Computerworld 50: Monthly Features Celebrating Golden Jubilee

Computerworld will be celebrating its 50th anniversary throughout 2017.

IDG’s flagship title came into the world — the computer world, of course — on June 21, 1967, and the current staff has a long list of how it plans to celebrate five decades of publication. Computerworld Editor-in-chief Scot Finnie set the stage with his Jan. 25 column, telling readers to expect “the 50th anniversary installment plan” with special content appearing each month during 2017.

“The CW@50 plan takes what we’ve learned to do with our other special projects —  roll them out in stages — and applies it to a much bigger project. With 50 years of content to select from, we knew that one typical special projects package wouldn’t cut it. By including anniversary-related content each month, we can meet one of our standing editorial goals: to maximize the ‘time in the sun’ — the number of hours or days a given piece of content is exposed to readers. There are several tactics we are developing for that, one of which is rolling out collections of related content piecemeal instead of the whole batch at once.”

“Readers enjoy when we dig back through our archives to spotlight key turning points in the IT industry and other snapshots in time,” said Computerworld Editor Ellen Fanning. “We’ll gather technology and event timelines, revisit our coverage of the hot-button issues of the past five decades and publish a feature we all love — funny advertisements from past print magazines.”

Computerworld will be featuring many of the cartoons that chronicled challenges its readers faced over the years.

Senior Reporter Lucas Merian’s story on how IDG founder Pat McGovern saw the need for the first newspaper to target the entire computer industry also appeared on Jan. 25. As part of the piece he interviewed Pat McGovern, Jr., who is working on a book about his father and IDG’s company culture. There’s been a lot of overlap between what he’s doing and what Computerworld was planning, Finnie said, and McGovern and the editorial team have been sharing ideas for what CW might cover as part of the CW@50 project.

In February, Computerworld launched a compilation of cartoon satire by editorial cartoonist John Klossner that was published for many years in Computerworld, including this series on preparing for Y2K.

The staff is planning to feature significantly more anniversary content in June, and most of Computerworld’s digital magazine (see sidebar) for the month will be focused on the 50th.

While this year’s milestone is a joyous one, there’s still a lingering thought of what could have been. When the editors started thinking five years ago about what to do for the golden anniversary, “Pat McGovern promised us that he would write a long, thoughtful essay for this content package,” Finnie said. “We had planned to build it around him. But we’re sure Pat would’ve liked this plan, too.”

This article is sourced from IDG Central.