Entertainment Weekly, InStyle cease print publications

February 9, 2022 12:17 PM

Dotdash Meredith is ending the monthly print publications for Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, EatingWell, Health, Parents and People en Español. The publications will go digital-only effective today, and the transition is expected to terminate roughly 200 positions on the print side.
posted by Clustercuss (34 comments total)

Doctor, dentist and pediatric waiting rooms will never recover from the shock.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 12:38 PM on February 9, 2022 [23 favorites]

Can they please kill the print version of People, too? Because someone subscribed me to that trashfire and it will not stop coming to my house no matter what I do.
posted by The Bellman at 12:42 PM on February 9, 2022 [16 favorites]

Wow. Entertainment Weekly was the first magazine I ever subscribed to. I used to get so excited coming home from school on a Tuesday and couldn't wait to check the mail. Conversely, I would be so upset if that week's issue didn't arrive until Thursday. AND THAT ONE TIME ON A FRIDAY WHAT ARE WE EVEN DOING MR. MAILMAN! I know that sounds pedantic but there was something annoying about the magazine you used to get before it hit newsstands now arriving nearly a week after it hit newsstands. I'd be at Barnes and Noble and the new issue with LEO on the cover would be mocking me. She may never let go but I certainly will!

Eventually the magazine became inundated with snark. It was like the one snarky column had taken over the entire magazine and I didn't not care for it. Don't get me wrong, I love snark, but I don't need it in every dish. Everything, from articles to reviews, to even reader mail was just so damn bitchy. I canceled my subscription shortly before Bush 2. I traded it in for The New Yorker which I was told had cartoons.

I know ew.com has been a thing for as long as the internet has been but I can count on my cat's paws the number of times I have intentionally visited that site with its autoplaying unrelated videos. Ew is right.
posted by guiseroom at 12:45 PM on February 9, 2022 [24 favorites]

Entertainment Weekly was the first magazine I ever subscribed to.

Other than a year of Games, I also started out as an EW subscriber in college. We were big readers and movies people and music snobs then (around 1990), and EW actually had decent reviews.

I haven't picked up an issue in years, but in its prime it was a good read. I figured that a new generation had moved into the target demographic as I eased out the high side, but I guess not?
posted by wenestvedt at 12:48 PM on February 9, 2022

Oh wow, that is sudden! I work at an independent distributor, but we usually hear about these kind of cancellations months in advance. Eating Well and In Style both sell great, makes no sense. Entertainment Weekly has been circling the drain for a while now, they went monthly (but kept the Weekly branding) years back. There's been a lot of private equity firms and companies like Dotdash buying titles and then killing the print runs. Happened to Saveur and Domino most recently.
posted by drinkyclown at 12:49 PM on February 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

I'm not surprised but still a little saddened to hear this. I started my IT career at Entertainment Weekly. Their building was across the alleyway from Letterman’s theater. Ate at the Hello Deli a couple of times a week but never saw anyone more famous than Leonard Tepper.

When I was there Mad Magazine was doing a parody of EW and we were helping them out with layout files, fonts and such. Keep in mind both EW and Mad were both Time Warner properties at the time. Now none of those three things really exist.

Oh, is this my opportunity to do a very mild blind item? I also chatted with a reporter there who had just finished interviewing an actress about her work and the reporter complained that his editor made him call her back and ask her about her more-famous boyfriend.

Also, this happened when I was there (CW: blatant racism). The editors seemed more upset that the report leaked than about what was in the report.
posted by Ampersand692 at 12:59 PM on February 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

Doctor, dentist and pediatric waiting rooms will never recover from the shock.

It's fine - they wouldn't have gotten to 2021 issues until around 2040.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 1:09 PM on February 9, 2022 [23 favorites]

Meredith has been on a mow down run for a few years now. Shame really, but then print has been hard for a while and only getting harder.
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:10 PM on February 9, 2022

When my BFF was pregnant I had to miss her surprise baby shower because I was stage managing a play at the exact moment it was happening. (I called during intermission to say hi, talked briefly and then had to go; it killed me I couldn't be there. Turns out that my friend really hated that they were throwing her the party and she was much more grateful I wasn't there, so she could vent about it when I called later that night.)

