Struggling Ziff Davis Bids Farewell to Newspapers
June 29, 2009
One deep breathing publishing company has gone out for a long swim. Tom Forenski’s “Disruptive Technologies Disrupt – Goodbye Newspaper Companies” has a simple message for newspapers:
“What could the newspapers have done to survive this disruption?” Even if newspapers had done everything right: started blogging five years ago, offered free classified online advertising as Craigslist, etc. It would not have been enough to avoid the continued disruption of their business models. This is an important point. What’s happening to newspapers, and other media companies, is not a business cycle. It’s not their fault. When an industry faces a disruptive trend there is nothing that can be done — except a complete reinvention of your business. You can’t just tweak a few things here or there. Newspapers cannot survive in the online digital world because the economics of the new world can only support the disruptors — the companies in the forefront of disrupting the old business model.
Keep in mind that ZD has killed its print publication PC Magazine. eWeek is thin. You know the old adage, “You can never be too thin or too rich.” It doesn’t apply to publishing. A few days ago I received a message that Ziff Davis’s Extreme Tech Web site was shutting down. Whoops. I learned a day later. Extreme Tech will be repositioned.
Here’s what Yahoo Finance had to say:
Technophiles in search of reading material have a friend in Ziff Davis Holdings. Through its Ziff Davis Media unit, the firm is a magazine and online publisher targeting the technology and videogame markets. It publishes the print magazine EGM, which covers games and hardware platforms. On the Internet, Ziff Davis operates PCMag.com, along with popular game sites 1UP.com, GameVideos.com, and MyCheats.com. The company also offers consumer events and direct marketing services. Formed in 2000, Ziff David Media filed for Chapter 11 in 2008. It emerged from bankruptcy later that year. In 2008 the company ended the print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, taking the title online only. [Emphasis added]
As a former laborer in the Ziff Communication cotton fields, I can tell you that the present line up publications does not look like big money to me. There are some weird podcast type of shows. There is the complexity of finding a story from the UK side of the ZD family. There are former Ziff stars who seem to be working for other folks and promoting their Web logs. There are quite a few signs that ZD has itself not been able to make an online business model work in a way that generates the type of cash that the Ziff of old relished.
When one publishing company wheezes that newspapers are losers, I hear the panting and wonder if oxygen starvation is an issue.
It is one thing for an addled goose in rural Kentucky to point out the problems with traditional publishing. It is quite another for a publisher that has tried to go digital to make the statement. When that company has emerged from bankruptcy, the write up by Tom Forenski becomes a message from some dimension to which I am blind.
Stephen Arnold, June 29, 2009
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One Response to “Struggling Ziff Davis Bids Farewell to Newspapers”
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Tom Foresnski writes for ZDNet. ZDNet is not part of Ziff Davis Media…its part of CNET. Its was sold to them years ago. Also, the company that publishes eWEEK (Ziff Davis Enterprise) is a different company than Ziff Davis Media which publishes PCMag.com as its core property. Ziff Davis Enterprise was sold by Ziff Davis Media a couple of years ago or something. Different companies.
Its odd that you would be unaware of these facts when writing this story.