After bidding farewell to Mary Englebreit’s Home Companion, I just received a postcard telling me I can kiss my Cottage Living goodbye too. You can read about the shuttering of this relatively successful shelter mag and the struggles of the rest of them here.
According to the postcard, the rest of my subscription is going to be replaced with Southern Accents. Sigh. I’m not terribly fond of Southern Accents, which is kind of like Southern Living (which I do like) on steriods. Think Coastal Living or Traditional Home, magazines I ditched a long time ago because the homes they featured were just too fancy for real people. Too much pink satin and lime green taffeta and not a flea marketing or junking feature to be found. No, I’m a Country Home, Country Living, Southern Living kind of gal–magazines that are also struggling for ad revenue (yes, the recent issues have been a little thin). Hang on guys, you can make it through this recession. I know you can!
mary’s gone, too. oh, drat. : (
How disappointing! I’m afraid for the future of magazines in the same way I worry about all these closing newspapers and tettering publishing houses. It’s not that the world has stopped reading, it’s that it’s too expensive to produce.
Save all your magazines. Your grandchildren may look at them in the same way we now look at manual typewriters and fountain pens – as quaint collectibles.
Oh my.
Hi, I am going through withdrawals with many of my favorite magazines going unpublished! I like the same ones that you do! Country Home and Country Gardens are still going, I hope…..Cindi
The company I last worked for was also owned by Oxmoor House (an imprint of Time), publishers of many of the titles you mention. I have to say, the last two years felt a lot like walking a very narrow, very crowded plank.
The problem however, wasn’t that our titles were expensive to produce (they were, and they always had been), but rather our inability as an industry to get in front of the market as that market became more and more driven by the Internet.
Publishing suffers many of the same ills as the music industry–among them, monogamous marriage to an outdated delivery system. It’s a complicated situation that hasn’t been helped by the current economic situation.
I don’t think magazines will entirely disappear, though, any more than I think Internet and electronic publishing will replace real, hold-in-your-hands, paper books. More than that, I do not know. If I did, I might still have a job there.
I was so upset that I could not find my most favorite magazine, was not on the shelves. then I-was going to try to subsripe to it, no way…
I hope we get through this recession quickly. our prayers to us all. Nora
I can’t stand it that I won’t be getting a magazine off the rack . I pray we get through this soon!
Nora