But after the show, one of the actresses who knew what went down checked in on me, and we talked Baby Gifts - and she gave me the genius idea to get my friend a subscription to Entertainment Weekly or People or something like that. "Because," she said, "she's going to want that brain fluff on a day when she's been stuck inside all day and the kid's been crying all day and the laundry's not done and her husband's being a jerk - but hey, here's pictures of people in pretty dresses!"

I did get a subscription - and my friend later called me the day the first issue came, telling me that there was indeed such a day when she was feeling cooped up and ready to climb the wall - and at that exact moment the mail dropped through the front door and that issue of EW was sitting there and it was like a shaft of light spotlit it and she pounced on it, and literally used her infant daughter's head as a bookrest so she could read while she fed her.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:17 PM on February 9, 2022 [38 favorites]

I used to really like InStyle -- it was a good way to figure out what the trends were and find ways that I could make them work for me. They'd show a runway look or trend and then show various pieces (often at various price points) that fit alongside that. But they started doing less and less of that. I haven't really found a good online replacement.

I subscribed to a bunch of magazines for a few years because they were cheap but I've been reading them less and less. I'm sad both these are going away but I'm not going to miss them, really.
posted by edencosmic at 1:28 PM on February 9, 2022

Doctor, dentist and pediatric waiting rooms will never recover from the shock.

I honestly wonder if part of the reason for this decision was seeing subscriptions plummet once waiting rooms stopped feeling a need to cancel what they've got, now that waiting inside a hospital is a public health hazard.
posted by bl1nk at 1:36 PM on February 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Doctor, dentist and pediatric waiting rooms will never recover from the shock.

I honestly wonder if part of the reason for this decision was seeing subscriptions plummet once waiting rooms stopped feeling a need to cancel what they've got, now that waiting inside a hospital is a public health hazard.

Last week at the dentist I noticed there were no magazines in the waiting room at all. Same with my doctor.
posted by JanetLand at 1:43 PM on February 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

Last week at the dentist I noticed there were no magazines in the waiting room at all. Same with my doctor.

Same at my hairstylist's. I have to bring my own book when I get my hair cut now (which is fine), but I miss the opportunity to read their fancy Harper's and Vanity Fair. It's a real bummer, similar to the shift away from paper menus and towards QR codes in restaurants.

Wasn't fomite transmission ruled out pretty early on in the pandemic? Yet we continue to pretend like it makes a difference how many hands touch a menu or a magazine. And there's mandatory hand sanitizer everywhere, too.
posted by knotty knots at 1:51 PM on February 9, 2022 [11 favorites]

Aww, this one hurts. I was an avid reader of EW for years, from my early teens. When I was that age, I appreciated that they brought a slightly more intelligent and progressive eye to the entertainment industry - the writing really helped me develop my critical eye towards pop culture in a good way. I used to read every single review and it really shaped my taste. And then in my twenties, I used to always bring two magazines with me on every flight: a copy of EW and something more "serious" like The New Yorker or The Economist. But of course I'm part of the problem because I haven't had a subscription for years and I can't remember the last time I brought a magazine on the plane.

All magazines are suffering in terms of relevance, of course, but I think EW especially so, because what they do (pop culture reporting/analysis with a light dose of industry knowledge and feminist/progressive perspective) is pretty much the standard online these days. When you have countless places to get that on a daily basis, reading it weeks later in a paper magazine feels a little pointless. And ew.com mostly seems to be used for TV recaps, but maybe not even that anymore? I haven't been on that site in a long time. (Back in the day, Jeff Jensen's unhinged Lost recaps were a lot of fun)

There's been a lot of private equity firms and companies like Dotdash buying titles and then killing the print runs.

