Reminders of just how not over this recession is–at least in the publishing business–keep turning up on a daily basis.

I was doing some browsing through my logs this morning and found a refer to my site from Drive-Thru.org, which turns out to be the weblog of an old CMP colleague, Mitch Wagner. Mitch is a tech-publishing veteran–he left InformationWeek about the time I joined it. Unfortunately, he went down with theInternetWeek ship, as did my friend Steve Zurier (who has done two exceptionally good deeds for me: he gave me the name of a divorce attorney, and then was my best man when I got married again).

Seeing Mitch's blog reminded me again how lucky I am to be gainfully employed. A lot of former colleagues in the magazine biz are still out there looking for work. All the members of my entire team from InformationWeek Labs (excepting myself) are, last I knew, between full-time gigs. Cynthia Morgan, once editor of Byte and late of Techies.com (another friend who, like Zurier, worked with me at GCN) has gone to the dark side and now works for Intel (though I guess that counts as gainful employment).

Right after I left Fawcette for my current gig, my first boss there, former FTP VP of Publishing Jeff Miller (another ex-CMP'r), was purged. Soon after, the publisher of my magazines at FTP, Jeannine Barnard was laid off, to make room for a more senior publisher whose book had been scrapped.

Of course, here at Ziff, there's been a whole bunch of people have been released into the wild over the past year, too.

This has been probably the worst body slashing I've seen the tech publishing business go through since 1991, if not ever. And I don't see there being a significant upside to this trench we've been in; I think tech publishing as we knew it in the mid- and late 90's is gone for good.

I don't see anything coming along to replace the networking books. Wireless looked like it could be the next big thing, but it's now looking like it will continue to be the next big thing for quite some time; sure, 802.1x is great, but there's not enough there to base a magazine on. And the beige box books are hurting, too–the merger of HP and Compaq has effectively halved the number of big advertisers in the corporate PC market. And with general biz publications like BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal providing more and more tech coverage,–and competing for the little big-market tech advertising that's left out there– the big IT newsweeklies are taking it in the shorts.

So what's the future?

Smaller magazines. More niche publications. More magazines with a limited life span. Fewer issues, with content online to keep readers hooked in between. More web, less frequent hardcopy.

The publication I'm with now, Baseline, is (currently) successful because it goes after a tight demographic market that has money, and presents information in a form that, in some ways, competes with folks like Gartner and Meta–and provides it free, with advertisements interspersed with the copy. Hardcore content, distilled and targeted, is what magazines do best. But the magazine is a monthly publication. We don't do “news”–we leave that to the weeklies (and the Web). We do drill-down, which doesn't work as well on the Web.

This isn't a good model for people who liked big magazine staffs and big freelance budgets. Advertising pages will only regain their value through scarcity, the publishing industry will find. That means a lot of people who've found themselves released into the wild over the last year won't be coming back to work in this business–just like most folks laid off in the Valley won't be going back to work at dot-com startups.

In the long run, that may be a good thing. In the short term, it sure doesn't imbue much of a feeling of job security. But. like Pat Green says, I'm still here. I plan on fighting it out where I am for as long as I can, because, honestly, there isn't much of a job market for technology journalists anywhere else, and my pottery isn't selling near well enough to make a living off of .