It’s a genuine pleasure to share with you some good news that’s in store for InfoWorld. Starting next week, this publication changes from its current tabloid format to a sharp, new magazine. You’ll find the same insightful reviews, news stories, and analyses -- more of them, in fact -- but in a better, more practical, more powerful form.
Why more powerful? Because the new InfoWorld is not just a shrunken, “Mini Me” version of a news tabloid. Based on extensive surveys and focus groups during recent months, we plan to leverage the best features of a classic magazine to do an even more effective job of our mission: provide expert information that IT technologists need to make the buying decisions in today’s market. Some specifics:
--InfoWorld’s newsier, event-driven stories will now be collected into a section called Tech Watch that leads the book. We’ll still concentrate on the story-behind-the-story of the latest products, services, and technologies. But Tech Watch will also include briefs to make sure you don’t miss information you need.
--Product reviews and strategic analyses fill the new
--Missed an issue? No problem. At the end of the
--Following Leaderboard is the feature section where writers can dive deep into subjects that deserve it, using top-quality photography, infographics, charts, graphs, tables, and more. Unlike in a tabloid, where story length is often limited, the magazine format allows InfoWorld to tell the story in whatever space is right: a paragraph or two in a brief if that’s all that’s needed, or a 10-page cover story if the subject would benefit from greater detail.
One sad note: To make room for this expanded coverage, InfoWorld won’t be able to carry all 13 columnists featured in the publication today. Tom Yager, Ephraim Schwartz, Chad Dickerson, and Robert X. Cringely will continue to appear in the magazine. They’ll be joined by Test Center Lead Analyst Jon Udell, who already writes a popular online column and Weblog at www.infoworld.com. Others, including Wayne Rash’s security column, Mario Apicella’s storage column, and Ed Foster’s Gripe Line (now reborn as a Weblog), will appear regularly online. Still other writers plan to self-publish their columns going forward. We urge you to sign up to receive them; details are in the individual columns this week.
The new InfoWorld is already gathering praise from industry observers who have seen mockup issues such as the one above. I hope you’ll agree when you see it next week. In the meantime, feel free to send me any advice, cautions, complaints, or random thoughts.
