By Michelle Bruno
Exhibition professionals around the country are feeling a range of emotions in reaction to last week’s abrupt closing of Tradeshow Week (TSW), the venerable godmother of trade publications for the industry. Some are reminiscing about the first issues they ever laid eyes on and others will no doubt remember where they were when they heard the grim news. There are also those who saw it coming. “Thin issues, little advertising, lackluster editorial, worn out business model,” are the descriptions used by those nonplussed with the weekly’s passing. No matter. The deed is done and yet another handful of dedicated journalists, salespeople and researchers are headed to the unemployment line wondering what happened and what now?

Chris Brown, executive vice president, conventions and business operations at the National Association of Broadcasters, is one of those sorry to see Tradeshow Week go. “TSW was a trusted and long-time resource for the industry. There will certainly be a void with respect to their data and research services with products like the Tradeshow Week 200, the TSW Data Book and their custom research services. They also did some other very nice things, including recognizing folks in our industry. There were some terrific people behind the publication—folks that not only reported on our business, but were also part of it,” he says.

There are those with frank criticisms of the publication. “To be honest, the demise of TSW was in the works for a long time and I suppose Reed propped them up longer than they would have another publication due to their crossover into exhibitions. They reportedly had 4,000 subscribers in 2000. That number dropped significantly over the years and the ad revenue dried up. Recent issues felt more like a brochure and half of it was the calendar. Though there were good people at TSW, their editorial content in general had diminished and they took a more salacious, less educated, and less researched view of industry issues,” commented one observer.

Still, Tradeshow Week filled an important niche when it started. Tom Corcoran, principal of Corcoran Expositions, remembers passing the yellow-colored missive around the office. “The newsletter would arrive with the latest news and was so popular that our single copy of Tradeshow Week was routed through more than two dozen people in the office, which was common place most everywhere. Whatever Tradeshow Week was writing about, we were all talking about,” he recalls.

As a vendor, Skip Cox, president of Exhibit Surveys, relied on the statistics and data gathered by TSW researchers. “Looking back it added some legitimacy to the tradeshow industry, if for no other reason than our industry was big enough to have someone report on shows. More than that, it became the primary source of data about the size of our industry. The industry was very fragmented and it was difficult to get any sense of total size, but at least we had a sense of how big the shows were based on attendance, square footage and number of exhibitor stats. We used that information to identify the shows to whom we wanted to market our services,” Cox says.

Some are left asking what killed Tradeshow Week. Lisa Goell Sinicki, a freelance writer who has seen other publications come and go over the years, speculates that the Internet may be partially to blame. “When I started in the industry in the late 1970s, we depended on Tradeshow Week. Its weekly format was the only way to get fairly recent news. But then came the Internet, which gave us news on a daily basis. Tradeshow Week had to compete against every other publication for relevance and survival. Unfortunately it lost,” she explains. Steven Hacker, president of the International Association of Exhibitions and Events (IAEE) observed “Clearly the TSW business model did not withstand the underlying changes that have reshaped the publications industry in the last decade.”

Some features of Tradeshow Week will be difficult to replace in the short-term according to Francis Friedman, president, Time & Place Strategies. “This detailed resource base, industry perspective, and editorial knowledge cannot be easily replicated by other publishers in the industry. It will take at least five years of work by another publisher entering this same daily publication space to build a large enough base of data and information to begin to replace the depth of Tradeshow Week editorial expertise. I believe our industry needs an engaged and ongoing editorial product to keep track of news, trends, stories and personnel changes and movements,” he comments.

The online realm is part of the answer says Jason McGraw, InfoComm’s senior vice president of expositions. “It seems to me that TSW should continue as an online-only publication with regular news flashes via e-mail as the need arises. The Tradeshow Week Data Book to me is still a valued publication, but it could also be online. I think this is a story of the publications industry in general. Many publications across many industries are failing financially and making the shift to online is critical. Like trade shows, ‘pubs’ need to find a way to engage their readers in a more meaningful way. Perhaps setting up shop in the social media realm is the next chapter for trade publications to thrive.”

So, what about social media? Mike McCurry, strategic account manager for Experient, believes that it figures prominently into the future of trade publications. “I believe the closure of Tradeshow Week [and others] is a clear signal that reader and advertiser needs have changed. While, in my opinion, there is still a place for print news media, the problem with the business as a whole is that it can’t compete with online news media channels. There is another important change in readers’ behaviors. They now believe it is as important to share thoughts and opinions on the stories out there, at a peer level, as it is to receive the original news clip. Call it News 2.0 if you will, as the influence of social media thinking is changing the way readers prefer to receive and respond to current events,” he says.

Tradeshow Week was a one-time leader, a trusted resource and a friend. Some say it was an institution. In the new media world however, it was unable to keep pace. There are those who wonder whether the publication’s demise signals the beginning of a greater upheaval in the trade show industry or merely exemplifies the realities of capitalism. Tradeshow Week had a fine reputation in its day—some say right to the very end. It is no doubt difficult to remain at the top of the leader board, to deliver an excellent product week after week, and adapt to a changing media environment no matter who is paying the bills. What comes next may be a new media hybrid delivering relevant and timely content under an entirely different business model. It is said that when one door closes, another one opens. Although it may be a browser window instead of a door, hopefully the former Tradeshow Week employees see it the same way.