MacWEEK, the once-feisty chronicler of all things Apple, is going out of print. And Apple Computer itself may have hastened its demise.
As of 24 August, MacWEEK, a venerable tip sheet that regularly broke product and corporate Apple news, will be replaced by platform-agnostic eMediaweekly, which will target digital content producers. MacWEEK's site will carry on with a new business focus.
"It was one of the last remaining bastions of Mac strength," said Bob LeVitus, a former columnist at the now-defunct MacUser magazine, which closed up shop last October to merge with Macworld magazine.
Lately, MacWEEK has not been a bastion of advertising revenue or hot Apple scoops, however, thanks to policies in effect at Apple since Steve Jobs returned to the company as interim CEO last September.
A 30 percent decline in the magazine's ad revenues can be traced to the death blow Apple dealt to Mac cloners last September, according to MacWEEK. Cloners like Power Computing, Umax, and Motorola were big advertisers. And back-of-the-book, classified ads are noticeably fewer since Jobs ordered a crackdown on unauthorized Apple resellers, they say.
Apple (AAPL) has not come to the rescue with increased advertising. Instead, the company has shifted its strategy. Its advertising in Mac-only publications is a relatively small percentage of the budget these days. "We've been focusing more dollars on the brand messaging, using broader-based media, like Time and The New Yorker," said Allen Olivo, senior director for worldwide marketing communications at Apple.
Meanwhile, the loose-lipped insiders at Apple who once fed scoops to the weekly have been silenced by a strict regime -- and Apple couldn't be happier.
"We certainly encouraged [MacWEEK] to become something other than a weekly Mac news and rumor magazine," said Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton. "We were delighted by the news."
Years ago, recalled one former MacWEEK employee, there were dumpster-diving missions outside Apple offices. Many a page-one story was devoted to news about a product that Apple wasn't ready to talk about.
Since Jobs' return to Apple, however, the gabbers of Cupertino, California, have been silenced. Employees were threatened with dismissal for leaks, and rumors circulated that false information was being planted with small numbers of employees to see if it sprouted up elsewhere. True or not, the possibility of getting fired shut many traps.
"It's definitely a tighter ship than it ever has been," said one long-term Apple employee, who, not surprisingly, asked to remain unidentified. Repeated calls to editors at MacWEEK were not returned or were dodged with nervous laughter and blurts of "Can't talk now, I'm on deadline."
But Colin Crawford, who heads up both MacWEEK and Macworld magazine as president and CEO of Mac Publishing LLC, insists the magazine hasn't been hurt by its dried-up source beds.
"It did not exist as a gossip-mongering or rumor-mongering publication," said Crawford, before rushing to Jobs' defense. "How can you run a company that leaks like a sieve? I cannot criticize him; in fact, I commend him for clamping down on it."
Crawford says the new direction is a product of market forces, Web developers and designers shifting to multiplatform users, and the magazine's target audience being in favor of the change. "A very small minority of people have expressed concern."
But online bulletin boards, like MacWEEK's own Mac the Knife carries fiery messages about the decision to kill the Mac-focused weekly tucked into topics with titles like "MacWEEK Places Gun to Head, Pulls Trigger" and "Apple Killed MacWEEK." Conspiracy theories galore contemplate the recent news in the context of last year's merger of MacUser and Macworld, which brought together rival tech-publishing houses IDG and Ziff-Davis in the joint venture.
The thinking seems to be that Mac users are being coerced to abandon their platform when even their fanzines start carrying reviews and ads from competing operation systems. Publishing an ad for computer graphics workstation maker Intergraph -- which bases its machines on Microsoft Windows NT -- for example, was seen by some as pure betrayal of the Mac platform.
"They did make some enemies," said Stan Flack, president of the Mac news site MacCentral. "They spread their content across other platforms, which wouldn't be a big deal in some circles, but the Mac market is a very strange animal." Mac fanatics quickly came under the impression that MacWEEK had shifted from its Apple allegiance.
One could argue that MacWEEK had no choice. While Apple has turned a profit for three consecutive quarters after logging nearly US$2 billion in losses in the previous two years, its sales leave it in last place among major PC vendors. The Mac market has shrunk from 11.6 percent of the market in 1994 to 4.2 percent in the first quarter of this year, according to Dataquest.
The weekly maintains that Apple played no part in driving it off the newsstand. "To suggest that there's any stress or strain between Apple and Mac Publishing is incredible," said Crawford.
But Apple's official position of "delight" that the magazine will cease to exist is hard to write off.
"Apple has always had a love-hate relationship with MacWEEK," said James Staten, an analyst at Dataquest who was formerly a MacWEEK editor. "They never liked it that they couldn't control the publication."