They don't even need a print property to do damage! They've been running Serious Eats into the ground for a while now.
posted by lunasol at 2:32 PM on February 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

Back in the 90s, EW was a good way to keep up with pop culture without being too credulous about it, thus my subscription to it for a time. It was still fairly readable the times I picked up a copy in the current century, but I'm surprised it lasted this long. As lunasol said, you can get the same material everywhere on line these days.
posted by tavella at 2:48 PM on February 9, 2022

I subscribed to EW in college and made a close study of it each week. Thanks to that habit I knew who Gwyneth Paltrow was before she started dating Brad Pitt and that made me feel in so with it.
posted by of strange foe at 2:55 PM on February 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

I subscribed to Lucky Peach and they stopped publishing so the filed the remainder with Saveur which then also quickly stopped publishing a print version so then I was bounced to some weird magazine that seems to be a vanity project from some couple who has an HDTV show or something. They keep referring to eachother in articles and I have no idea who these people are. Should I? I’m expecting to start getting Country Living or some such any day now. Quite the journey.
posted by misterpatrick at 3:02 PM on February 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

misterpatrick, just curious, is it "Magnolia Journal" from Chip & Joanna Gaines?
posted by of strange foe at 3:25 PM on February 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Last week at the dentist I noticed there were no magazines in the waiting room at all. Same with my doctor.

Same at my hairstylist's. ...
Wasn't fomite transmission ruled out pretty early on in the pandemic? Yet we continue to pretend like it makes a difference how many hands touch a menu or a magazine.

In the case of doctor's offices, it's probably that the person whose job it is to keep up with the magazines is either working from home or too stretched to be worried about the magazines, or both.

I know this because it was until very recently my job to keep up with the magazines for my boss-doctors' waiting room. When new magazines arrived, I switched out the old ones for the new ones. (I usually took the old ones home and crafted postcards out of them to send to reluctant voters through the Postcards to Voters group, rather than tossing them in the garbage.) The person who has taken over my old job is absolutely too busy to be keeping up with magazines.
posted by joannemerriam at 4:00 PM on February 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I actually switched a bunch of my digital magazine subscriptions to print recently because of the pandemic. They're nicer to read that way and being immunocompromised having something fun to look forward to in the mail has been a big deal for me over the past 2 years...

Given that I have two small children and a third in process Parents is the one I will miss. It's actually a decent information source and a heck of a lot better than a lot of the online sources.

Plus having light reading with pretty pictures and no screens is just nice sometimes when you've been trapped at home for what is now literal years.
posted by scififan at 4:09 PM on February 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

Magazines are utterly gone from all waiting rooms I've been in the last 2 years.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:36 PM on February 9, 2022

Magazines are utterly gone from all waiting rooms I've been in the last 2 years.
... and coasters from bars and menus from restaurants and a myriad of other things that were gleefully taken away using 'OMG virus vector, must destroy everything we touch with fire' as the excuse, but really as a miserly cost-saver and they'll all now never return.
posted by dg at 6:32 PM on February 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

Magazines are utterly gone from all waiting rooms I've been in the last 2 years.


Have any of you looked at the magazine rack at your supermarket lately?

It's just a wall of glossy printed clickbait.

Take a look at what's on offer. Virtually nothing that will ground you in the day's date, or week, or month. Every cover sports stories that are timeless,. Which is to say, the headlines will not get dated if the store stockers are slow about replacing last month's issue and putting this month's in its stead. And that is because sales from that shelf no longer justify breathing down the stocker's necks and getting the magazines replaced with the diligence it used to require. So the store doesn't care as much, and the magazines publish content that allows them to care less, and when did you even look last? Yeah, you needed something to kill time with.

So if you want the dentist waiting room experience, go to the supermarket.
posted by ocschwar at 7:16 PM on February 9, 2022

More likely, people are simply glued to their phones in the waiting rooms just as they are in every other idle second of their lives.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:28 PM on February 9, 2022 [8 favorites]

Yet we continue to pretend like it makes a difference how many hands touch a menu or a magazine. And there's mandatory hand sanitizer everywhere, too.

