Magazine Death Pool

Which Magazine Goes Next? Cast Your Vote Now

Below are some of the prime candidates for magazines to kick the bucket next. What you have to do is go to the comment section and cast your vote, and explain why you think this magazine must go.


SOUND & VISION: Hachette's Jack "Swing The Hatchet" Kliger is in a busy mood these days. How many HD TV and DVD audio geeks are there to support this magazine? This magazine seems as viable as Stereo Review and Audio magazines -- and you know where those guys are now.

JANE: Without founder and namesake Jane Pratt, this pioneering young woman's title seems to be losing its way under Brandon Holley. Advertisers have pulled out in droves, shedding 21% in 2006. No buzz. Will Jane without Jane go down the drain?

BUSINESS 2.0: Not dropping ad ad pages like Fast Company, but you do have to wonder in this day and age of Time inc. slicing everything that is not making money, how much longer this respected yet  inferiority-complexed  title will be around?

HOLLYWOOD LIFE: Come and get it! You know who you are! Everybody's favorite whipping boy here on the River Styx. This publication is right up there in the "how does the magazine still get published" category.

US NEWS & WORLD REPORT: #3 title in a seriously hurting category of newsweeklies. The editor in chief quits. You wonder how much they're giving the ad pages away and how much circ is dentist's office filler. Is it even essential?

                            HOME or HOUSE BEAUTIFUL:
  Take your pick. Symbols of the 
                             troubled shelter category.

FAST COMPANY: Dated artifact. I can't remember the last time this magazine had an up month in pages. Down 13.5% in 2006. Mansueto deserves a medal to still be sinking money into this title at this point in time.

QUICK & SIMPLE: This must be Hearst's biggest money pit at the moment -- publishing a weekly must cost a fortune.  Last May, WWD reported a 20% sell-through rate and that ain't gonna cut it for a supermarket checkout title.

FORTUNE SMALL BUSINESS: Another title looking primed for the Ann Moore battle axe. Looks like a typical business magazine offshoot created to scoop up some extra ad dollars in the past, now just existing to exist.

You Can't Read The Web While Sitting On The Toilet... Yet

Look, folks -- you can bring your wireless laptop into the john if you'd rather surf the web than read magazines. But let's face it, it's rather awkward and you kind of have to do a balancing act on your upper legs and knees.

You'd rather have a stack of magazines right there to plow through. This may be the only room in the house where magazines will thrive.

What a business model to save publishing: supplying magazines for toilet stalls in apartments, dorms, and homes worldwide. You have a captive audience intensely focusing on the content who do not want anybody to distract them. Vans and trucks come and replenish the supply with a new stack on a weekly basis.

Hey, this is the Reaper's business plan, so if you decide to use it, I want 5% of the royalty cut!

Other places where it is still more convenient to read magazines than take out a laptop: the nail salon, the waiting room for the doctor or dentist, relaxing in a hammock, and sunbathing at the beach.

Child Magazine: RIP March 2007

No spring break this week for the Reaper.

Child magazine, which has been one of the mainstays of the very large parenting category, was visited by the Reaper today. Granted, Child is not as sexy as People or US Weekly or Vogue or Vanity Fair. But its closing does portend some rather ominous signs.

When was the last time time you heard of a major parenting magazine closing?

The parenting category has been Teflon for a very long time. As long as there were booming amounts of new parents, there would be no shortage of advice these magazines would dole out.

Child had repositioned itself as an affluent parenting magazine not long ago, perhaps anticipating the arrival of Cookie magazine, and to a lesser extent, Wondertime.  But the  magazine's DNA is with the very middle American Meredith Corporation, who is not used to marketing to the affluent. So while the price tickets on the items were high in the magazine, it was still a middle America designed product.

The very well-funded, designed and editorially sound Cookie appeared, kicked butt with its Conde Nast/Fairchild pedigree, and started making some big inroads.  Child was losing advertising for quite a while and then boom, Meredith pulled the plug.

Not long ago, the Los Angeles Times printed an article that stated moms were slowly abandoning the Today show and other morning programs for the immediacy of web sites and blogs. The closing of Child may be a reflection of that change, but it also may be a sign of things to come in this category, as well as the aging Seven Sisters.

Child was a class act, but we're going to kill two birds with one stone, so I'm trying to take every Kidz Bop album ever made with me too. You want your kids to like Sly & the Family Stone's "Stand" or Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars?" Buy the originals!

Infoworld: RIP 1978 - 2007

It's a two for one sale here on the River Styx, and with that you get a free soft drink.

As of April 2nd, IDG's IT magazine Infoworld is going to exist only online and in events. Because let's face it, if you are selling some kind of router, widget or motherboard, the straightest line to an IT geek is on the web.

