Magazine Death Pool

Blender now officially on deathwatch

With parent company Alpha Media Group nearly in the hands of creditors after a mere 15 months after buying Maxim and Blender, it's not hard to see the scrawl on the wall.

I'm sure Rolling Stone or Spin will be picking over the subscription bones to this one.

Blender has been on my watch list earlier, but now it's teetering close to the edge. With ad pages disappearing faster than Elton John's hairline, watered-down editorial, and being a music magazine with no workable web strategy, Blender is the prime candidate to go to join Jimi, Jim, The Big Bopper, Stevie Ray, Richie Valens, Dimebag and Janis in Rock and Roll Heaven. At least there'll be a hell of a band.

RIP: Sport Compact Car, Modified Luxury & Exotics

It's Monday, so it must mean a magazine has been visited by the Reaper. How about two?

The automotive category is beginning to look like the new shelter category.

After sending Turbo magazine to the Reaper last week, Source Interlink went right on to closing Sport Compact Car and Modified Luxury Exotics. Sport Compact Car's web site even saluted those who have fallen.

Like James Dean in his Spyder, this category is heading for a date with yours truly. Live fast, die young!

RIP: Remix magazine

If you are looking for that late Friday magazine death notice today to slip out, well, here it is!

Remix magazine, Penton Media's monthly devoted to urban and electric music production, has programmed its last beat.

The Reaper announces its Merging Titles Name Contest. Submit now!

The Reaper had so much fun writing the last item about DNR and potential Fairchild mergers, that I have been inspired to launch a contest for everybody to participate in that truly reflects these hard times for the publishing industry.

I am asking all of you, my faithful magazine death followers, to come up with the best potential magazine merger titles!

Way back when, I thought Giant was going to merge with Complex to become Giant Complex magazine!

We all need a good laugh in these hard times, so why not start it here at the Reaper joint?

Please see my DNR post for a few examples, but I know you can top those.

THE RULES:

1. The magazines to do not have to be from the same publishing company, but extra points if they are.
2. You can use as many magazines titles to create your new title name.
3. Explain in one sentence what the magazine is about or who it is for.
4. The magazine titles have to be real ones that are still publishing (at least as of today!).
5. Submit your merger title submissions as comments to this post.
6. You can submit as many times as you want.

RIP: DNR

Do you know the Reaper had a weird internal twinge when it saw DNR on its computer this morning? Do you believe in fate? It hit me that there was no need for DNR, Fairchild's men's fashion trade magazine, when they could just slap it into their bigger sister, WWD.

It was perfect! Ingenious!

Why stop the cost cutting there? Fairchild's next move would be to close Footwear News and merge it into Beauty Biz and create a special section devoted to beautiful feet!

Or merge Elegant Bride and Modern Bride into Brides and call it Modern Elegant Brides!

Or the best yet... merge W Magazine with WWD and it would become (drum roll)... WWWD!

RIP: PC Magazine 1982 - 2009

Wi-Fi may survive, but PC Magazine has not.

As recent as July 11th I wrote about this demise: "With a 35.8% ad pages loss in this year's first half, PC Magazine has emerged as a leading candidate for the Reaper's prediction of a computer magazine going under this year." My earlier predictions appeared on May 22nd and in a quite sweeping fashion back on January 17th.

PC Magazine will become a web site only proposition in January 2009, which makes total sense since tech computer and product reviews are the fastest growing, most commonly used areas of the web. Why wait weeks to find out if a Dell computer is slightly faster than one from HP, when you have to buy it now and you don't want to wait?

PC Magazine has a long illustrious history tied in with the rise (and fall) of Ziff Davis Media. At the height of its popularity in the late 90's, PC Magazine appeared bi-weekly thick and full of advertisements. It was Ziff's print cash cow. But like magazine information, the software went through its own evolution and became downloadable and instant. By 2008, there was no reason to have a print magazine devoted to upgrading your PC or evaluating new products. That world had moved entirely to the web.

While this will shake up Silicon Valley and computer nostalgia fans, PC Magazine leads a category that will shrink for the very same reasons.

As you know, the Reaper does all its blog postings on its Die-BM desktop. (sorry, I could not help myself)

RIP: Cottage Living

The shelter magazine category gave up another one to the Reaper today, as Time Inc. closed the doors on Cottage Living.

Cottage Living is notable for all the trade industry awards its won since September 2004. In its short four year of life, the publication got the kiss of death by winning Adweek's 2005 Startup of the Year and appeared on their "little Hot List" in 2006 and 2007 for magazines that made under $50 million in revenue, and Advertising Age's "2005 Launch Worth Watching."

In the end, all those "hot lists" meant nothing against the housing market meltdown.

It's too bad the Reaper doesn't have much of a crib and it certainly doesn't resemble a cottage and there's nobody living down here. Another one bites the dust.

Car magazines put on the endangered species list

Automakers have been pulling their ads out of magazines faster than A-Rod pulled out of Madonna before the tabloids caught him cheating on his wife. Advertising Age proclaims this week that the "death of Detroit would wallop the ad world."

While this has put a huge hurt on magazines, there's one category which will have a hard time escaping the momentum: the automobile category.

Consider the percentages of magazine revenue derived from the automobile industry, as cited in the same Advertising Age article: "24.9% and 19% for Source Interlink's Automobile and Motor Trend, respectively, and 15.7% for Hachette's Car and Driver."

Through the first three quarters of 2008, compared to one year ago, automotive advertising is down 23.6%, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. That's more than any other category they measure.

Next to shelter magazines, this is where we are going to see some Reaper visits over the next six months. These titles will be either merging or the magazine versions will be croaking, giving way to web only properties. Considering how much car shopping research is already done on the Internet, auto magazines are dead ducks.

Even if Uncle Sam bailed out Detroit, the Reaper sees this category as a road to no return. Your father's copies of Car and Driver and Road & Track are going to become collector's items, relics of another era.

The Reaper is sentimental about those oldies about car accidents. Remember Leader of the Pack? Or Teen Angel? Tell Laura I Love Her? They bring a tear to the missing ducts on the Reaper's face. However, there'll be no crawling from the wreckage this time.

RIP, November 2008: Play, the New York Times Sports Magazine

With the New York Times in a neck and neck race with GM to find out who goes bankrupt first, there's some serious fat to chopped.

The quarterly Play magazine, which was nominated for a National Magazine Award, has been defeated.

Award nominations, even award winners, are no match for the Grim Reaper.

Discover cuts its publisher... let the death odds begin

Discover magazine just laid off its publisher and a senior editor, according to FishbowlNY.

When a magazine lays off its publisher and there's no replacement, that is a seriously bad sign. Nobody running the ad sales team at a small magazine publisher?

ODDS OF SURVIVAL: 15%