Your friendly neighborhood AtAT crew used to subscribe to MacWEEK, back when it was an actual paper publication (imagine!) and when we'd commonly hear people refer to it as "MacLEAK." At first there was a kind of comfort in receiving a big ol' magazine filled with Mac info every single week; it sort of reinforced the notion that the Mac world was big and bustling, at a time when everyone in the industry said it was small and dying. Eventually, though, getting the paper edition just became a hassle-- by the time it arrived, we'd already read all the articles online, and it was just another thing to throw in the recycling bin. Oh, sure, having access to ads that were updated on a weekly basis was occasionally useful when shopping around for cheap RAM or a new hard disk, but for the most part, MacWEEK was just a waste of paper as far as we were concerned. So we let our subscription lapse.

Then, of course, there was that whole rigamarole when the Mac publications world got very frightening: MacWorld and MacUser merged, and MacWEEK announced it was ceasing publication of its print version. Reasons cited included the fact that there just wasn't enough advertising revenue to go around. If ever there was a sign that the Macintosh universe was imploding, to us, that was it. And then came the coup de grace: the publishers of MacWEEK switched their focus to the cross-platform digital media industry and started cranking out eMediaweekly, which we're told wasn't all that much different from MacWEEK, except that it stuck a little closer to the digital content creation thing-- and start covering All Things Windows.

Apparently the publishers, Mac Publishing LLC, felt that stirring Windows NT into the mix would bring in all kinds of money that those throngs of Windows users have stuffed into their pockets. We can only assume that things didn't quite work out that way, though, since Mac Publishing released a statement announcing the "immediate suspension" of the magazine's publication. The official reasons given for the death of eMediaweekly include the lack of "maturity" of the digital publishing market and the fact that "computer publications across the industry" are having difficulties. Fair enough. We can't say we'll particularly miss the magazine, but we still feel a twinge of remorse, given the sense of comfort we derived from the very existence-- if not necessarily the content-- of MacWEEK several years ago. If there's a lesson here, we're not sure what it is-- unless perhaps it's, "Don't assume that opening your Mac-centric product or service to the Windows crowd will necessarily bring you fortune." (Hmmm, I think I got that in a fortune cookie once...)