Reading Infoworld makes the Reaper's eyes glaze over and let me tell you, it's hard getting network help all the way down here. IT guys charge an arm and a leg to make house calls for the Reaper's network, so now I'm just going to have to peruse the back issues of the Infoworld archive and do it myself. Wish me luck.

Life Magazine: RIP Again March 2007

Can't say I did not warn you last September with an odds of survival rate of 10%.

If you are a Sunday newspaper reader, between the piles and piles of Best Buy brochures and shopping coupon inserts, you may have happened to have found a thin Sunday weekly called Life magazine.

With two stalwarts already stuffed in Sunday papers -- Parade and USA Weekend -- Life was last to the game and never really caught traction. It lost tons of money, which is never good if you are part of Time Inc. nowadays.

Frankly, when you are closing a title, I do not understand why in the same memo, Time Inc. president Ann Moore says: "LIFE enjoyed strong consumer support. Research showed readers consistently placed it above its competitors in terms of quality edit and photography." I guess she had to say something nice because "quality edit and photography" doesn't make a business.

So down it goes, one more time, and who knows when it will rear its head again when it's convenient for Time Inc.?

Most Things In Entertainment Weekly Are On The Web

This is an exercise in cynicism. I am going to show all of you -- on the heels of Premiere closing its doors -- why the very same thing could happen to Entertainment Weekly.

Granted -- we all like the feel of magazines, and you can read them in the nail place or sitting in the dentist's waiting room. You don't bring a laptop to any of those two places.

But this is Reaperland, folks, we're going to play Devil's advocate. We're going to go through the March 18th issue and point out the same stuff that can be found on the web, if it isn't old news already by the time you actually get the issue.

Is the new issue of Entertainment Weekly solely going to make you rush out to see a movie, buy a CD or read a book if you've read about it many times before? Like Premiere, is it a concept that peaked and heading towards obsolescence?

• BEHIND THE SCENES DRAMA AT "GREY'S ANATOMY" (page 7): All the anti-gay hysterics of actor Isaiah Washington rocketed through the web via the People.com and the Associated Press stories picked up online everywhere like this, then salary disputes, and bickering over Kate Walsh's proposed spin-off. By the time you receive the March 16th issue, this is all in the rear-view mirror and you'd have to be living under a rock with no Internet connection not to know about this.
• BRINGING BRITNEY BACK (page 10): Even Spin.com had this story of Timbaland wanting to help the buzzcut singer at least 10 days before this issue of EW.
• MONITOR (page 18 and 19): Celebs and dealmakers who were married, re-signed, exec shuffle, courts, fined, buried, and deaths. Old news and more old news, all over the web.
• INTERVIEW WITH ANDY RICHTER (page 21): Richter did a zillion interviews that can be found online to plug his show, so congrats to NBC's PR department.
• COVER STORY ON "UGLY BETTY" (page 28): Like any popular TV show, there are five million blogs that go over every piece of gossip and dissect each episode with a fine tooth comb.
• LILY ALLEN INTERVIEW (page 40): So she cusses up a storm and looks cute. The UK press has been mobbing her for quite a while, but if you just want to stick to US press, Pitchfork spoke to her in November 2006. What? Too early, you say? Rhapsody has an interview you can download!
• MOVIE REVIEWS (page 45): One visit to Rotten Tomatoes and you can read every review posted on the web in one fell swoop the day a movie opens up.
• DVD REVIEWS (page 55): A dime a dozen with all the DVD geeks on the web, but you can start with DVDTalk.com, then go to DVDAuthority.com, hop to the wonderful DVDJournal.com, and end with the niche-y DVDReview.com. Most of these sites post their reviews the day or week the product appears.
• TV REVIEWS (page 59) and WHAT TO WATCH (page 63): Couch potatoes rules online! You've got posting their reviews on, where else, TV.com... or run through them by clicking through at Metacritic.com... or visit the review of just about any established newspaper critic on their official paper's web site... or go to one of their blogs like TVBarn.com.
• CD REVIEWS (page 67): A nice broad spectrum of links to music critic postings can be found at the reliable MetaCritic. For the latest in alterna-crud writings, there's the much mocked yet visited Pitchfork. And if you're fixated on the charts, Billboard handily posts theirs 24/7.
• BOOK REVIEWS (Page 71): EW may be one of the last strongholds of this dying art, as newspapers give very short space to book reviews, and separate book sections are almost nil. But there is -- as always -- MetaCritic.
• STEPHEN KING (Page 78): It's nice to see Mr. King keeping his ramblings to one page for a change. His infrequently updated web site has a few things worth checking out too, like what he's watching and reading -- stuff that he talks about in his EW column.

