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.<p>Unfortunately, that also means it's a really terrible time to be a writer <i>for a living.</i> Like every job that is (a) creative and (b) can be distributed digitally, almost all of the money is falling out of it.
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.<p>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.
Sad day. I still have a bunch of old Macworld issues.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>I hope the talented writers and editors who've been laid off get snapped up quickly.
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.