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On Feb. 9, Dotdash Meredith — “America’s largest digital and print publisher” — announced the end of the print edition of Entertainment Weekly.
Leaving aside the fact that “Dotdash Meredith” sounds like a multi-level marketing company that sells whimsical knitwear and candles, this is very sad news, real end-of-an-era stuff.
Dotdash, a publishing unit of Fox founder Barry Diller’s InterActivCrop, purchased Meredith — home to such publications as People, InStyle, Better Homes & Gardens and EW — for $2.7 billion last year. At the time, CEO Neil Vogel claimed there would be no loss of jobs, but that promise wasn’t worth the digital platform it was printed on.
Last week’s announcement included the information that the transition is expected to terminate roughly 200 positions on the print side.
“This is an important step in the evolution of Dotdash Meredith, and I want to be clear with everyone about what we are doing and what is ahead,” Vogel said in a memo. “We have said from the beginning, buying Meredith was about buying brands, not magazines or websites. It is not news to anyone that there has been a pronounced shift in readership and advertising from print to digital, and as a result, for a few important brands, print is no longer serving the brand’s core purpose. As such, we are going to move to a digital-only future for these brands, which will help us to unlock their full potential.”
I’m not sure what the “core purpose” of Entertainment Weekly is, beyond “delivering entertainment news to people who care about entertainment,” but coming from a man who also used the phrase “cost synergy” to mean “laying people off,” I suppose clear language is too much to ask for.
I’ve been reading Entertainment Weekly since it came onto the scene in 1990. My family had a subscription and when I moved out, it was one of the things I splurged on. I still subscribe, even though “Weekly” became a misnomer back in 2019, when the print version moved to a monthly format, and even though a lot of the musical acts covered these days make me feel like an octogenarian.
It’s difficult to overstate its influence on me, especially back in those pre-internet days. EW introduced me to a huge world of filmmakers, authors, musicians and actors. Some incredible journalists — Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwartzman on film, Gina Arnold on music, Gillian Flynn (of Gone Girl and Sharp Objects fame) on television, among many others — really drove home that writing critically about entertainment was an art (and also a real job).
EW was unique at the time, different from its celebrity-obsessed sister publication, People, and the entertainment mags focused on industry insiders, such as Variety. It was serious about pop culture, but not snooty. The writing was fun, and sometimes irreverent, but offered context and history too.
I always imagined how cool it would be to go to work every day with people who loved pop culture as much as me, who saw the value in it, whether as frivolous entertainment or serious commentary or lasting works of art.
Luckily, I’ve found that kind of camaraderie at the Free Press, working with my fellow Arts & Life scribes who are so smart and funny, engaged and plugged in.
But I’m going to miss the arrival of my EW friends in my mailbox each month. I’m sure CEO Neil Vogel’s dream for the magazine’s digital future is a grand one, but for this paper-reared reader, it’s likely to get lost in the noise of the internet. To me, it’s a magazine, not a brand.
Jill Wilson
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