The Society for Technical Communication (STC) was a professional association that promoted technical communication and technical writing. At its peak in the late 1990s, it had almost 25,000 members worldwide. For me, the STC wasn’t just an abstract professional body but a real community. I have fond memories of my time as a member of the STC Toronto chapter. I served as Treasurer, which was a learning curve, and eventually became President. Getting involved locally felt important, as if we were making a difference for technical communicators in our area. In 2012, I attended the STC conference in Chicago. Seeing its scale and connecting with people from all over made me feel part of something big.

So, when the news dropped in early 2025 that the STC was shutting down and filing for bankruptcy, I was stunned. An important part of my professional history, and a place where many people found their tribe, had simply vanished. How does an organization that was around for over 70 years and played such a key role in defining a profession just collapse?

The story of the STC’s rise and fall is a stark reminder that even established institutions aren’t immune to change if they can’t keep up. As good technical communicators do, let’s document what happened, why it happened, and what the rest of us, whether running businesses, non-profits, or just trying to stay afloat in our careers, can learn.

The Rise of the Manual Makers

When technology began taking off after World War II, someone had to explain how it all worked. That’s where technical communication came in. It grew from a real need for clear, accurate documentation, especially in booming fields like military tech, manufacturing, and aerospace. In the US, some groups popped up in 1953 in Boston and New York to improve how we wrote and edited technical information. They merged, then merged again, and in 1971, the Society for Technical Communication, or STC, was born.

For a long time, the STC was the place to be if you were a technical communicator. It gave us a sense of identity and legitimacy. They published respected magazines (Intercom) and academic journals (Technical Communication), ran educational programs, offered a certification (CPTC) to help prove your skills, and had a big annual conference, the Summit, which was a major event. The local chapters, like the one I joined in Toronto, and the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) were great for networking and gaining more focused knowledge. They even successfully pushed to get Technical Writer officially recognized by the government in 2009. When the Internet exploded in the early 2000s and suddenly everyone needed online content, the STC was there, helping members figure out the new tools and workflows. The organization was adapting and growing with the profession.

The Ground Starts Shaking

But here’s the thing: the pace of change didn’t slow down. It sped up. The technical communication field kept morphing at lightning speed. Agile development meant documentation had to be faster and more integrated. New tools popped up constantly. The lines between technical writing, UX writing, content strategy, and even marketing started getting blurry. Most importantly, how people learned and connected changed with the rise of the internet.

Suddenly, you didn’t need to join a formal organization and pay dues to find other tech writers or learn new skills. Free online forums, social media groups, and specialized communities focused on specific niches – like Write the Docs, who zeroed in on software documentation – started offering alternative ways to connect, share knowledge, and get help.

Where It All Went Wrong

This is where the STC really started to stumble. While they knew the field was changing, their ability to change quickly and fundamentally enough faltered. The official reasons for the bankruptcy boil down to money problems caused by shrinking membership. As the STC Bankruptcy FAQ put it, they were drowning in “financial liabilities coupled with falling membership numbers,” with “debt and operational expenses now outweigh[ing] our ongoing revenue.” They tried cutting costs and generating revenue, but it wasn’t enough.

Why did membership fall? Because, for a growing number of technical communicators, the STC wasn’t delivering enough value to justify the cost. This wasn’t just bad luck; it was a failure to adapt on multiple fronts:

