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Publisher Young.
After braving the digital threat to print for more than a decade — and outlasting a corporate competitor he said was created to put him out of business — publisher Mitch Young is moving his Business New Haven and New Haven magazine publications completely online.
Young made the announcement Monday in a press release.
Young co-founded Business New Haven in 1993, then New Haven magazine in 2007, through a company called Second Wind Media. Both remained primarily print publications in an age of disappearing print, proudly local and smart publications in an age of dumbing-down out-of-town corporate chain ownership of media. Young’s publications dived into local debates from how to market the city to how to reform public education
In the release, Young said that advertisers “have shifted their spending away from local media, to large global enterprises. For us at least, that has made our larger scale, high quality publication efforts less practical.”
The company claimed to “reach more than 50,000 business people and upper-income households” with the print publications. The new “digital efforts will work toward very targeted demographic audiences,” Young stated.
Young added that the decision has nothing to do with personal health problems he has had. “I don’t expect to die in the next year,” he maintained.
The Tribune publishing company launched a glossy monthly magazine to compete with New Haven, called New Haven Living. The magazine published its last issue in December. Young subsequently wrote that that magazine tried to run his small local outfit out of business by leveraging its corporate advertising reach, but ultimately failed.
Click here to read and above to listen to a previous interview with Young on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
