Tech Publisher CMP Restructures

CMP announced a major restructuring that includes shuttering some print titles and cutting about 200 jobs, an 18 percent reduction in staff.

The Manhasset, N.Y., tech publisher said the move was prompted by a decline in print revenue and growth of its online and events business.

On the print side, the emphasis will be on investing more in some of its biggest magazines at the expense of others. The biweekly Network Computing and monthly Optimize will be folded into InformationWeek while SysAdmin will be shut down.

CRN is moving down from three times to twice-monthly publication, and VARBusiness will move from bi-weekly to monthly frequency.

Although the size of the cutback caught some industry-watchers by surprise, the news was hardly new. Announcements about layoffs in print publications have become commonplace in the past few years, as newspapers and magazines struggle to cope with ad dollars going where more readers are going to get their news: the Web.

After the layoffs, CMP will be down to about 900 employees, or about 18 percent fewer staff than before.

More than half of CMP’s revenue now comes from online and events, Alix Raine, spokesperson for the company, told internetnews.com. “We’re realigning the resources of the company around the growth areas,” she said. “We want to continue to aggressively grow our events, which we’re expanding internationally, and new online products.”

With the Web rapidly establishing itself as the preferred source of news and information, traditional tech magazine publishers like CMP and others have battled to keep ad revenue flowing to the print side at or near the same levels as year’s past.

IDG recently shut down the print version of Infoworld while maintaining it as a Web site. IDG CEO Pat McGovern said in a recent interview with PBS’s Mediashift, that there is a need to protect print revenues “from eroding too quickly.”

“We always thought of ourselves as [print] publishers who did Websites and conferences,” said McGovern. “Now the Website typically has a bigger audience than print, and it’s growing much more rapidly.”

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