Editorial: magazines vs websites

Many of you may not know my professional history, but I am a former editor for Maximum PC magazine. I spent approximately five years there writing features, reviewing hardware, writing how-tos, and eventually served as a Senior Editor.

I recently decided to move to Austin, TX in order to escape the Bay Area’s obscene housing market, and ended up landing at [H] Consumer. I’ve been working here since September, and the whole time I’ve been adjusting to the “Web” lifestyle and thinking about which medium is better suited to delivering hardware news. Of course, when I worked at the magazine I rarely questioned its ability to compete in the marketplace with all the Web upstarts. But now that I’ve been immersed in the Web world for awhile, when I stand back and look at the situation, I think magazines are destined to fail at this enterprise. And I can think of three reasons why.