Macworld lays off most staff | Hacker News Reader

Macworld lays off most staff

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106 pointsMattRogish87 comments

Today is a great time to be a writer. There are virtually no middlemen between you putting together a sentence and millions being able to read it. There are countless communities where you can find people to give you good feedback to hone your craft.

Unfortunately, that also means it's a really terrible time to be a writer for a living. Like every job that is (a) creative and (b) can be distributed digitally, almost all of the money is falling out of it.

If you're trying this seriously, consider Patreon. I support some obscure stuff, and that obscure stuff is currently trending between "lucrative hobby" to "middle-class job pay".

You still have to put in the work in the first place, of course, but I think the situation is slowly swinging around to being able to make a living at it again. But... not everybody is going to be able to make a living at it, and that's just not going to change, ever.

Patreon is a very interesting development, but I think it's crucial to be a personality and not just someone producing good work. People like supporting...well, people.

But it's exciting to see a writer like Cara Ellison get enough money to live and work on, or a group like RedLetterMedia get an extra $100k/year to make more and better stuff. People had been talking about direct audience support for years, and Patreon has proven that it can work.

Patreon is on my radar. I'm really excited about the idea of micropatronage, or just patronage in general. I think it's a workable idea but it needs a certain amount of critical mass before it can swing culture enough to be self-sustaining.

> almost all of the money is falling out of it.

Well no money because nobody's paying for it,and since nobody's paying for it the content is usually average at best.

Free information is great,but let's face it,quality news cost money and time. What have we today?in the tech world? content farms (readwrite,thenextweb,techcrunch,mashable...) where writers often know nothing about the subject,or are using social justice warfare to manifacture outrage in order to generate impressions( http://readwrite.com/2014/09/09/apple-no-women-on-stage-dive... ). How can that kind of news scale? readers are not idiots. But most readers ,at the same time,refuse to pay for anything,so the money has to come from somewhere,so we get sponsorised news too...

Real journalists or writers have skills,what's missing is a plateform where pro journalists could monetize their skills to corporations directly,to write serious reports on a specific subject for instance,intelligence,sourcing,or just writing for the web(for commercial purposes,i.e. writing for content for a corporate website).

I don't think there is really no one paying for it. At least where I am from you can buy 100+ really obscure magazines at larger railway stations for example. I doubt the magazines will generate large profits, but seem to be self sustaining and at least some of them have content you would not easily find on the web. Even with tablets, it is more pleasant to leaf through a 10 Dollar magazine about design, than the equivalent app. High quality magazines should still have some advantages over online advertising for some brands and they select specific audiences probably as efficient as elaborate online analytics. If you bought a magazine about miniature railroads or gardening, noone needs to store your purchase history to infer what products you might want to buy.

> At least where I am from you can buy 100+ really obscure magazines at larger railway stations

That's because magazine publishers are responding to widespread decline in sales with more and more titles, trying to capture every possible niche under the sun.

> seem to be self sustaining

That's less and less true every year.

Try googling "Linux Voice"; read up on their background, what they are doing and why. You'll see how things are really going. The "magazine" format is dying a slow death, in the same way generalist TV is; their death will be slower than the one of newspapers, but it's written in stone in the same way.

The current quality and quantity of information previously classified as "news" is far beyond what has ever existed previously. Look at any news event and compare the information that's immediately available now compared to similar news events 20 or 30 years ago. People on the ground publish pictures, videos, and reports as the events are happening, and we can read reports from any source in the world translated instantaneously into our native languages. And we have access to all of this using a tiny computer that fits in a pocket.

The idea that quality has decreased is simply an absurd and obvious myth perpetuated by editors and professional writers who are unhappy that their control over the journalism and publishing industries is evaporating. Furthermore, the market has never really paid for journalism, which was always subsidized by ads of questionable efficacy and ownership by wealthy individuals.

Finally, the big secret is the a massive amount of non-fiction by professional writers is embellished, plagiarized, or outright fabricated, and there is almost no real fact-checking in the industry. The regular scandals are just the tip of the iceberg.

Journalism and non-fiction writing as they exist now are in need of a major overhaul. Thankfully, technology is creating a situation where the world is naturally moving forward.

I think that's a bit of an oversimplification. Straightforward reporting is in very good shape right now, particularly due to the effects you mention.

Long form journalism and in-depth reporting is not doing nearly as well, and is not well supported currently.

Well, there are still a couple of good ones. The Economist is exceptional, but it's there. Foreign Policy is also pretty good, though it the opinions are less polished - it seems written by people who haven't had to defend their article in front of colleagues before publishing. Anyway, it's good. On the tech front there's Anandtech and partly Ars Technica. I doubt the world has seen much better journalism than those four.

And the best private blogs are really good. (Even if the average is pretty poor.)

Quality isn't a linear metric.

