Other Magazines

Was Gourmet Too Good?

In today’s L.A. Times, columnist Russ Parsons pooh-poohs the existing theories about Gourmet’s closure (an elitist tone, print’s unstoppable march to the grave) in favor of a new one: narrowcasting. Was Gourmet too broad in its content to survive in an increasingly niche media marketplace? NYU Journalism professor Robert Boynton tells Parsons that Gourmet “was the closest thing the food world had to a Life or Saturday Evening Post” (magazines we can’t help but notice are also dead). But Boynton goes one step further, hypothesizing that an overall move away from general-interest magazines isn’t actually a matter of reader attention spans — instead, it’s all about the bottom line. After all, the more clearly-defined a magazine’s audience, the easier it is to sell ads. “That may be good business,” Boynton says, “but in the process the whole notion of food itself as a cultural artifact gets lost.”

Apres Gourmet: Food magazines find their niches [L.A. Times]

Was Gourmet Too Good?