Musings on the Death of Gourmet

My husband loves to cook and is good at it. Our pantry is full of cookbooks and cooking magazines. Taking up increasing amounts of space, though, are loose sheets of paper—recipes he has printed off the Internet. Why dig through a stack of magazines looking for sweet potato enchiladas (yum!) when all he has to do is Google it?

That is one simplistic explanation for the death this week of Gourmet, after 68 years of publishing. (The magazine was even older than me!) Gourmet was a lush publication offering foodies a major shot of recipes, menus, back stories, and escape from normalcy.

Normalcy, though, has become a fight for many Americans. Just keeping up with mortgage, insurance, and day-to-day costs keeps readers in this recession-stunned country focused on more banal issues than lunch at Berkeley, California’s Chez Panisse. We now eat at Chez Ramen Noodles.

The San Jose Mercury News reports that one of the restaurants featured in Gourmet’s October cover story, The French Laundry in Yountville, California http://www.frenchlaundry.com/, will cause serious damage to your budget--$264 for dinner for one, a single drink, and a tip.

Still, 978,000 print readers remained loyal to Gourmet. I would argue that, in this recession, the only access most readers have to such pricey dining is through their magazines. Magazines have long provided a fantasy function for readers.

Why kill a magazine that still has enough readers to create their own sizable city? Advertisers. Conde Nast has lost 8,000 ad pages so far this year.

So, we have several problems here, all part of a cockamamie magazine business model:

1. Publishers remain dependent on advertisers who really could care less about a title beyond its reputed appeal to buyers of their products rather than on readers of the magazine who are committed and loyal.

Early in their history, magazines were supported entirely by readers—advertising was a byproduct of the industrial revolution. Perhaps it is time for more daring publishers to ask readers to pay more, thus allowing them to get off the advertising dole. Well, it’s been time for that for a few decades.

2. Publishers who give away valuable content on the Internet. That cat is so far out of the bag that getting him back is going to cause of few folks to get their editorial hands seriously scratched. It might be time, though, to suffer a few wounds rather than cutting their hands off completely. Check out Gourmet's free recipes online.

3. Out-of-control executive pay and profit margins. As in other industries, the multi-million dollar salaries of CEOs and publishers continues, while the worker bees face job losses and pay cuts.