The news that PC Magazine is ending its print edition came as no surprise, but I couldn’t help feeling a little bit sad about another sign of the obsolescence of a medium. For three years, I was responsible for getting the magazine out on time, and what a monster it was to produce. When Bill Ziff hired me as the Editor of PC Mag in 1991, “Mag”, as it was simply known at Ziff-Davis, was at the top of the publishing heap. Circulation was 800,000 and would grow to 1.2 million; the magazine came out 23 times a year and the average issue was over 400 pages thick.  The magazine brought in more than $200 million in revenue and an annual profit north of $40 million.

The biweekly copy really did hit your desk with a “thump” and I suspected it contributed to more than a few hernias among postal carriers. We were in the midst of the PC boom. The PC makers fueled PC Mag’s prosperity: we ran multiple-page ads in every issue from Northgate, Swan, and a dozen other companies that exist now only in memory.  Companies like Dell and Gateway were experimenting with an innovative approach to sales, bypassing dealers and selling directly to consumers. Of course, in an age before the Web, “direct” meant making a phone call to an 800 number.

Windows was still evolving and Microsoft was not yet dominant. A lot of people used DOS because Windows was so slow or their software didn’t run on Windows. When we did a review of word-processing programs, there were 17 products to test. When we reviewed modems, 100 manufacturers submitted products. Testing all 100 and making sure each modem could connect to every other modem in the review cost us $200,000. Our desktop PC reviews routinely included 50 or more products.The annual printer issue included at least 100 models (see photo).

PC Mag’s enormous clout was built on transparency. The editors had created a testing process that was completely clear and objective. Our reviews often ran 40 to 50 pages, and included endless tables and charts of test results that readers could (and did) peruse. We explained the criteria that led to our coveted Editor’s Choice designation, a logo that could turn a company into an overnight success. We were blunt about products that failed to meet our expectations.

A bad review could scuttle a company, and occasionally resulted in a lawsuit.  One maker of memory management software (necessary when the amount of RAM in a PC was 64K or 128K) filed suit, accusing our reviewer of failing to understand the technology. That turned out to be bad strategy: the reviewer was a rocket scientist: a theoretical physicist at the Jet Propulsion Labs who kept meticulous notes. A judge soon threw out the suit, but the company eventually went out of business.

Our editorial policy was to review every product that fit our criteria. I saw signs that this strategy was losing its justification. After reviewing the exorbitant cost of the modem review, I sent a note to the publisher pointing out that just a half-dozen of the units had 90 percent of the market. Yet we spent 90 percent of our money on products that almost nobody bought. I suggested focusing on the products with the biggest market share. There was a quick reprimand from the publisher: we will review EVERY product.

Mag could afford such a grand mission. One colleague, who, like me, had come to Ziff from mainstream publishing, marveled at the steady flood of ads. “They don’t sell ads here,” he said. “They take orders.” No one believed the gush would end. After a particularly good year, we took the entire editorial staff of 110, plus significant others and children, to Saint Lucia for an all-expenses-paid four-day retreat.

I remained a subscriber long after I moved on. I was a techie before I went to Mag, and I remained an avid reader, especially when shopping for a new product. But as the tech industry consolidated, so did the ads. In its bankruptcy filing earlier this year, Ziff indicated revenues had dropped from $210 million in 2001 (for all its publications) to $40 million in 2007.  There were other reasons. Much as we complained about Windows, it standardized computing and turned much hardware into commodities. You no longer needed a magazine to tell you how to make something work. More than other sectors, technology ads have shifted quickly to the Web, with its instant metrics and measureable effectiveness.

The editors at PC Mag tried valiantly to adjust to the shifting realities; they wrote about auto tech, about cameras, and even home theater systems. Like other magazines, the company soon saw that print and distribution costs exceeded revenue. So even with a circulation of 600,000, PC Mag will soon stop cutting down trees and exist only on the Web that destroyed its original business.