Immediacy and media quantity have shot up, like you say. It's one of the most amazing things about living in the world today.

Depth and investigation has suffered, and I think accuracy and objectivity have too. Not every story can be revealed with cell cameras in the right place at the right time. Sometimes you have to dig and dig hard.

I rolled my eyes every time someone linked to the “publications” you’ve mentioned: readwrite, thenextweb, techcrunch, mashable… add venturebeat, buzzfeed, cnet, business insider, the street, and many more……

It is all in the name of page hit, no longer about useful information.

The pageview journalism model is fascinating. Initially you just had to produce cheap content in volume. Now you actually have to build the incentive structure so that most of your content is free. The payouts to writers become somewhat of a skill based lottery.

Much like Bitcoin mining, there are only so many pageviews per day. You can optimize certain behaviors to increase your pageviews and ad impressions -- more ad units, auto reloading pages, slideshows, more side links, etc. Publishers doing this increase their slice of the pie. Big brand advertisers appear to not track sales at all so quality publishers basically subsidize the low quality content farms.

Fighting back is possible. If you see a weird article that friends are sharing, look up the writer. Many of these people are amateur writers or college students. Facts are wrong (happens in real journalism too.) Some of the 'controversies' in technology today are almost completely made up but they attract pageviews, so they keep getting written about.

One thing I learned when I was earlier was that a lot of articles in the professional business press where complete trash for an entrepreneur -- Fortune, Forbes, Harvard Business Review. They had some basis in fact but consisted of a lot of noise written by writers who probably didn't know what they were writing about (with exceptions, which is why I kept reading.) What happens when the people who do read get not only noise but noise that no one fact checked? Twitter, Youtube, and fact based organizations (Human Rights Watch, ACLU) publishing material to all instantly balance even this ocean of crap out. I think despite the negatives we remain much better informed than the past.

>readers are not idiots.

The wild success of such social justice warfare proves that you are incorrect. Most people are too stupid to read, comprehend and / or care about legitimate news, and so the industry adapted in order to increase revenue. This adaptation started over 100 years ago, and now the transformation is almost complete.

There are still some excellent journalists out there, but they are outnumbered.

> since nobody's paying for it the content is usually average at best.

I think that's an oversimplification.

I believe the lack of publishing gatekeepers means the bottom end of the bell curve isn't being truncated. The variation in quality has certainly gone up, but I'm not sure if the mean or median have really moved.

Sure, there's a lot of crap to wade through, but there are also a lot of talented people who wouldn't have been able to find an audience going through old publishing systems.

So to recap, terrible time to be a writer.

Depends on your motivations and what you want to get out of it.

For example, for me, it's a great time to be a writer. I wrote a book that I'm self-publishing. If I couldn't do that, I would have had to compromise it in ways I don't really like in order to please a publisher.

I probably won't be making as much money (not that I would make much with a traditional publisher), but that's OK. I'm lucky enough to have a decent-paying day job.

The way writing works today is perfectly attuned to what I want to get out of it.

>Today is a great time to be a writer. There are virtually no middlemen between you putting together a sentence and millions being able to read it.

I'm wondering if any journalist has thought about the idea of a subscription model. For example, charging something like $5 a month to read all articles on their site or releasing long-form articles that cost $1 each.

>> almost all of the money is falling out of it.

This always struck me as odd. Writers are clearly aware making money in their industry now is an uphill battle, yet in music (which has the very same environment), people seem to think the industry is thriving.

Musicians get significant non-pecuniary benefits. Eg, groupies.

The industry isn't thriving, but music is.

I think what you see is that more and more musicians do it for mainly non-financial incentives. That's been true for most musicians since time immemorial, but it's even more true today.

It turns out you don't really need to pay people much to get them to make and play music. They just need some gear and enough free time to do it.

This is not really true. If your job prior to the internet was to earn six figures from covering celebrities then yes, your suffering. However, if your job as a writer was to use proper grammar and write logical correct and intelligent works, you can still find a lot of work paid very well. I'm consistently surprised how high writers are compensated in urban centers (although a lot seem to work remotely as well).

I think it's worth noting that they let staff cover the event yesterday, and then surprised (some of) them with a layoff today. Classy.

I don't see anything unclassy about laying off workers after a big event. I'm assuming there's a decline of work after a big event, so if they're financially hurting a decline would be the correct time to have layoffs.

oh please, seriously?! decline of work :)

Yup, same thing happens to QA and Devs after big game releases.

Surely that's better than laying them off the day before the event?

Attending events like the one yesterday has to be one of the best perks of the job, and if any of the employees had wind of what was coming, it would have been a great place to network for their next opportunity.

Attending events like the one yesterday has to be one of the best perks of the job

Are you serious? Live blogging events like that is utter misery. Constant stress for an entire day.

(Shrug) Stressful or not, it's one of those jobs that someone, somewhere, will cheerfully do for free.

