Updated with the official announcement below, and the layoffs:
Original post: Saturday 7:15 PM PST: Another storied print magazine is coming to an end in print, and the focus is shifting to online and events: InfoWorld, the weekly magazine owned by IDG, is closing down, and the announcement will come Monday morning, paidContent.org has confirmed. It was first reported in MediaSurvey premium newsletter here.
InfoWorld has been a pioneer online and has been the earliest to embrace new techniques and forms of journalism and advertising, including blogging, podcasts, RSS (and ads in it), screencasting and others, so this move probably makes sense.
The worst thing: the staff internally didn’t know about this until this story came out, and got picked up by SF Chronicle and Valleywag among others. From what my sources told me, there won’t be too many layoffs as most of the team had been working on multiplatform already: print, online and events. And don’t discount the events side, as that was a major source of revenue for the brand.
A former InfoWorld veteran Matt McAlister (now at Yahoo) writes about this move on his blog: “IDG is doing a smart thing if merely experimenting with the model for how to move entirely online for the rest of the “fleet”. Somebody had to step forward, and InfoWorld is as well positioned to make that transition as anybody.”
Related: IDG No Longer A Print Company; Online 35 Percent Of U.S. Publishing Revenues
Update 1: The company has officially announced it on InfoWorld’s site:
-- Editor Steve Fox: “Frankly, the editorial staff foresaw the demise of print from a long way off and began making preparations for that inevitable day.”
-- InfoWorld.com VP Virginia Hines: “The announcement broke with a strange spin. People who hadn’t read ink on paper in years were suddenly waxing nostalgic about the days years ago when InfoWorld Magazine used to show up in their mailboxes, and lamenting its supposed ‘demise.’ Folks, it’s the print vehicle that’s going away, not the brand.”
Update 2: IDG has issued the official release, and says that about 10 employees, with print-related responsibilities, have been laid off. It will add more staff, including in sales and online production.