My Proposed Theory: Why Entertainment Weekly May Be Doomed

I hate to be the party pooper -- and being the Reaper, it's hard not to escape that role -- but I've thought long and hard about my Premiere eulogy, pondering whether Entertainment Weekly should be nervous.

I've decided that very shortly, I will show why any pop culture freak can get much of what is in Entertainment Weekly on the web, so why buy the magazine? I know this is going to get the people at Time inc. all worked up, sweaty and sending their PR people scouring for the culprit (be prepared for sub-zero temperatures, my friends). I know, it's terrible to be saying these things.

Now, I am not saying Entertainment Weekly is a bad magazine deserving to have its tires slashed. Oh, it's a good magazine -- used to be better -- now, I'm not quite sure you'd call it essential.

I look at Premiere, and I look at Entertainment Weekly, and I look at Premiere, and I look at Entertainment Weekly, and it's a fairly short jump to the same reasons why they may have both outlived their usefulness in this day and age.

We'll be back shortly to discuss our thesis.

Official Playstation Magazine: RIP January 2007

Sorry to let this one slip by, but I received a nice e-mail reminding me that Ziff-Davis pulled the plug on this one back in November 2006 with the January 2007 issue being its last. Must have been while I was vacationing in the Caribbean getting a little Grim Reaper tan.

Ziff-Davis has been on a tear closing their own magazines, representing the biggest game consoles -- Xbox360 and the even bigger Playstation, leaving a completely wide berth for Future US, Inc. to take over the print field.

Ziff had to pull the plug on these magazines because it was losing its collective shirt with lost advertising and their core audience taking their business online. So you've got to be where those trigger happy young men and women are, right? Off with the Playstation magazine's head, interestingly enough just as Playstation 3 was trying to get some launch traction on US shores. 

Premiere Magazine: RIP 1987 - 2007

The final reel has arrived for Premiere magazine. Hachette has found no buyers, so as the Reaper was waiting at the door, it was time to come and take it.

In its golden era in the 1980's, Premiere was THE buzzed-about movie magazine -- glossy, sexy, juicy. Great writers launched their careers from Premiere. This was THE movie fanatic's bible.

Fast forward more than 20 years later and Premiere is a classic case to become a guest on the Reaper's boat: a million movie gossip sites, and blogs posting photos of celebs before they even get to put their makeup on (!).  Movie companies looking to push their latest dreck or DVD preferred plastering those web sites and blogs with ads for a fast rush of buyers. It even made more sense to advertise on the radio to capture the compulsive buyers of movie tickets and DVD's (that is, if they weren't downloading bootleg copies in the first place). Premiere became obsolete.

We've discussed the impending demise of Premiere before, and it still bring up that question which seems to bring about lots of comments here -- if Premiere folds, how in God's name does Movieline's Hollywood Life still exist?

Of course, the Premiere folding announcement has the inevitable "we'll keep premiere.com and Premiere Mobile" going -- Hachette should. This is a well-known name brand for a great on line area and they should be able to scoop up some money if they really do it right and it's not just lip service.

But this is about magazines, isn't it? Great ones that have somehow outlived their usefulness, and Premiere is a classic example of that. So we're riding Premiere off into the sunset -- and thank goodness it's dark down here because it makes spectacular film viewing.

UPDATE: As predicted, one mention of "Movieline's Hollywood Life" and bam, instant venomous comments appear! There is no other magazine that seems to inspire such hatred on this blog as this publication, that I'm beginning to think is the cause behind cancer, the War between the States, 9/11 and bacterial tooth decay.

MORE THOUGHTS: With a general movie magazine meeting its demise because of the changing technology and media habits, what does the future abode for Entertainment Weekly?

Cracked: RIP 1958 - 2007

If you think reviving Radar a third time is quixotic, then think about the recent and very short revival of humor magazine Cracked. The magazine hadn't published in a year and a half (probably for a very good reason), lawyer/entrepreneur Monty Sarhan buys it and publishes it.

Now after three issues, the last laugh is unfortunately on Monty.

Clearly aimed at the older than Mad crowd this time, so I'm guessing 18-34, the magazine had less of a chance of making it than David Pecker's remaining tenure at AMI.

Because that exact audience wants its humor online, so they can pass it on to their friends and have a good laugh around the office cubicle. Who would buy a comedy magazine from the newsstand at this point in time? They can go to collegehumor.com and get it all right there!

Monty, Monty -- you should have listened to your friends. Now you've got to "come on down" with the Reaper!

So the print edition folds -- a noble but misguided folly -- and all that's left is the web site cracked.com -- which is what Monty should have been investing in in the first place.

I've decided to hire Sylvester P. Smythe as "the official janitor of the River Styx" because some of these magazines like FHM and Shock have left a real mess at the bottom of my boat.