PRWeek Goes Monthly; Weekly Edition Becomes Digital
PRWeek announced a reorganization of its editorial today, which will replace the weekly paper edition with a digital version. It appears they are pulling all content back behind the subscription wall in response to the difficult economy. The trade pub began releasing some items for free in 2004, followed by the launch of a few blogs and a podcast.
There will be a monthly print product with more analysis, interviews, and features according to the announcement.
The trade pub also promises to retain the best aspects of its current weekly in the new digital version to be delivered on Friday. The announcement states that March 2009 was their best traffic month so far. Quantcast–which should be taken with a grain of salt–puts the site traffic at very modest 10,700. UPDATE: The number of pageviews for PRWeekUS.com for March provided by PRWeek was 315,717.
No mention in the story if the annual subscription of $198 will change with the revamp. The subscriber wall goes up on April 27th. Emails to Publishing Director Julia Hood were returned with an Out of Office reply. We’ll update the story once we reach her.
Meanwhile, the search began last week for a new Editor in Chief (see the job posting on mediabistro) when Keith O’Brien announced his departure to Attention PR. Our assumption is that they will go with someone in tune with more 1.0 subscription-supported publishing. More on that tk.
