Magazine Death Pool

Marked for Death: Entertainment Weekly

Time Inc. employees should just take a look at their late-to-the-show neighbors at Conde Nast and what it took them to finally cut down to a normal size. Bloated Conde Nast had to hire McKinsey & Co. to tell them what anybody with common sense could have told them for free over the past five years.

Entertainment Weekly has been losing as much traction as Jennifer Aniston's career. For years, the Reaper circles the building on Avenue of the Americas, taking Cottage Living and Southern Accents, wondering when they'll let go of EW and turn it into the web property it cries out to be.

It's like Kubler-Ross' stages of death, except Time Inc. refuses to move out of the denial phase. Ad pages are plummeting faster than Jon Gosselin's popularity with women. It's thinner than the last photos of I saw of Mischa Barton. Like its Premiere predecessor, it's quickly becoming old news. At least Hachette knew when to call it a wrap. 

What will it take Time Inc. to come to their senses? A knock on the old noggin from the Reaper? Paying out fees to companies like McKinsey?

The Reaper predicts that when EW folds, it will be announced that it will become part of People magazine and its web site.

WWD says that it has "renewed energy under new managing editor Jess Cagle." I'm sure Jess Cagle is a very nice person, but even the well-loved good-looking Leonardo DiCaprio couldn't make the Titanic float again.

Movieline's Hollywood Life: RIP March 2009

Like The Terminator, just when you thought it had taken enough bullets and torture, Movieline's Hollywood Life kept staggering on. Somehow defying gravity, no newsstand to speak of, no buzz to ride on, just fumes. It was the thing that wouldn't die.

Until now.

It's time for your close-up, Hollywood Life.

When it was Movieline, it was one of the finest movie magazines ever, with the best and most clever journalists and writers. As staff left, it became irrelevant, even changing the name made it a prime candidate for the nail salon piles.

Since Magazine Death Pool appeared, Hollywood Life has provoked some of the strongest reactions at the mere mention of its name. We've predicted its demise many times over and the comments inevitably followed.

Tango beat it in a "race to the death." We had it pegged as far back as May 2006, but Premiere made it down here first.

In April 2006, one letter the Reaper published summed it up best: "For years, I subscribed to Movieline magazine. Then, they overhauled it, changed the name to Movieline's Hollywood Life, and totally screwed it up, changing it from a movie lover's magazine to just another fluffy, stupid, fashion & celebrities magazine. I loathed it, and immediately cancelled my subscription."

The letters the Reaper received tonight were practically salivating...

 "The website hollywoodlife.net will remain for the time being and Anne will still have here Hollywood Life awards shows/parties. The new owners are re-launching Movieline, but only as a website, with the guys from Defamer."

"FYI, the rag once known as Movieline, later Hollywood Strife - er, Life - has finally ceased publication. Buhbye!"

The Reaper has finally let the credits roll on Hollywood Life. Let the fan comments begin!

P.S. No animals were hurt or injured in the making of this blog post.

"We are open forever," says Radar's Maer Roshan

Those are words to live, uh, die by. The NY Observer has the latest soap opera that is Radar magazine, but the Reaper would like to add a couple of points of its own.

* Departing Radar president Fred Poust was hired to sell ads, because that was his background at Time Inc.

* If the magazine has enough money "to stay put for a year," what happens after that? If Radar is "open forever," it'll probably be as a web-only entity, which has been suggested by just about everybody since it started publishing again.

* It does not make a difference if Ana Marie Cox contributes or Bryan Burroughs jumps ship from Vanity Fair, as long as they keep putting their biggest stories on their web site. Why buy the magazine?

* There are "52" full-time employees at Radar? That is pretty enormous for a magazine that does not even have 200,000 circulation yet. Oh, I think they were also counting the maintenance staff in that number too.

* How many art directors does it take to design Radar? I've lost count. It's been redesigned more times than the faces of "The Real Housewives of NYC." Could you imagine working at a media buying agency and being presented a new Radar redesign every few issues?

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.