Magazine Death Pool

Nickelodeon magazine: RIP June 2009

Not a good week for the youth of our country after yesterday's croaking of Children's Digest.

The Reaper had this one pegged over one year ago as a prime death candidate. Losing ad pages as fast as doody jokes on a Rugrats episode, the real question is why did it take Viacom so long to put this one out of its misery? Little brother Nick Jr. got the juice two years ago.

Didn't the Nickelodeon network get it? Kids were too busy drooling over iCarly and her other jailbait friends and getting their first "tentpoles" to read magazines!

Children's Digest: RIP June 2009

The Children's Better Health Institute took the Reaper's advice that kids are too smart for their own good and sent their magazine Children's Digest upstairs without any dinner... permanently.

Known for its hard-hitting investigative pieces on such topics as bananas, understanding your brain, and gravity, Children's Digest will be mourned by 6th graders everywhere.

RIP: "Disney Adventures" August 2007

Yo ho ho, me bucco's! We're here aboard our fair dark ship taking the Disney marketing, whoops, magazine Adventures on the ride down to the end of the world. The 15 men on a dead men's chest may be the number of Disney employees unfortunately out of a job now that Adventures has met its watery fate.

If you've read about the phenomenal hype machine that is Disney TV and radio, High School Musical 2, The Jonas Brothers and Hannah Montana, and the huge bucks all of this stuff rakes in, why would you need an antiquated marketing device like a pocket-sized magazine to be found on newsstands?

RIP: Nick Jr. magazine

School's out, baby! There was once a time when cable networks thought extending their brand into print was "the natural thing to do." You had your ESPN The Magazine and Nickelodeon Magazine, and even Nick Jr. for the tykes.

But then 10 years later, and you'd have to have your head examined to be a network launching a branded magazine. Lifetime and Hearst learned that the hard way last year.

Nick Jr. was for the Blue's Clues set and more practical and less corporately heavy-handed as its big sister. It may be a sad commentary that there are less kids reading magazines, and more of them piling into Club Penguin and Webkinz.

So we're taking Dora The Explorer and her friends, with permission notes from their mothers, on a class trip. A boat ride, you see, a long dark one....