to real world decisions by any institutions -- business, government, or even academic. I would place a small bet that in a year I will not be a subscriber because TR will not address my concerns. Also, writing off 1/3 of one's readers seems like an odd choice.

CLARIFICATION (12/23/05).

posted by James DeLong @ 10:57 AM | Media: Video, Music...

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