MacWEEK yesterday announced that they are merging with MacCentral as of Monday, March 5th. This brings to a close a magazine which at one point was praised above all others as the holy grail of Mac literature.

Back in the late '80s, getting a subscription to MacWEEK was like a nod saying you were influential in the Mac community (or willing to pay $99 a year, which wasn't really a possibility for my 15-year-old self). As an inustry weekly, it targeted those with purchasing power, interested in what's happening in the industry this week instead of the two to three month lag mandated by Macworld and MacUser's production schedule.

In 1993 I had the honor of working at MacWEEK as a reviews intern under Rick LePage, Sean Wagstaff, Henry Norr and Stephen Howard. Since that time, Rick went on to be Editor in Chief of MacWEEK, and is now Editor of Ric Ford's Macintouch. Sean has become an accomplished author on 3D issues on the Macintosh, Stephen Howard has become Editor of ZD-Net, and Henry Norr is an Editor Emeritus at Macintouch, and frequent writer on technical issues for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Anyhow, MacWEEK's closing is just another sign of the times. BMUG, the Berkeley Mac Usres Group, (another place I used to work) is now officially out of business, their petition for bankrupcy having been completed last week. Both BMUG and MacWEEK were victims of the Internet community. Targeting different ends of the Mac spectrum, both organizations served to bring timly information on the state-of-the-Mac to the people, and now that the people grow closer to information every day, they became unneeded middlemen. In one way, they accomplished their goals. These organizations, along with so many others, sought to empower people through their computers. Their collective efforts succeeded beyond their dreams, and now that that battle is won, the armies are disbanded, while the soldiers get to move on to other fronts.

All in all, though I feel sadness at the passing of MacWEEK and BMUG, I can't help but be warmed by the factors that brought about their decline. Though we didn't see our battle as anything other than an ongoing effort to help and inform people, we still managed to win, at least to the point that the efforts are carried out now on different fronts of email, newsgroups, bulletin boards and news sites updated several times a day.

This post has now officially reached the level of rambling and vamping, so I'll cut it off here. Let's just leave it at I'm sad, but in a good way.