Recent changes at two of the leading magazines devoted to material handling topics may be signs of the deep challenges and dramatic changes facing traditional trade magazines; industry practitioners can expect more and more content to move on-line, and fewer original stories as writing staffs shrink. Supply Chain Digest will pick up some of the slack.

The Material Handling Institute (www.mhia.org), a professional organization for material handling related vendors and producers of the ProMat trade show, announced last week that it had named Gary Forger as Senior Vice President of Professional Development, replacing the retiring Dick Ward. Forger had most recently been editor of Modern Materials Handling.

At nearly the same time, word is leaking out that Material Handling Management magazine editor David Drickhamer has also left that publication.

It’s simply speculation, but the challenges in traditional trade magazines may be a factor in these changes. A combination of advertiser preference and rising printing and mailing costs are driving more and more content on-line, and indeed likely to threaten the concept of printed trade publications themselves in just a few years. Most trade magazines have cut their editorial staffs substantially to just a handful of staff writers and increasingly the use of freelancers. In the past few years, industry publications Frontline, Supply Chain and Manufacturing Systems, and Chief Supply Chain Officer all went under. Technology magazines such as InformationWeek are published now at just a fraction of their former page counts, as print advertising volumes erode.

Many of the emerging on-line models rely on aggregation of the articles and content from others, meaning the publications have less and less original content – leaving readers and practitioners with fewer choices for quality information and insight. The reality is that it is in many respects hard to fully replace the impact and content of traditional trade publications on-line, but the cost dynamics are simply driving the market that way.

In several categories, including material handling automation and RFID/automatic data collection, you can expect an increasing focus by Supply Chain Digest over the coming weeks to fill the void of quality content.