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« on: December 31, 2009, 0316 UTC »
It's hard for any print publication, no matter the niche, to remain relevant to internet users. I relied on magazines like MT up 'til the 1990s and read Zeller's columns routinely. Zeller's columns and Yoder's books got me hooked on piratical malfeasance. But since the late 1990s I've used the internet almost exclusively for info about radio monitoring.
Occasionally I'd still buy a magazine for illustrated articles on technical matters, such as building radio kits, but I haven't even done that in several years. When I had only dialup access it was too slow to access sites with lots of illustrations, but now in many cases it's more efficient to use the web to search for relevant info.
Sad to say, especially since I used to work in the traditional print media (former newspaper guy), but they haven't adapted well. Traditional news/infotainment magazines clumsily tried to emulate blogs and websites. (Take a hint, Newsweek - magazine readers can't click on those URLs.) And websites/blogs started by magazines mired in the traditional print media tried too hard for too long to make their sites resemble a paper publication.
It's ironic because the paper I worked for, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, was among the first - possibly the first - with online content, back in the 1980s. But the paper is now a ghost of itself and hasn't adapted well to electronic access. One of the few things older folks like my mom want a newspaper for is the weekly TV guide, but most daily newspapers can't even get that right. They buy from TV listing services, which provide too much inaccurate or incomplete data. So my mom and several of her neighbors quit subscribing to the local paper during the past year.
No surprise that MT is going downhill. The best paper-based periodical publications have been struggling even when they had a clue, and MT's departure from pirates - among the most active segments of the HF spectrum - confirms how clueless they are. Too bad they didn't get better acquainted with them thar fancy interweb tubes. They might have realized from the FRN, Alfa Lima, HFU and dozens of regularly updated blogs by shortwave fans that HF is alive and well, but mostly among a very different demographic from the genteel folk who once listened to the BBC and Deutsche Welle, or the hamsters who gnaw on each other on 75-80m and cannibalize each other on 14275U. (Well, of course pirates sometimes gnaw on one another too, but that's a whole 'nuther topic for a cannibal's recipe book.)
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