It was announced Thursday that Editor & Publisher will cease to exist — both in print and online — at the end of the month. While I admit I almost never read the print publication, I’ve been reading it online for a few years now. And I’m sad to see it go. Another bastion of the publishing industry, wiped out.
Editor & Publisher, a newspaper trade publication, has a 125-year history dating back to 1884. The online component was expected to survive either a sale or the closing of the print version, so the move came as a shock to editor Greg Mitchell and his employees, according to the New York Times.
The title wasn’t included in parent company Nielsen’s sale of some of its properties — Adweek, Mediaweek, Brandweek, Film Journal International, Backstage, The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard — to a new company called e5 Global Media. In addition to Editor & Publisher, book-review mag Kirkus Reviews is also being shuttered at the end of December.
Sadly, one website is chronicling a lot of the print title closures — the appropriately named Magazine Death Pool. Although the Grim Reaper doesn’t seem to cover the death of trade pubs, perhaps this one warrants his coverage.
The publishing industry has been particularly hard-hit by the economic downturn of the last few years, as ad sales and readers declined. As someone who has been a writer, editor and copy editor in both the newspaper and magazine areas, I’m hopeful the contraction period is almost ended, and the reorganization and rebuilding portion of the recovery is on its way. We’ve already lost too many good titles (here’s looking at you, Gourmet).
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