That's my understanding too. That said, now that I'm washing/sanitizing my hands more I have also gotten way way fewer non-covid colds, so my hope is all the handwashing has actually helped keep hospitals out a little by reducing the spread of other diseases. As much as the pandemic has sucked, I can only imagine how bad it would have been if it was a heavily fomite transmissible virus that affected kids badly.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:30 PM on February 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

And there's mandatory hand sanitizer everywhere, too.


I am surprised that anyone is surprised by this; I was living and working in Toronto in 2003 during the SARS outbreak, and my impression of that is that was when hand sanitizer began sprouting on every store counter and at every mall entrance. I’ve lived in a few cities across Canada since and I can’t recall ever remarking upon an absence of it, even though the overwhelming majority of Canadian cases and deaths were in Toronto (I want to say 42 of the 44 fatal cases in the country, bit that is an untraceable number that is just in my head from decades back).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:09 PM on February 9, 2022

Magazines are weird. We get a ton of titles at Barnes and Noble, at least half UK-based - from UK editions of global mags to fairly niche home design or car stuff. (My theory is that the newish UK-based CEO brought the relationships.) They arrive more or less weekly in boxes that look like they've been beaten with shovels, we put them out when we can afford to waste the staff time on it, and we throw out about half of what we get once it's sat unsold for a couple months. The store gets them all on consignment, so it doesn't really make sense to spend resources on the section, and people mostly read the magazines in the cafe and then leave them in piles. Plus they've gotten expensive - $8-$10 each, at least. I can't say I'm surprised the print editions are getting shut down - I suspect that when the prepaid subscriber base goes, there's nothing else at all supporting the business model.
posted by restless_nomad at 1:51 AM on February 10, 2022

misterpatrick, just curious, is it "Magnolia Journal" from Chip & Joanna Gaines?
Yes! That’s it, I couldn’t remember as they immediately go into the trash. Lucky Peach it is not.
posted by misterpatrick at 8:12 AM on February 10, 2022

EmpressCallipygos's story rings very true to me. As a parent of a baby/young child, print magazines were great for mental break in short chunks (cause interruptions will happen often). I was an EW subscriber since college, but got signed up for a bunch of magazines accidentally when my MIL put my infant daughter's name and address instead of hers when ordering. So I got Parents, Real Simple, Sunset, and People for a while. And it was great in more than one way. I have some cute pics and video of my then 7 month old tearing an issue of People to shreds. Those issues helped get me through the baby/early toddler period, but have slowly dropped off and I haven't missed them too much. My time for pleasure reading has improved and when it is still in short chunks, I guess I spend more time on my phone, sadly.
posted by weathergal at 9:22 AM on February 10, 2022

Have any of you looked at the magazine rack at your supermarket lately?

Sure have.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:15 PM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

This company also owns Hello Giggles, which no one seems to notice stopped being updated in September. Weirdly, they still tweet links to their old stories and posting on Instagram. I can find nothing anywhere about what the deal is.
posted by urbanlenny at 12:22 PM on February 10, 2022

I can find nothing anywhere about what the deal is.

I'm guessing Hello Giggles itself is dead but somebody is still getting paid to do social media. With no new content to cover, they're posting old links and riding this out until someone stops writing them checks. I haven't been in exactly that scenario but close enough. Freelancing is a weird life.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 5:11 PM on February 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

I am frankly shocked that InStyle and Eating Well are being shut down - those both seemed to be some of the only magazines doing well.

Magazines as a category are dying in the USA. They seem to still be trucking along in the UK, Australia and New Zealand (yes, there was the brief shutdown of some titles in NZ, but that was because a German publisher decided to pull out of NZ due to COVID). They're also more interesting in those places. There's nothing in the US like Frankie or Smith Journal or Mindfood or Flow (*sob* the English language edition was another pandemic casualty). There are lots of niches that could be served by good, interesting magazines but the US really requires things to be mass market.

I love Smithsonian Magazine and I'm afraid its time will be up soon - the ad quality has gone downhill something fierce.
posted by rednikki at 7:14 PM on February 10, 2022

Ms. Windo has had a subscription to EW for a long time.

New one just arrived today. Maybe the last one?
posted by Windopaene at 6:31 PM on February 19, 2022