i am going to miss gourmet magazine desperately. conde nast is shutting down gourmet, cookie and modern bride. gourmet! i will especially miss ruth reichl, she has done great things with that title. the layout, the design, her commentary and the great writers she selected as contributors. reading w. hodding carter's extreme frugality posts was always a joy. and so much else. ruth reichl truly amazing, and the recipes were superlative. i am hoping her new tv series, gourmet's adventures with ruth, will still be on pbs. see all about it here. cookie is really cute and always seems to have stylish family friendly lofts and houses on display, wildly creative and colorful. fun. so long friends, you will be missed.
and internet, you are so disruptive to so many businesses. i love you, but you are cruelly changing everything without regard to quality!
p.s. hodding carter has just started a blog to continue his extreme frugality series, also a book in the works. check out the blog here. and ruth's tv series will still arrive next week on pbs. (yay!)
You raise very good points, I agree. I even use Martha Stewart Every Day Food more than those for weekday meals – so good! I rarely buy all of those magazines. Publications also needed to get into the online game more, especially robust, beautifully designed online password-protected content for subscribers.
ReplyDeleteVery upset. Gourmet connected me to my mother & grandmother, but also my great-grandmother. I do buy the magazines...one of my major expenses in an otherwise frugal life (w/flowers, of course:). The internet cannot replace real hold-in-your-hands publications. It just cannot. And yes, too many people are think they can get something for nothing--they can't. Not of quality. I agree about Ruth R. I think the cookbooks will live on. But one thing I said to friend today (also in publishing)...CN definitely could have held onto Gourmet for six issues a year. This has been done & succeeded in other titles. I do think they'll regret many of their decisions of late. They won't cut some of the obscene expense accounts for chief & mging editors of the other titles. They didn't even try.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post & pretty blog.
my favorite cookie magazine is no more..sad..very sad..
ReplyDeletethanks for posting your thoughts/comments dear blog friends. and may i lament, why oh why do magazine companies seem unaware of the digital assets they possess and what to do with them? would it be so much trouble to keep the website going with a bit of fresh content through the current tumult until a new business model becomes a winner? well it is very easy to second guess from where i sit, firmly outside the center of it all. but then, these are desperate times for media consumers. domino. cookie. gourmet. oh my.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a tragedy yet I have have bought less than a dozen copies since Reichl took over. I liked it when it was an oversized magazine, they way it was back in the 80s when I started reading it. Gourmet is an institution and it will be missed.
ReplyDeleteI love the internet but can we please hang on to some of the nice things we grew up with? Newer isn't always synonomous with better.
Sounds not good....sad..
ReplyDelete