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
[email protected]
45°38' N, 122°6' W
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