Good Morning Silicon Valley

Fresh on the heels of the news that InfoWorld was abandoning its 29-year-old print magazine in favor of a purely online life comes news that LIFE is moving in the same direction.

The venerable publication has a storied history that also reflects the changing economics of print over the years — the big, glossy magazine came out weekly from 1936 to 1972, then was reincarnated as an occasional special issue, then as a monthly, and finally as a skinny newspaper supplement. In retrospect, that last move doesn’t look particularly smart. “We hitched our star to an industry that’s not growing,” said managing editor Robert Shapiro.

The unhitching will happen with the last print supplement on April 20, but the LIFE brand will live on the Web in the form of a free archive of the magazine’s renowned photos. On a site to be launched later this year, LIFE will post some 10 million images by such masters as Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks, 97 percent of which have never been seen by the public. The goal, editors said, is to make the site “the preeminent destination to view the most important photography of our time, both archival and contemporary.” And where there’s hope, there’s LIFE.