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.

Do Magazines Have a Future?

Patricia Prijatel blogged about this issue last March in her other blog, PEP Talks:

In this current economic mess, I have often thought about how our over-consumption has caused us such grief. Yet, that consumerism is what drives many magazines, so it is a little difficult to be too critical of spending patterns that keep our careers going. Still, moderation is a good thing, and I hope we have learned that overbuilding and overspending have serious consequences.

We see more and more green products advertised, so that gives me hope for the industry and society as a whole. How nice it is to be supported by products that do good.

Yet, spending is embedded in the American psyche and few of us are so holy that we don’t fall into the “I gotta have it” trap, and the goods of our desire are not all that good for anything or anybody. I just bought a pair of jeans and am really pleased at how they look—they do a nice job of showing off all the weight I have lost. And my reaction to this pleasure? I think I need to get another pair.

That is not moderation, is it? Advertisers love that about me, though. Until they realize I am way too old to be demographically significant. No matter my age, my desire to have more and more helps stoke the economic engines quite nicely. As long as I have the money to buy, I will continue to stoke, but I have always been a tad stingy, so Madison Avenue had better not depend on me too much. I am more generous in green expenses. I spend an inordinate amount on organic food and we’re planning to beef up the solar power at our cabin–and get a new compost toilet.

The economy also got me thinking about how magazines have weathered these types of storms in the past. During the worst economic downturn this country has seen, the Great Depression, magazines continued publishing—some even were started then. Esquire magazine began publishing in 1933, during the depths of the Depression. The New Yorker started in 1925, four years before the stock market crash, and continued throughout the Depression. In fact, it had a shaky start and didn’t really gain momentum until the 1930s.

The Atlantic and Harper’s continued giving readers perspective on their world throughout the Depression. In 1932, The Atlantic published an article by John Maynard Keynes, titled, “The World’s Economic Outlook.”

The economy, then, can even help magazines by providing content about…the economy.