Conde Nast: Shifting from Print to the Internet
The culinary compass of adventurous North American home cooks for almost 70 years, Gourmet Magazine, is folding.
Condé Nast Publications announced Monday it is closing down Gourmet along with three other money-losing titles, Elegant Bride, Modern Bride, and parenting magazine Cookie. To blame? Declining ad revenue.
Gourmet has just under a million subscribers. Its last issue will be November 2009.
Editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl tweeted hours after the announcement: “Sorry not to be posting now, but I’m packing. We’re all stunned.”
Founded in 1941 as “the magazine of good living,” Gourmet encouraged North Americans to move away from condensed soup casseroles to such novelties as pesto, hand-rolled pasta and heirloom vegetables through approachable recipes and mouth-watering color photographs.
Monthly subscribers joined dinner clubs to take turns preparing boozy theme dinners. Writer Judith Moore remembers “gourmania” sweeping her Oregon college town in the 1970s as adventurous gourmets strove to outdo each other with Greek or Provençal menus, complete with home-butchered rabbit.
Now there are rumors (Financial Times, and others) that Time Inc and Conde Nast are in talks to build something like an Apple iTunes (or is it a Hulu?) for journalism. Whoa!? I have only been talking about this for the past 2 years. I saw it coming, and it is coming.
From the FT:
The new service, as yet unnamed, would serve as a digital storefront for magazines, possibly newspapers and other publications and is expected to be announced in about a month. The launch is planned for 2010, people familiar with the plan said…
The business would be structured like Hulu, a popular online video service formed by NBC Universal, News Corp and Disney. Founding publishers are expected to take equity stakes in the new entity and the venture will be financed by its partners. Details of the arrangement have not been finalised, these people said.
The article is clear to point out that the publishers see this move as an effort to keep an outside company from creating a store of paid journalism that dominates the industry, like Apple iTunes has done for music. It’s a notable move, but it’s hardly surprising. Publishers sound like they’re rallying around the idea of paid content online — Rupert Murdoch is getting bullish on the point — and the best way to get people to pay for something they consider near-free is to bundle diverse content and convince readers they’re getting a deal.
But to make this idea work will require somebody to flip a switch on numerous websites to make them inaccessible to non-payers overnight. The more free content they leave on their sites, the less impetus readers will have to pay through this new Hulu platform. This shift will also bring new social networks and online user generated communities, as readers expect a way to contribute, and join the conversation.
