Reprinted, with permission, from itjouro.com.au
By Mahesh Sharma
Jan 18, 2007
Years from now people may look back at blog tech.blorge.com as a paradigm of this time in publishing: leaving print to venture online.
Computer mag Free Access was shut down around April last year by founder John Pospisil, and later in the year he quietly re-entered the tech media space with tech.blorge.com, a decision purely based on his opinion that the media’s future is online.
“It really came down to making a choice about where the future was, and as much as my background is as a print journalist and I love print and magazines, if you’re talking about where the future of publishing is, I don’t know if you’ll find too many people saying print”, he said.
“Being a print publication, the production costs of that compared to a website are very different. You face very different risks and you’re talking about a loss of tens of thousands of dollars per edition, as opposed to thousands of dollars for a website.
“Free Access also had some weaknesses. Obviously it was always dependant on Harvey Norman, Myer, Dick Smith, and the main distributors.”
The catalyst for the closure was the retirement of their ad manager, but Pospisil said the mag’s circulation had remained steady leading up to its demise and that he saw the departure as an opportunity to go out on a high.
“The circulation was around the 45k mark. It was an audited mag and completely reputable…The last issue made a profit, it wasn’t necessarily about Free Access losing money until it shut down.
“We concluded that Free Access had been a remarkably successful product over its life and rather than running it into the ground, my preferred option was to set it down while it had some dignity.”
Pospisil said many of the lessons he’d learnt with Free Access over its eight-year lifetime assisted him in soft-launching tech.blorge.com in November last year.
“One of the lessons I’ve learnt over the years is how important it is to do market research, make changes where appropriate, and to not be rigid. They’re the kind of lessons I’ve been applying to tech.blorge.”
Pospisil is gunning for a portion of the ICT audience that already has a glut of information to choose from on the Net, but he believes tech.blorge’s ‘edgy and opinionated’ approach is finding its mark.
Starting from scratch in November, Pospisil claimed to have more than 200,000 unique visitors in December. Alexa traffic shows that in late December, the site had a major spike in traffic around the time of the Microsoft blogger controversy, which would have contributed significantly to those figures. Pospisil said the goal is to achieve higher, more consistent traffic levels thought to the end of March, and then double those figures by the end of June.
And reader feedback since the site went live over two-and-a-half months ago has convinced Pospisil that they are on the right track before their full launch somewhere between May and June.
“It’s more or less confirmed our original idea, which was to launch a site that wasn’t afraid to tackle the big issues, wasn’t afraid to be controversial if needed, and wasn’t afraid to take up stories that perhaps had been overlooked by other people…This was confirmed by the reader response in terms of feedback and the stories that have been read the most.”
Reader participation on the site has not only helped Pospisil tweak the editorial direction of the site - a story on the Microsoft blogging scandal attracted 57 comments - but it’s also something Pospisil expects will help promote the site once it’s ready to go.
“There are many ways you can promote a website. There are a lot of citizen journalist and social news websites out there that have started to pick up our stories and have brought in readers…Social computing in general is a really good way of promoting a website.”
The tech component of ‘blorge’ currently makes up half of the sites under that umbrella – the other site is ‘photo blorge’ - and while Posposil said he has currently devoted all of his time to his area of expertise, his long-term goal is to expand the blorge brand to encompass a wide variety of fields.
“The broader concept is that blorge is the umbrella brand for a number of different blogs/newssites. At the moment tech.blorge is the number one priority,” he said.
“It’s an area we’ve all worked in and an area where there’s already a large audience on the Net looking for tech news and comments. The idea is that as tech.blorge grows and becomes more self-sustaining I’ll start to look at other blorge sites.”