How about being totally open about the state of the company, so people have advanced notice and the opportunity to prepare?

Surprise layoffs essentially reduce a significant inconvenience for the employer at the cost of a massive, stressful life changing event for the employees. It's always an asshole move.

So what? There are plenty of things that are really great to do once for fun, but still devolve to a grind when you do it all the time for work.

I'd drive a tractor trailer or a tank for free, or work on a 787 assembly line. But that doesn't mean the people who do it every day for a living consider it a perk to do their jobs.

Additionally, the people who cheerfully do this stuff for free are often the people you don't want doing it for you for real.

Are you seriously suggesting that we need more than, say, one person per language to type the things Tim Cook says into twitter? I think you're overstating the journalistic impact of MacWorld.

I cannot possibly be overstating the journalistic impact of MacWorld because I'm not stating it in the first place. I was only talking about how a job that seems glamorous and exciting from the outside can become boring and routine when you do it all the time.

Work done for free is worth exactly what you pay for it: nothing.

Richard Stallman on line 2. He seems agitated.

Of course there are always exceptions to the rule :)

(That being said, a very significant chunk of open source contributors are, in fact, doing so on paid time)

I was at the original iPhone launch for CNET, and there was a lot of stress, as you say. But watching Steve Jobs unveil it was a magical experience, and it also was very much a perk of the job.

Have you live-blogged similar events? Just wondering.

Absolutely. I would pay good money to be flown out to Cupertino, CA with a press pass to liveblog an Apple keynote, let alone be paid to do it.

Why? And would you do it 1x, or 100x?

Note that you'd do it for free (you would even cover your costs) and the issue expressed is that journalism doesn't pay.

hell I have seen people laid off on employee appreciation day, fortunately they allowed them to enjoy the free lunch first.

We're at the turning point where great journalists are getting pushed out of their careers because jobs are vanishing under their feet. The content model has completely changed, some argue for the better. In the long term I fear the quality of content written will suffer, article accuracy will be reduced and we'll all be reading each others blogs about medicine [insert other topics here] (without ever having studied it or any previous knowledge on the subject). The Internet of "everyone's an expert" overnight is not something I'm looking forward to. Just look at all the overnight social media professionals. Many of these people don't have an understanding of how the Internet (or email) even works but they'll throw down the hot keywords to make themselves sound important; KPI's, User experience, etc etc.

I still feel there's huge opportunity in the learning space for online education. If I was a journalist or writer with specialized knowledge in a certain field, I'd focus my attention to that and bring my friends.

Journalists job is not to know about the thing they are covering; usually they have only slightly more knowledge than the layman; their job is to have relationships with people who can give them information the public doesn't easily have.

These relationships that lead to information becoming available won't and isn't going away, the people doing the reporting (now called bloggers) just aren't getting paid (much) for it. It's now a hobby. And that's ok.

As far as writings from experts; science journals still exist and AFAIK are not hurting or are in danger of being scaled back. Maybe someone with more knowledge can speak on the state of academic journals.

Bigger than Macworld. IDG, the parent company, has seen better days. They killed the print editions of Computerworld and CSO not long ago.

They started with InfoWorld in 2007.

I guess my point was this says a lot more about legacy print publishing than about macs.

Sad day. I still have a bunch of old Macworld issues.

Though that name seems like such an anachronism. The Apple universe isn't so much "Mac" anymore.

This might be a good case study for dying traditional form of online media. Credit goes to random dance of Google SERP. As per Alexa, search traffic (for macworld.com) is gone down from 50% to 30% of total traffic, in three months. Google decided to do a (un)fair distribution of traffic.

Niche content companies should remain lean to survive.

What is the catalyts for this? Apple's market share is similar to what is was a few years ago. Is there a decline in ad revenues? What is the reason for this.

Declining print subscriptions, most likely, and pressures to increase profit margins. They're ceasing print publication, but continuing to operate the website.

This is unfortunate, but that's the nature of publishing in this newfangled media landscape. (As they say.)

The growth of tech websites has made print-based magazines extremely difficult to operate at profit.

While there are far more people using Apple devices, there are also much larger support communities for them as well, so a printed magazine is largely redundant.

The magazine market is running on fumes. Most of the print media companies haven't been able to replace the kind of revenue they used to see from subscriptions and in-print magazine advertisements in the on-line world.

It seems like there's a lot of competition for "apple rumors" in general but I think the worst damage comes from within - the entire tech reporting industry just plagiarizes and cannibalizes other people's work, it doesn't require as much talent or manpower to reword articles.

Print media is dying.

No, actually, print media are dying, one medium at a time.

The magazine market seems to be the worst possible use case for print, especially in the tech sector. With newspapers, at least you are only ever 1 day or maybe 1 week (sunday edition) behind the news, and its all general interest so there's probably something your reader hasn't read about in there.

