With a heavy heart, I, and the entire media world, report that the truffle of a magazine, Gourmet, The Magazine of Good Living and food porn, has succumbed to the tragic, yet predicted, fate of most big-budget print publications. Keeping with past and current market trends (the previous losses of Portfolio, Mogue and even popularity queen Domino), the outcome should have been obvious, but, after years of Gourmet’s consistent servitude on my mother’s coffee table and my own skepticism towards glossy print, I must admit, that even I was shocked. I’m not going to go into the economic downturn blahblahblah, but suffice it to say that it wasn’t that the magazine wasn’t widely subscribed to; Its overall profitability was called into question after it failed to produce adequate advertising revenues. Gourmet Magazine, we barely knew ye.
With the popularity of DVR and Firefox no-ad plugins, today’s users, movers and shakers don’t need to look at advertisements they don’t want to see. To pace and outwit the new and improved cynical and savvy consumer of today, advertising has gone forward with digital, viral, and subliminal methods. In short, ads are progressing with smarter, more efficient ways of getting into the psyche, which no longer include increasingly-dated print (see: kindle).
The New York Times said it best when they observed, “The age of the big, bold new magazine to fill a hole in the printed marketplace is over. Publishers will now spend their days cutting costs at remaining titles to compete in a new world of commoditized advertising, no matter how luxurious the context, doing battle against digital upstarts that have none of the legacy costs of traditional publishers. Older titles need to justify their existence, and new ones? There may not be any.”
As much as I would love it to be, now is not the time for nostalgia, but for embracing the future and all the possibility that lay ahead. Dry those tears; For the moment, print still has a place in advertising and journalism. But the inevitable fall of this 68 year old juggernaut is enough to get one pondering: Where, if anywhere, has the print-journalism-as-entertainment industry gone wrong? Did it run its natural course? What is the future of advertising? What lies ahead for print?
I, for one, am not adverse to finding the answers over Greek-Spiced Lamb Chops with Creamy Dill Spinach and an old copy of the magazine. However, don’t be surprised if all we end up with is question mark tea and speculation krumpets. Gourmet Magazine was too beautiful for this world. RIP, Gourmet.
