As if to dramatize the crisis facing the newspaper industry, the owner of the 125-year-old Editor & Publisher magazine announced it is shutting down the title. The venerable trade magazine was the unwanted child in a deal between Nielsen Business Media and e5 Global Media Holdings, LLC involving the sale of eight brands in Nielsen’s Media and Entertainment Group. The closing was announced in a one-sentence mention in a memo from Nielsen Business Media President Greg Farrar. AFP has the facts and Huffington Post, considered by some to be the standard-bearer for the new breed of publishers that will succeed daily newspapers, adds detail.
That includes E&P’s string of 11 Neal Awards, a prestigious honor awarded to trade publications by American Business Media, as well as the magazine’s once-formidable position as the journal of record for the newspaper industry. E&P writes its own obituary and suggests that there’s still a possibility that the title could be carried on in some form. It also obligingly lists the e-mail address of all staff members for the benefit of recruiters.
We have often cited E&P‘s work in our posts on this website, and had just this morning written a commentary on an excellent dissection of the circulation experiment at the Dallas Morning News that appeared in E&P this week. While the publications articles could be annoyingly terse at times, its features are often very good and its coverage was always timely. We have particularly enjoyed the work of Mark Fitzgerald and Jennifer Sabba and hope that they quickly find a new place to showcase their talents.
It’s perhaps fitting that we learned of E&P’s demise the way an increasing number of readers consume their news these days: it was posted on Twitter.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 3:32 pm and is filed under Facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
This closing got to me, more than others, probably because I am a longtime journalist. Hard to believe a publication like this will just disappear.
[…] Death […]
I first subscribed to E&P back in the early 1990s because it had the only place to get newspaper job listings. And it was great. I actually got two of my last three jobs by job postings in E&P. I canceled around 2001, seeing there was no way they could continue a weekly publication that was so small. Just a couple months later after passing on my renewal payment, they went monthly. I figured they would become online only at some point, but looks like that won’t even happen. Very sad. They had tons of great info on the business.
Stupid of them to be so short-sighted, but not unexpected.
They see the loss of paper as the loss of their industry. (What’s the definition of industry? I bet it does not include any mention of the word paper in there.)
There will still be a need to edit articles and publish them.
There will now be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of outlets for editing and publishing in the electronic medium of the internet, instead of the mere tens of thousands now.
People still have things they want said and they know that they aren’t word smiths.
The demand for writers, editors is about to go up not down as the number of traditional outlets heads to near zero.
The craft of word smithing is about to flourish.
I don’t understand why they don’t just online and put up a pay wall. I’m sure a number of people would be willing to pay. It’s not like they have a huge staff to support.
E&P had despite the fondness some may have for it become fourth rate at best.
I am sorry if this hurts someone’s little feelings, but no publication can garner a higher rating than that if it is too thin skinned and full of itself to host comments on what it publishes.
Times have changed, the bar has been raised, and Editor and Publisher failed to pass the bar.
So long and thanks for all the fishwrap.
The E & P was time and again remarkable for its candor. It may just be a matter
of getting of silly company / organizational circumstances, be set free, and the
people form the E & P might have a good chance to start out again after maybe making
some changes prevented so far. And have a go again. There is certainly a market
for insights like this:
The E & P for instance carried this article by Danny Schechter originally:
Where Was Media When Sub-Prime Disaster Unfolded?
“It is somewhat surprising,” Larry Elliott, economics editor of London’s The Guardian observed recently, “that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.” If such a fraud was taking place, and if Wall Street’s financial crisis, according to the usually staid Economist, was on the edge of “disaster” with a “financial nuclear winter” waiting in the wings, why were American news consumers among the last to know? …
http://rinf.com/alt-news/media-news/where-was-media-when-sub-prime-disaster-unfolded/2854/
[…] certified fact, with newspaper circulation decreasing by the day, a number of local dailies closing shop, and the job market for writing and journalism jobs fiercer than ever. For most young people […]
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