Adios, MacSurfer ⇥ sixcolors.com

From the message posted to the MacSurfer homepage:

Dear MHN Readers:

Not seeing a viable future with subscriptions, MacSurfer and TechNN will cease operations effective immediately. Please allow a few weeks to process forthcoming refunds. If need be, subscription inquiries can be addressed to the Publisher at the bottom of the Homepage.

Thanks kindly for your support, and thanks for the memories…

MacSurfer’s Headline News Team

Dan Moren, Six Colors:

I don’t remember how I started reading MacSurfer — I’m sure Jason or one of my other Macworld colleagues mentioned them to me as a place to check in my earliest days of blogging at MacUser. For many years, they were an invaluable resource, a manageable way to quickly see what was going on in the Apple world without having to subscribe to hundreds of sites and spend literally all of your time trawling headlines.

But as social media and podcasting grew in popularity and RSS and “visiting actual websites” ebbed, MacSurfer struggled to adjust. They attempted a subscription plan, as the above note mentions, but it seemed like it never really caught on. I still loaded up MacSurfer once or twice a week, especially when digging for a topic for my weekly column, but the coverage had gotten much sparser.

Being slow to change with the times may have been MacSurfer’s downfall, to some extent, but I love how stubbornly it stuck by its formula, even refusing to give up its <table>-based layout. I’ll miss it.