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.