CMP recently announced that they will cut 200 jobs, and shut down more than one magazine in the process, folding their content into other existing magazines. There has been a lot of buzz in the sysadmin community (which I know largely as a loose collection of people who belong to LOPSA, SAGE, USENIX, or local groups of various kinds) about how sad and unexpected this is and how it’s a sign of the times or something.
You Can’t Sell a Generalist’s Mag to a Market of Specialists
I actually think SysAdmin’s demise was a long time coming – in part because, well, I’m involved in the publication of a couple of magazines, and read lots of others, and know people who work in publishing on other magazines as well as large online media outlets (some of whom I also write/edit/consult with). The plain fact of the matter is that it is extremely difficult to cover a topic like system administration in a generalist sort of way when your audience no longer consists mostly of generalists.
For example, the last two issues of SysAdmin magazine I remember getting were about Database Management, and Linux, respectively. The database management issue talked about Oracle and MySQL, and then had 3 or 4 articles on things not really directly related to databases at all, if memory serves. The Linux issue is probably of no interest to the admin who was all revved up for the Oracle articles, because that admin is probably not so much a sysadmin as an “Oracle admin”. Meanwhile, the average Linux administrator is probably uninterested in the Oracle RAC Primer.
Most admins aren’t generalists anymore unless they work in academia, research, or a company small enough that there are only a couple of people to handle the entire infrastructure. Even people who would like to be more general aren’t doing generalist things in production. I know several people who work *only* on {Oracle, sendmail, websphere, whatever-other-service-you-like} at work, and nothing else, but they run Apache, Bind, Postfix, and a few other services at home. That knowledge is nice to have, but it’s hardly something you can use to market yourself as a production generalist administrator.
So the market is flooded with mail administrators, backup administrators, storage administrators, cluster administrators, network administrators, database administrators, websphere administrators, exchange administrators, desktop administrators… the list goes on and on and on. The magazine market has mostly followed suit. There are magazines about cluster computing, DB2, AIX, SQL Server, Linux servers, Windows servers, and lots of other specialized areas. Note in that list that there are two separate magazines for two separate database products, but no “DBA’s Journal”. In killing SysAdmin Magazine, CMP is just following along with market trends.
Programming has mostly gone in the same direction. Dr. Dobb’s Journal is no longer available on your local bookshelf, but you can find php|architect, a magazine about nothing but PHP, doing well. Others exist for .Net, Cold Fusion, C/C++, Java, and now even Python. I’m sure Ruby and Lua aren’t far behind.
“I know, let’s start our own magazine!”
There are lots of naysayers out there who seem to think you need a huge staff, tons of money, and loads of other resources to start a magazine. Not true. You need a few dedicated, motivated people, and a small amount of seed money, and some time and hard labor.
An example is php|architect. It started with two guys: the publisher (who was a software development consultant as well), and his business partner, who also knew Quark pretty well – plenty well enough to do the layout. Then I came on board. So after the first issue came out, the rest were all tech and copy edited by the publisher and I, and the layout was done by the other guy. That’s really minimizing the amount of work we did, but the point is you don’t need an army.
When you’re as big as CMP and you’re looking at cutting a million bucks or something from your operating expenses, you go ahead and cut away! A small outfit isn’t playing with these kinds of numbers. A full-time editor at a company like CMP probably makes a 6-figure salary. A guy like me who edits as a side job makes something like… far less than that. At that rate, you can add another editor, a tech editor, a couple of columnists, all part time, and the advertising revenue will still cover the costs.
So if you want to see a sysadmin magazine, get some dedicated people who have half a brain and go do it!
Good luck.
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