On the contrary, look at the core demographic of a tech magazine to begin with: people obsessed enough to buy an entire magazine about one company's products. Add to that that that company's devotees are tech savvy and want the information yesterday, and you have a recipe for disaster for a magazine that comes out a month later with info.

Maybe a solution would be to focus on more in-depth style articles that cover exclusive information. I'm not sure that there's enough creativity around today for a publisher to be comfortable doing it but that'd be a way to produce non-daily content, if that makes sense.

There isn't much worth reading on the site, except perhaps the occasional Macalope column and an occasional OSX-related tip.

If you're into reading columns and opinion pieces, there are much better blogs and sites, e.g. Daring Fireball, Roughly Drafted, Recode.

If you're looking for detailed reviews and specs there are again much better blogs and sites, e.g. Anandtech, Ars Technica.

And if you're looking for rumors, there are yet again much better blogs and sites, e.g. AppleInsider, MacRumors.

And there's Twitter, and HN, and what not for live coverage of news events.

And their site's redesign made it slow as hell on low-end iDevices.

In short the site brings little to no value to the table. Or then I'm too young or too old or too dumb to understand what that value is.

My guess (as someone who worked for a decade+ as a journalist before leaving to create http://recent.io/) is increased competition for readers and advertising dollars. What <guywithabike> said is correct, especially the decline of print. Who wants to wait a month or two to find out more about yesterday's watch announcement? How many HN readers are actually paying for a print subscription to MacWorld?

Also, even if MacWorld moved entirely online, it's not like its web site is one of the only places to find this info, as the print magazine was in the 1980s. A lot of news organizations that are fierce competitors now simply didn't exist a decade or two ago. Hence today's major layoffs as opposed to reassigning the existing staff to the web. (When I look at the Recent.io knowledge graph, the top of the list of news organizations that cover Apple includes: Fool.com, Cult of Mac, Silicon Alley Insider, BGR, and TUAW.)

I wouldn't be surprised to see MacWorld with legacy costs and pay structures that make it less competitive against these upstarts.

Some of the ex-MacWorld journalists who are freshly unemployed are looking for jobs, so if you know of anyone who's hiring in this area, I'm sure they'd appreciate the pointer: https://twitter.com/PhilipMichaels/status/509752573763407873 https://twitter.com/jsnell/status/509749300683735041 https://twitter.com/danfrakes/status/509756139831975936

My only print subscription is Bloomberg Businessweek. Seeing the week's cover in my mailbox is a highlight of my Saturday. But I got three years for $20.

The transition to mixed print/digital or all digital. Not handled well by magazine people. Some are making the transition (The Economist, Popular Mechanics) some are not (MacWorld and pretty much every other IDG title).

The only time I've ever bought a copy was when I was flying and needed something to read while taking off and landing, and even those days are gone now. Pretty sure I read maybe one page.

Online advertising revenues per reader are through the floor compared to magazines, and everyone's going online now. You can sell a page in a magazine going out to 20-30,000 people for $5,000 or more. Getting $100+ CPM on a Web page doesn't happen.

That sucks. I realize Macworld still exists but won't be the same. Losing a lot of great writers that I've enjoyed for years.

MacWorld was such a big part of my childhood, and a catalyst for why I'm able to make a living making things on the web today.

I hope the talented writers and editors who've been laid off get snapped up quickly.

Why? where they in charge of the streaming yesterday?

They could have shuttered the print magazine and kept the staff on to write for the website. Like all the other tech websites out there. Wonder why they didn't do that.

They are. But many of them are now freelancers instead of fulltime.

Hi, I just stopped by to say 'basic income'.

Hey, I just stopped by to downvote you.

I did not realize that Macworld still existed.

IDG is slowly dying. I don't think they'll see 2025, possibly not even 2020.

I think it speaks volumes to the downward trend of Apple these days.

or the print business.

No no no, clearly it's all because of Apple. All other print magazines are thriving!!! /s

Yes, their/tech magazines' print business. A lot of print publications are doing well and even growing, but print is now basically a luxury world where the best 10% are thriving and the worst 90% are dying.. whereas it used to be more balanced.

More like dead trees delivered at your door-step a month after things happened.

Apple mags will just be the first to go. The rest will eventually follow.

First? http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_World:

"On July 10, 2013 owner IDG announced that the magazine would cease its 30-year print run. The August 2013 issue was the last printed of PC World magazine, future issues will be digital-only."

(Once) famous earlier examples:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr_Dobbs: "In January 2009 Jonathan Erickson, the editor-in-chief, announced the magazine would become a section of InformationWeek called Dr Dobb's Report. and a Web site."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_(magazine): "Print publication ceased in 1998 and online publication in 2013"

Not really. With more people with iPads etc (and obviously just on normal desktops) they have less need to read physical magazines.

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