Another bit of sad news to bring you – TUAW, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, is ceasing publication this coming Tuesday, February 3, 2015. The parent company, AOL (yes, that AOL) is folding TUAW and the video games-oriented Joystiq into their larger properties (Engadget and Tech Crunch):
We have a large, loyal following of readers and we still have the fire in us when it comes to our passion for Apple products. However, TUAW is a small cog in a big machine — AOL — and our niche offering did not fit in with the corporate direction for larger content providers such as Engadget and TechCrunch.
The corporation is doubling down on all of the large properties, and the resources — however meager — being expended on sites like TUAW and Joystiq are being reallocated to fuel that big machine.
I’ve enjoyed TUAW (and their email newsletters) for several years.
You can read the official statement here and if you are around at 10pm Eastern/9pm Central tonight (Sunday, Feb 1st) here in the US, you can listen to their final Sunday Talkcast.
It was just a few weeks ago that MacUser Magazine (UK) announced they would be ceasing publication after 30 years.
Is this, along with the closure of MacUser Magazine, a sign of bad things to come? Well, it’s a bad thing if you work for one of those publications, but I don’t take it as a part of an overall trend – Apple is doing extremely well, and they just announced that they set revenue records (Apple.com) for Mac and iPhone sales.
What’s happening, and the TUAW statement confirms this, is that coverage of Apple products is becoming quite mainstream in many ways, and for companies like AOL that have multiple tech properties, the people at the top may see some redundancy in some areas. Engadget for instance, has a huge amount of Apple coverage, and it’s not uncommon to see multiple Apple-related stories in a single day.
That’s not to say it’s a wise decision – I can’t see how TUAW isn’t paying for itself, but they want to cut costs, and one of the ways tech companies do that, is lay off people.