Recent
changes at two of the leading magazines
devoted to material handling topics may
be signs of the deep challenges and dramatic
changes facing traditional trade magazines;
industry practitioners can expect more and
more content to move on-line, and fewer
original stories as writing staffs shrink.
Supply Chain Digest will pick up some of
the slack.
The Material
Handling Institute (www.mhia.org),
a professional organization for material
handling related vendors and producers of
the ProMat trade show, announced last week
that it had named Gary Forger as Senior
Vice President of Professional Development,
replacing the retiring Dick Ward. Forger
had most recently been editor of Modern
Materials Handling.
At nearly
the same time, word is leaking out that
Material Handling Management magazine editor
David Drickhamer has also left that publication.
It’s
simply speculation, but the challenges in
traditional trade magazines may be a factor
in these changes. A combination of advertiser
preference and rising printing and mailing
costs are driving more and more content
on-line, and indeed likely to threaten the
concept of printed trade publications themselves
in just a few years. Most trade magazines
have cut their editorial staffs substantially
to just a handful of staff writers and increasingly
the use of freelancers. In the past few
years, industry publications Frontline,
Supply Chain and Manufacturing Systems,
and Chief Supply Chain Officer all
went under. Technology magazines such as
InformationWeek are published now
at just a fraction of their former page
counts, as print advertising volumes erode.
Many of the
emerging on-line models rely on aggregation
of the articles and content from others,
meaning the publications have less and less
original content – leaving readers
and practitioners with fewer choices for
quality information and insight. The reality
is that it is in many respects hard to fully
replace the impact and content of traditional
trade publications on-line, but the cost
dynamics are simply driving the market that
way.
In several
categories, including material handling
automation and RFID/automatic data collection,
you can expect an increasing focus by Supply
Chain Digest over the coming weeks to fill
the void of quality content. |