Markets

It's Been Quite a Week for Prominent Print People to Go Digital

By Catharine Taylor

Updated on: December 11, 2009 / 8:45 AM EST / MoneyWatch

There's no news in the turmoil that has struck the print business this year; stories of the woes of print have become commonplace. But this week seemed, dare I say it, a tipping point in terms of the transition many people who had been in the newspaper and magazine industries have decided to make. Not surprisingly, the direction they're headed is digital, with this week, in particular, seeming like a mass exodus. Here are three headlines from this week:

Veteran New York Times tech reporter Saul Hansell takes the buyout to become programming director of AOL's Seed, the robo-tron content operation on which AOL is betting much of its future.
MaryAnn Bekkedahl, evp/group publisher at Rodale, leaves her post as the end of her contract nears, so that she can transition to a digital career.
Ad Age editor Jonah Bloom, and editor-at-large Matthew Creamer, leave the venerable trade publication to run Breaking Media, which, from what little I know, is a potential competitor to us here at BNET since it focuses on blogs focused on business verticals.

Layer on top of that Nielsen Business Media closing down Editor & Publisher yesterday. The magazine, which covered the newspaper industry, had been around for 100 years and was shuttered as many of its sibling publications (including my alma maters Adweek and Mediaweek) were sold to a new publishing group.

Wow. On the full disclosure front, maybe this week seems particularly noteworthy to me because I have relationships, however minimal, with all these people, ranging from a brief unmemorable introduction to moving in the same professional and personal circles with others. But, whatever my relationship to those above, the moves this week are telling signs that what we're seeing is the realization, on the part of many of the best and brightest in print, that whatever the print industry's hopes to save itself the safer ground is in digital. It's a risk, sure -- time was, for instance, that it was rare anyone would willingly leave The New York Times -- but these so-called safe havens don't feel so safe anymore, and so, some of the best and brightest are leaving the industry.