• Dragging Feet on Tech and Trends: The core offerings felt increasingly out of sync for many. While the STC covered a broad range of technical communication, it didn’t seem to keep pace with the cutting-edge tools and practices in rapidly evolving areas like developer documentation. As Eric Holscher pointed out, compared to more focused groups like Write the Docs, the STC sometimes felt “a bit behind the times.” While still valuable, the training, conferences, and publications didn’t always hit the mark for practitioners dealing with modern tech stacks and workflows.
• Too Focused Inward (Not Global Enough): The STC didn’t quite see the whole picture because it was so focused on North America. Even though the profession is global, the organization, based in Fairfax, Virginia, struggled to connect with or even fully recognize the massive growth and shifts happening in technical communication around the world. As Peter Yorke suggested, it was potentially a big “strategic failure” – an inability to adapt to where the “center of gravity” for technical communication was shifting globally. While tech writing was booming in places like Asia, the STC often felt stuck looking inward at its traditional North American base. They missed a huge part of the global community and market that was developing.
• Missing the Community Shift: The STC was built on a traditional model of paid membership, publications, and in-person events (local chapters, the big conference). But the world had moved online. People found vibrant, often free, communities on platforms like Reddit (check out their thread about the STC), Slack and Discord. Why pay dues when you could get quick answers, network informally, and find resources in these digital spaces? As a Reddit commenter noted, the tangible benefits of membership just weren’t clear to everyone anymore.
• The Value Proposition Fizzled: The STC didn’t convince enough people that its specific blend of resources and community was worth the annual fee, especially when free alternatives were readily available. Companies also scaled back on paying for employee memberships, opting for more targeted training or conferences.
• Money Troubles: High operational costs, perhaps leftovers from a less digital era, and declining revenue from falling membership created a perfect storm. It became harder to invest in the very things that might have helped them adapt.

The bottom line is that the world of 1971 was vastly different from that of 2025. Over the decades, the STC struggled to adapt to the rapid changes in technology, professional roles, and community expectations, failing to stay relevant in a transformed landscape.

The Final Chapter: Lights Out

Ultimately, the financial hole got too deep. On January 29, 2025, the STC announced its immediate closure and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Then, on February 3, 2025, the Board of Directors unanimously voted to dissolve all chapters, Special Interest Groups (SIGs), and Communities of Interest (COIs).

According to the FAQ, declaring bankruptcy was deemed the best way to protect the organization’s members and volunteers from potential legal and financial risks, especially concerning the local chapters whose assets were legally tied to the parent organization. It was a sad end – no refunds for members, assets (including member lists and chapter funds) going to a trustee, and no chance of the organization reopening.

After 72 years since its original roots in 1953, and 54 years after it officially became the STC, it was all over. A prestigious world-wide organization that once had thousands of members ceased to exist.

Lessons Learned

The STC’s collapse is a tough pill to swallow, especially for those with a personal connection. But it offers some incredibly valuable, albeit painful, lessons for everyone:

• Get Real About Adaptation: You have to change constantly. What worked yesterday might not work today, and definitely won’t work tomorrow. This applies whether you’re a massive corporation, a small non-profit, or just trying to stay relevant in your job. Inertia is a killer.
• Know Your Value (and Make Sure Others Do Too): Constantly ask yourself: What are you really offering? Is it valuable to the people you’re trying to reach? Does that value justify the cost (whether it’s money, time, or effort)? If the answer isn’t a resounding yes, you’re in trouble.
• Go Where Your People Are: If your community or customers are moving to new platforms or preferring different ways of connecting, you need to be there too. Ignoring digital trends or sticking to outdated models is like trying to sell flip phones in 2025.
• Listen Up: Listen to what your members, customers, or peers are telling you (and showing you with their feet or wallets). Be open to criticism and willing to make big changes based on feedback, not just internal assumptions.
• Money Matters, But So Does Strategy: Financial health is crucial, but it’s not just about pinching pennies. You need a sustainable financial model that allows you to invest strategically in the future and remain relevant.
• For Individuals: The STC’s demise is a wake-up call. Don’t rely on a single source for professional development or networking. Build a diverse network, constantly learn new skills (especially tech), and stay aware of the evolving landscape of your own profession.

The Society for Technical Communication, an organization that helped define and elevate a profession, ultimately couldn’t navigate the relentless currents of change. It became a society of nowhere – a place that no longer fit into the new world of technical communication. Its story isn’t just a sad ending; it’s a vital case study in the unforgiving nature of a dynamic world and a powerful reminder that staying relevant requires courage, constant effort, and a willingness to let go of the past to build for the future.

