On October 4, 2009, Condé Nast closed Gourmet magazine. Gourmet’s closure shocked the media and publishing worlds. The 68-year-old magazine had been a marquee name for the publishing house, and still maintained a healthy (though not phenomenal) subscriber base (at the time of its closure, Gourmet had about 900,000 subscribers). Founded in 1940, on the premise that “gourmet” cooking could be available to all, Gourmet took American readers on armchair travels around the world.
Gourmet is only one of many, many magazines receiving the axe this year, as difficult financial circumstances and changing media consumption habits force a sea change upon the publishing industry.
The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reports that 2009 is one of “the bleakest” years for journalism since Pew began producing these annual reports in 2003. (Read the report here: The Pew Research Center’s 2009 State of the Media Report)
Much has already been written on the impact, on journalism, journalists, funding models, and “how news organizations would ensure quality and reliability.” Nothing, it seems, remains untouched. Even our habits—of reading, of knowing, of criticism and reflection—are transformed.
This piece is not, strictly speaking, about journalists or the journalism. I am not preoccupied, here, with the content, only the form: the physical object itself, the glossy, 8.5 x 11 magazine that hits my mailbox once a month, twelve times a year, and the sensual experience that accompanies that object.
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A fresh copy of Vogue has arrived. I am twelve, almost thirteen, and the magazine’s arrival thrills me. I suppose other girls fell for boy bands. I fell for the cultured, sophisticated world depicted in the glossies.
The pages are glossy, heavy, and smooth to the touch. If I get in closer, and press my nose against the paper, I catch the ink’s metallic, slightly acrid scent.
In those first heady moments, when the paper is still fresh and the binding still uncracked, one can disappear into magazine completely. Forget the Dairy Queen, the corner drugstore, the mall with its three department stores and innumerable “country living” stores with scented potpourri and Hallmark Christmas ornaments. We’ve switched frames, to a world where princesses dine with countesses, and meals feature fabulous French concoctions on fine china.
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