[PLUG] Linux Journal Redux

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Mon Aug 12 19:22:46 UTC 2019


On Mon, 12 Aug 2019, Johnathan Mantey wrote:

> The journal has been shuttered a second time.

The economics of running media operations have changed so much over 
the past 25 years.

There are now only a handful of for-profit Linux companies with 
national reach that would want access to LJ readers, a large 
percentage of whom I'd guess are not IT professionals.

In a traditional print-subscription model (e.g., The Atlantic or 
Vanity Fair), subscriber fees rarely do more than fund the direct 
costs of printing and distribution. Advertisers fund the costs of 
staff, authors, office space and equipment, etc. Success requires lots 
of advertisers in competitive marketplaces.

Other than hardware companies like Dell or HP (and maybe some smaller 
ones like System76), the few companies that might want to reach 
LJ-type readers -- Distro folks like Red Hat, service folks like IBM 
-- could mostly care less about non-professional readers. They want 
people with access to and control over business budgets; there are 
better vehicles to reach those people than LJ and its ilk. Long gone 
are the days when there were several dozen hardware vendors willing to 
compete nationally for hobbyist Linux users or small-business IT 
generalists.

Plus -- and this may be an idiosyncratic viewpoint -- I think the days 
of the PC Enthusiast are mostly gone. The sort of person who formerly 
would spend hours learning how to work within an OS now puts that 
energy into 3D printing or Raspberry Pi and Arduino kits. The interest 
is programming and code, not operating systems.

This is arguably a good thing -- OSs should IMHO exist to accomplish 
work not to get attention for themselves -- but it does mean that 
OS-specific media are likely to fall on hard times.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W


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