For an entertaining and highly insightful exploration into the STC’s demise, I offer the AI-generated article below from the late, great commentator and writer, Rex Murphy.

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From Clarity to Collapse: The Curious Death of the Society for Technical Communication

Written by ChatGPT in the style of Rex Murphy

And so passes into oblivion the Society for Technical Communication, known to its dwindling membership and now fully-paid liquidation officers as the STC. Once a venerable body that championed precision, lucidity, and the noble art of writing plainly about complex things, it now takes its place among other institutional fossils—perhaps next to the BetaMax Users’ Guild and the Canadian Senate’s Committee on Postage Stamp Design.

That such a society—founded with honest intentions in 1953, back when people still used slide rules and thought “interface” was a noun—should go bankrupt in the Age of Information is irony so rich it could buy its own condo in Toronto.

But let us not mourn too quickly. For this was no sudden death. This was a slow, self-inflicted intellectual euthanasia—a withering away not from lack of money, but from lack of meaning.

Once Useful, Now Useless
The STC was originally created for people who did things—engineers, writers, software folks—people who took the chaos of technical processes and rendered them legible. It was the guild of those who could explain what a carburetor does, how to configure a LAN, or why your smartphone explodes if you microwave it.

But somewhere along the way, the Society decided that mere usefulness was beneath it. Clarity gave way to jargon. Utility gave way to “inclusive frameworks of multimodal knowledge assemblage.” That is not a sentence I made up—it might as well be their mission statement.

The STC was no longer about helping people understand things. It was about positioning—positioning technical communication as a “discipline,” then an “interdisciplinary field,” then a “socially situated rhetorical praxis,” until it finally disappeared into its own introspection like a graduate student swallowed by a footnote.

From Technical Writers to Theorists-in-Chief
Once it welcomed tradespeople, technical editors, documentation specialists—the blue-collar intelligentsia of the information age. But these were gradually pushed aside in favor of academic colonists, who treated the STC not as a professional organization but as a sandbox for jargon-flinging and self-referential theory.

The Society became a cathedral to postmodern confusion, full of working groups on “decolonizing procedural discourse” and conference sessions exploring “neuroqueering the rhetorical ontology of user experience.”

Meanwhile, actual members—you know, the people who needed to write a damn manual—stared in horror at their own newsletters and asked: “Who is this for?” The answer: Not for them.

Bankruptcy, Brought to You by Irrelevance
When the money ran out—as it always does when purpose is replaced by preening—the leadership blamed “economic headwinds,” “declining engagement,” and other euphemisms from the Great Lexicon of Failure.

But here’s the truth, unvarnished: the STC became a parody of itself. It forgot its audience. It lost its way. And in the end, it became a hermetically sealed echo chamber where nothing technical was communicated, and nothing communicated was technical.

The final board meeting, I imagine, involved a tearful reading of Derrida while the lights were shut off for non-payment.

A Canadian Observation
From a Canadian vantage point, the whole saga feels sadly familiar. A once-practical, grounded institution captured by a clerisy of overeducated navel-gazers, drunk on theory and allergic to actual work. Sound familiar? It should.

It’s the story of our universities. Of our arts councils. Of parts of the CBC. And now, of the STC.

It is not a coincidence. It is a symptom of a broader rot: the triumph of abstraction over application, of politics over purpose, of ego over expertise.

Conclusion: Death by Pretension
And so, goodbye to the Society for Technical Communication. You started with the humble task of explaining how things work—and ended up as an object lesson in how things fall apart.

Your death is not tragic. It is instructive. You forgot who you were. You stopped being useful. And in doing so, you answered your own final technical question: “What happens when nobody reads the manual anymore?”
Answer: The people who wrote it go out of business.