ST Informer
"Keep on Keepin' On"
ST Informer was a somewhat unique magazine for the Atari ST as it was first published in the size of a tabloid newspaper. Published by Rod McDonald, it premiered in May 1987 and ended its run in May 1996 after 97 issues.
I used to have a very large collection of ST Informer magazines, but they were lost. Now I only have a few issues that I’ve picked up on eBay over the years:
Number 53: November 1991
Number 55: January 1992
Number 70: April 1993
Number 71: May 1993
Number 77: November 1993
Number 80: February 1994
Number 93: July 1995
Having only 7 issues makes me sad, but it’s better than none!
Of these, Number 53 is the only one I have in the tabloid newspaper format. This style for a magazine was strange, but also fun. It did have a feel of “Atari news” that other magazines didn’t have and I presume this type of format was quicker to publish as ST Informer would often have information before the fancier magazines did.
Since each page in this format was much larger than a typical magazine, there were fewer overall pages, typically about 40. The large size did make it harder to read, though. And the newsprint meant that the paper faded and yellowed quickly and was not all that durable.
Unlike other magazines, ST Informer did not publish its own programs. There was an accompanying public domain disk, highlighted in the Public Domain Watch column. There would be several hand-picked ST programs on the disk and the article will briefly discuss them.
It looks like ST Informer was able to keep a monthly cadence for its entire production run, with the exception of May/June 1993, a remarkable achievement!
Published monthly, the cost was originally $19.95 per year (about $46 in 2024, or about the same as a Goto 10 subscription). A disk subscription was $55.95. By the end of its run, a subscription was $22 per year with a disk subscription at $61 per year.
Starting with the January 1992 issue (Number 55), ST Informer switched from its tabloid newspaper size to a standard magazine size, but it kept using a lower quality newsprint paper for the pages. Since this was a smaller size, the page count increased to 70 pages or so, slowly dwindling down to about 48 pages in the final issue.
ST Informer was also affiliated with A&D Software, perhaps most known as the publishers of Universal Item Selector, the most popular replacement file selector for the Atari ST.
There is a large collection of archived PDFs of ST Informer issues here:
Not all issues are available, but there are a lot to look at.
Now let’s take a look at a few specific issues, including the November 1991 (Number 53) issue in more detail…