| News Section Background |
By Doc Searls
Chris DiBona of VA Linux Systems says there is a fundamental problem with "all this talk about the need for an enterprise Linux magazine." The problem is, he says, "There is no enterprise Linux story yet. It's too early. There is an ISP story. There is a Web server story. There are other stories here and there. But we're really over-reaching if we think there is an enterprise story. It's just not here yet. Not that the rest of what's going on isn't real interesting."
But the perception is there that there is Linux For Suits is a big market. So is the projection. What's more, everyone who wants a good fight (especially the press) casts Linux i as Microsoft's worthy opponent. So, of course, does nearly everybody in the whole Open Source community. And every CIO and system administrator in the business world has a powerful demand for what Microsoft alone — just like IBM alone a generation earlier — cannot provide: competition; choices; opportunities for new software (and new kinds of software) to flourish.
Meeting that demand is Linux Journal's job. Both by default and by responsibility.
Linux Journal has no competition among print magazines. Linux Magazine was a one-shot prototype. It's dead. Enterprise Linux won't appear until October at the earliest, and the publisher is so deadly-dull and unplugged from the Net (and therefore from the Linux community) that there's no way it'll do much more than further discorage the majors from jumping in.
So Linux Journal has three challenges: 1) meet demand by the business world for good, hard, interesting, useful Linux information; 2) meet demand by the existing readership for good and useful technical information; and 3) do a better job of what it's doing already.
To start meeting the first of those two demands, I have spent the last few weeks studying five things:
On the first issue, Linux Journal indisputably lives up to both its claims: "The Premier Linux Magazine" and "The Monthly Magazine of the Linux Community." LJ has a devoted following in the real Linux community: the developers who write the code and the system administrators who make things work. The magazine's subjects are, with few exceptions (to borrow from Slashdot), "stuff that matters." DejaNews, which catalogs Usenet postings (among other things) finds nearly nine thousand posts that contain the phrase "Linux Journal." With few exceptions, LJ is given respect and authority. It is and should remain acentral feature of the Linux community. The numbers here also bear this out. The number of visits and inbound links to SSC sites are both enviable. I would bet that linux.com doesn't begin to come close for a long time.
In the words of my pal, the Linux contrarian and network guru Craig Burton, Linux Journal also "makes Doctor Dobbs look like Martha Stewart Living." Nothing wrong with that; but there is no reason that Linux Journal can't be both Doctor Dobbs and Red Herring. Val Landi (for decades the number two guy at IDG) thinks it should be both, and modeled on Byte in its best years.
"Byte was for two populations: power users and developers. Linux Journal can own the same space for two reasons:
Sam Whitmore, a former top Ziff-Davis editor, agrees, but with some exceptions:
"There has been only one successful magazine to bridge the techie and business markets, and that was Byte," Sam says. "And Byte failed because there are two different business agendas going on, and it couldn't sustain a single sensibility around them both. A similar thing killed PC Tech Journal, which was a great magazine that got caught in a political war between PC Week and PC Magazine, both of which thought they could cover the same territory. Neither one of them did, but PC Tech Journal got killed anyway, just to make room."
Sam thinks Linux Journal has a terrific incumbent position. Here is a condensation of what he says:
Both Val and Sam are adamant about taking advantage of Linux' native Web involvement. Linux already has what every business covets: a preëminent — even a preëmptory — position. LJ should host conversations with Linux folks, get their participation, and use the Web to feed print into the magazine, which in turn will feed more LJ-related activity onto the related Web sites. In other words, make the Web side of the house as active and involved as possible. Look at Forbes, ZD and some of the other business publishers. They all expose their contents on the Web: each article has a unique and permanent URL. There is no risk of losing subscribers by doing this, and these guys prove it. What matters is reader involvement, and exposing content fosters that in a huge way.
Val Landi makes one specific additional recommendation: start adding pieces to the magazine that also add on the Web — all to make it more lively and contemporary and inviting to readers of all kinds. Don't worry that business guys will pick it up for light news and get swamped in the deep Linux stuff. They do that in Forbes too, with business stories about bond pricing and insurance models. Start with a news section, because there is such a rich resource in the Linux community already.
So here are the goals for the news section:
The first issue with a news section should be August. Candidates for materials are here.
There are three criteria for model magazines today:
Here are a few models of all three. The two PC magazines are really there for comparison's sake.
Here are examples of how several magazines do their news sections: