Mr. Peacock loves magazines and grew up on magazines. My mother got me hooked at an early age. She also loved magazines and always kept a spare magazine in her glove compartment of her car—just in case, usually a Vanity Fair. It really saddens me to watch so many magazines close. It was always such a treat to buy a magazine and savor it over the month. I guess times have changed, due to the internet. People no longer have the same relationship to magazines as they used to.I worked in the art department of many magazines for different publishing houses for about 10 years—including Condé Nast. My heart goes out to all of the hardworking souls who stayed late and gave their blood, sweat and tears (yes, there’s tears every issue) to make sure that each magazine issue always hit the newsstands on time—who are now looking for another job.
Grace Bonney, at Design Sponge, summed it up wonderfully on a comment she made under her Domino posting yesterday. She basically said that publishing houses need to change the way they produce magazines. To paraphrase Grace, “...cut staffs down to smaller sized, do away with bloated salaries, cut photo budgets ...it’s time for the publishing industry to get lean and mean.” I agree! They need to rethink how a magazine is produced, and how it relates to the website.
Unfortunately, once a magazine is shut down it’s usually over. But never say never, House & Garden was shut down in the 1980’s (as HG) and relaunched in the 1990’s, only to be shut down again in 2007. Maybe once the publishing industry gets the balance right between their web content and the printed magazine, one of the closed shelter titles could be relaunched down the road. Mr. Peacock hopes that a new, and even better, shelter magazine will rise from these economic ashes and launch in the next year or maybe two. Stranger things have happened…
2 comments:
That’s really sad to see the demise of this type of magazine. I had the opportunity to work with Gail Steves the editor for Home magazine when she did a spread in conjunction with Pier One Imports. It was basically an editorial advertisement. That was ten years ago and I guess the magazines were struggling even then to have been pandering to their advertisers
Way too sad. I use shelter magazines the way many use crack. Withdrawal is going to be ugly and my home is going to suffer needlessly.
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