Harry McCracken:

If I have to explain why, you haven’t been paying attention to the media business for the past decade or so. The web has been awfully hard on magazines, and no category has suffered more than computer publications. Both readers and advertisers have largely moved online. Many of them did so years ago — especially the sort of tech-savvy people who once read PC magazines. At the end, PCWorld was about a quarter the size it once was in terms of pages and had lost two-thirds of its readership. I don’t even want to think about what had happened to its profits.

It’s amazing that any computer magazine has been able to hold on this long. Computer enthusiasts were the most likely to have, earlier than most, cancelled magazine subscriptions in favor of reading their news online. I’m surprised that PCWorld still had enough subscribers to make it this far. It’s a sign of the times, and it’s going to be happening more and more. If magazines don’t adapt, they’ll fail.