Goodbye Seybold

Print Action, Mar 2004 by Tribute, Andrew

For almost 25 years the name Seybold has been a respected brand in the graphic arts and media markets. The Seybold Report has become synonymous with quality, in-depth coverage of all the key issues that have affected and changed this industry. Unfortunately that is now likely to change. Seybold Publications has been based for its entire life in the town of Media, Pennsylvania, but the current owners of the Seybold brand, a company under the name of MediaLive International, has decided to move the company to San Francisco to sit alongside all the other operations of this company.

The editorial staff of Seybold Publications has been made redundant from mid March. MediaLive states that it will recruit a new editor to be based in San Francisco, and they will utilize freelance staff to continue the publications. In my opinion, and I speak as a long-term Seybold writer, this is the end of Seybold as we all know and respect it. The group of editors in Media, who have been declared redundant, are more than just editors and writers, they are the heart and sole that makes Seybold special.

As a group they have all been together for more than 15 years, some for 20 years. They understand, live and breathe the industry. You cannot just put in a new editor without any background and understanding of what Seybold means, and continue with the brand. This move, however, is just the final stage in the ongoing history of Seybold. I have been expecting to write this article for at least the last five years. With my understanding of Seybold's owners, I am surprised I have not had the opportunity to write it before. Let's first look back at what Seybold is, and what Seybold was.

John and Jonathan Seybold started The Seybold Report, and John's daughter Patti later joined it. It started in the 1970s when computer-based phototype-setting and publishing systems were in their infancy. John and Jonathan previously had founded the world's first high-speed database typesetting company, Rocappi. In the late 1970s and early 1980s The SeyboId Report became the undisputed authority on anything that was happening in the area of publishing and output systems. Its circulation was worldwide in newspapers, trade repro services, publishers, printers and many large corporate organizations.

In the early 1980s, Jonathan Seybold started Seybold Seminars, as a meeting place to discuss the key issues that affected the publishing systems market. Again this rapidly grew to become the meeting place where publishing and printing professionals met. At this time I was a vendor of laser imagesetting equipment, and I knew the power of Seybold, and the benefits of getting a good write up in The Seybold Report. In 1985, when I opened up a consultancy, I began my 15-year relationship with the organization, later becoming its international editor.

Seybold was a well-known authority in newspaper circles where major operational revolutions had taken place in the 1970s and early 1980s, but it really came to major prominence with the arrival of desktop publishing (DTP). DTP, with Apple, Adobe (PostScript), and Aldus (PageMaker) was launched at Seybold, and The Seybold Report became the worldwide authority on the subject.

Seybold Seminars developed to become a major tradeshow that served as the world's launch centre for anything concerned with printing and publishing. If your job was to keep up with the latest developments in publishing and printing, you went to the Seybold Seminars and read The Seybold Report. People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, John Warnock and other industry luminaries, were the regular speakers at the events. Attendees came not just to hear them, but also to hear Jonathan Seybold's unique brand of seminar moderation that brought the maximum from the speakers.

Who will forget the emotions of Bill Gates on being torn apart by the audience for his lack of understanding of the needs of the publishing market? Also who will forget Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and, above all, John Warnock on the issue of making the PostScript font format an open standard? In newspapers and high-end publishing, Seybold continued to influence well into the early 1990s with its Fourth Wave discussions that again changed the face of the industry.

It was with PostScript that we really saw the benefit of the publications and seminars working cohesively together in areas where Seybold became the absolute industry-testing standard. The issues of PostScript speed testing and, later, colour screening evaluation were real industry benchmarks that established PostScript as the publishing standard for the future. The same happened with PDF where Seybold, more than Adobe, established this as the ongoing standard for the future.

Seybold became a very successful brand, and a very successful tradeshow. Jonathan saw the opportunity to expand and sold the Seybold Seminars and Publications operation to publishing organisation Ziff Davis. This did not include the office automation operations, which were run by Patti Seybold, and which remained independent. Unfortunately Ziff Davis did not understand the Seybold market and thought newsletter publishing, with its zero advertising approach, was just like computer magazine publishing. They decided that mass marketing was the key to grow circulation.