Happy 40th to Us!
As PCMag celebrates four decades of industry-leading technology journalism, our top editor reflects on what drives us.
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I'm the Editor-in-Chief of PCMag.com and the Vice President of Content for Ziff Davis, overseeing the editorial operations of PCMag and ExtremeTech.com, steering reviews and product coverage, news and features, and service journalism across the sites.
Back when the first iPhone was released, I started at PCMag as a senior editor covering consumer electronics and mobile reviews. After that, I went on to head up the reviews team as executive editor. And most recently I served as deputy editor, managing PCMag's editorial team and day-to-day operations. I've covered more product releases and have edited more reviews, roundups, and buying guides than any human reasonably should, each and every one contributing to the noble pursuit of helping you find the right technology to fit your life.
PCMag is 40 years old. We've been around for four full decades. A brand built around a print magazine, which started out with the fairly narrow mission of serving IBM personal computer enthusiasts, has managed to not only survive and transform into a successful website, but grow and thrive, just like technology itself.
The extreme longevity of our brand is a mind-blowing anomaly. In the modern media world, the bottom line is the top priority, the competition is fierce, and websites come and go at the speed of light. But I think you can pin our multi-decade success on one simple concept: passion.
I was recently named PCMag's editor-in-chief, the seventh in the publication's history. Alas, I haven't been here for the full 40 years, but in the many that I have been, I've held several roles. Besides editing thousands of reviews, buying guides, and articles, I've hired a lot of people along the way. The one thing every PCMag writer and editor has in common is a deep, true love for the technology they cover. It's an absolute requirement. We're basically just a big group of geeks whose primary mission is to translate our particular passion into a wide body of expert advice you can use to help find the right technology to fit your life.
We're basically just a big group of geeks whose primary mission is to translate our particular passion into a wide body of expert advice you can use to help find the right technology to fit your life.
This important mission has taken various forms over the past four decades. Back in the beginning, it meant getting on the telephone with every vendor on the planet, procuring every printer you could possibly buy at the time (120 of them including dot matrix and daisy wheel models), setting them up in a lab, running endless trials, fact-checking your results multiple times, and reporting it all in a print magazine issue devoted exclusively to that topic. And because of printing lead times, that issue wouldn't even hit newsstands for another three months.
Why would anyone want to undertake such a laborious task? And do it multiple times a year with various types of hardware and software products? In the editor's note in that November 27, 1984 issue, then editor-in-chief Bill Machrone explains it simply: "We do it for expertise—you can call it glory if you like. We seek to make original contributions to the body of knowledge in the computer field. It's the primary way in which we can be useful to you." Machrone goes on to explain that with its profound depth of coverage, PC Magazine was seeking to form its editors and writers into absolute experts.
PC Magazine came to be known for those mega-features, but more for its experts and its exhaustive, labs-based testing. Today, given product release cycles and various other factors, it would be impossible to review, say, 200 laptops at the same time. But our PC analysts do it over the course of a year—building up a wealth of data along with a strong understanding of the full range of the field, the trends, and where everything fits in. All so we can make smart comparisons and pick the right laptop for every type of user. Nothing brings this team more joy than dispensing a thoughtful product recommendation—on our site, via email or social channels, or even at a family dinner or a birthday party. (We also act as on-call tech support for pretty much everyone we know.)
No matter how far we expand, we stay true to our roots. Expertise remains at the heart of all that we do. We go deep, and our passion drives us to understand more.
Forty years on, the range of technology product categories is wider than ever before, and it just keeps growing. And we keep growing. But no matter how far we expand, we stay true to our roots. Expertise remains at the heart of all that we do. We go deep, and our passion drives us to understand more. Here at the 40-year mark, we'll pause to celebrate the hell out of ourselves, we'll get nostalgic and marvel at how far we've come, and then we'll just keep doing what we do best: testing, gathering data, rating, comparing, explaining, and reporting, all while standing in awe of the power of technology and what it can do. That's always been the PCMag way. Our passion powers this unstoppable machine we'll ride into the next 40 years.