Two major weekly trade magazines have closed this week as print business titles feel the effects of advertising moving online.
Incisive Media has merged two of its two technology weeklies, IT Week and Computing. Meanwhile, Publishing Week, a weekly publication for the book industry, has closed altogether.
IT Week launched a decade ago, successfully challenging VNU-published Computing and RBI’s Computer Weekly.
While the established weeklies had controlled circulations in excess of 100,000 targeting IT professionals, IT Week had a circulation of around 50,000 aimed at more senior decision makers. IT Week was taken over by VNU two years after launch, and VNU was acquired by Incisive last February.
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The newly merged magazine, Computing, incorporating IT Week, will be out on 4 September.
Managing director Graham Harman said: ‘Weekly magazines cannot compete for breaking news with online – people want to see it immediately.”
Editorial teams across the group, which also includes online titles VNUnet and The Inquirer, have been reorganised according to ‘content specialism’rather than publication, which means some journalists will work across all three titles.
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Harman said: ‘Under the old structure there was duplication, and we’re trying to do away with this and make sure the stories are written in the right way. We’ll have a team of news journalists who’ll be breaking news online and we’ll have a team of in-depth journalists who will take the story, work with the news journalists and expand on it. There will be an editor for our news journalists, primarily online, and an editor for our in-depth journalists, primarily in print.”
Harman said that there will be ‘minimal redundancies”, and although no final figure had been reached he said it will be less than five, with every effort to place people elsewhere in Incisive.
‘We think this is a positive story. It is about changing with market trends and the way people want to receive their information. The wrong thing would be to do nothing or only move a little bit.
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‘We think we’ve been very realistic and honest with ourselves in the market and said: ‘There’s no getting away with this, it’s the way its going and we want to be at the front driving it, not just reacting bit by bit.'”
Former Computing publisher Peter Kirwan, who now edits Fullrun, said: ‘This is very sad. IT Week was a great little title, but it was dependant on print advertising.
‘Clearly advertising has been migrating from print to online in IT over the past decade.”
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