EarthWeb, responding to concerns about what it is doing with the newly acquired Perl Journal (both in print and online), has posted a letter to TPJ readers.
Mark Schlack, Vice President of World Wide Content for EarthWeb, admitted that not everything has gone smoothly so far in the transition, and committed to fixing some of the online issues in regard to adding back missing content and fixing subscription problems. He also said that bad interface problems are being addressed: the site is virtually unreadable on lynx, and two of the links off the main TPJ page are unrenderable by Netscape 4.61 for Mac OS (and probably other platforms too) because of broken tables (though some of those problems seem to have been fixed as I was writing this).
Schlack also introduced Mike Green as Executive Producer/Publisher of all Perl Journal offerings, and commented on advertising on the site, saying that EarthWeb has no plans to back off on the amount of, or types of, advertising on the site.
The future of The Perl Journal in print is still unclear, despite what appear to be statements designed to clear up the issue. Schlack said that EarthWeb has "no current plan to discontinue the print version", but also claims that "online will supplant print to a great extent as time goes by." Schlack writes EarthWeb is "committed to publishing it indefinitely," but gives no assurances that TPJ will remain a print periodical in the long haul. He asks readers to let EarthWeb know whether or not they want a hard-copy version.
