So Long Linux Journal

Well, Linux Journal will cease publication. The November issue was their last.

There are such nice comments below that. Long-time subscribers, very civil and supportive. Were you a subscriber, oldgeek?

No. While I have it on Feedly, I rarely read any articles. One would grab my attention here and there, but not enough to justify a subscription. Besides, I really don’t understand a lot anyway.

Shit, that’s terrible news. Linux Journal was like BYTE, one of those old guard publications that wasn’t really bound by the usual code of BUY SOME CRAP WE’VE BEEN FORCED TO PIMP YOU BY OUR ADVERTISERS!

They’re selling the end of year HTML archive they give to subscribers to non-subscribers for twelve bucks, with the added bonus that it includes ALL issues since 1994. I bought it and got to download a 700MiB zip file with 23 years worth of content (actually I got the option to sideload to Dropbox, so I did that!).

God, I miss BYTE :frowning:

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I have a stack of old LJ magazines. It use to be my go to when I was a full on Linux user. I live in a small town in NM and when our only bookstore closed that killed my access to any magazine stands so the only way to get a hardcopy magazine is by mail. I miss the ability to go to a store and browse periodicals. How do you all feel about the death of the printed media?

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If I’m not listening to an audiobook, I prefer to do my reading non-digitally. I think it is sad that printed media is going by the wayside. Today, I was taking some material to the community recycle bins for my mom. There I found a bunch of old, unused, National Geographics. Dumpster diving is rare for me. However, I did manage to snag a dozen or so without actually getting in!

I live in a small market town in northeast England. We’re lucky to have a reasonable number of traditional local shops - butcher, greengrocer, newsagent etc. Gives it a nice village feel. Despite that, most of our family’s food shopping is done at one of the large supermarkets in the neighbouring town, and quite a bit of shopping is also done online. It’s cheaper and more convenient.

I feel quite bad about doing this though. Local businesses are “use them or lose them”. So despite doing the bulk of our shopping elsewhere, we make an explicit effort to also shop locally.

I think the same argument applies to print media, although personally I’m probably less attached to that. If you like print media and you’d like to see it continue, you need to make an explicit effort to put up some money.

Never subscribed to or read LJ myself. I did used to buy the odd issue of another Linux magazine that I always found a bit underwhelming. I think one challenge for technology publications is that they do tend to work well online. If I was to buy anything in dead tree format it’s likely to be something that’s aesthetically superior on paper (e.g. Nat Geo with the photos) or something that I’d read when I don’t have a device immediately to hand.

As a previous contributor and long time fan, I was quite bummed when I learned of this. sigh, I guess we’ll always have issue 260…

–jeremy

Couldn’t agree more here. The decline of print media has hit my family personally: My brother used to be night shift production manager at two different printing companies, one in the UK then later in Australia. Both companies printing large runs of glossy magazines, now both closed due to lack of interest. He now can not find work in the industry and is now working as a stock man in a warehouse. This is via an agency and in theory a zero hour contract meaning he does not get paid if sick and has no guarantee that he has work from day to day.

Technically as I am self employed this is also true for me but I still earn more for one day after I have paid all the relevant taxes than he does for a week before paying any tax.

They’re back!!!