Conde Nast boots Ruth Reichl, closes Gourmet magazine

October 5, 11:33 AMSan Jose Dessert ExaminerJoy Valerie Cronn

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  Gourmet closes after November issue.

The last Gourmet magazine is coming to the November newstands.

The venerable, 68-year-old Gourmet magazine has been slated for slaughter by its publisher Conde Nast come next month's November issue.  Nothing is sacred in this economy.

Conde Nast announced this morning that it will close Gourmet Magazine on the eve of its December anniversary due to lack of profitable advertising and a poor economy.  Gourmet's first issue was published in December 1940.

“These businesses should be 25 percent net margin businesses,” chief executive Charles H. Townsend said in an interview with The New York Times. “We have had some underperformers, but not businesses that have cost us money to run except for launches, and businesses like Gourmet that, with the economy, have slipped into the red.”

“We will not be in that position after today — we won’t have businesses that don’t make a contribution,” he said.

Conde Naste announced that Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl and the other 180 employees of Gourmet Magazine would be out by the end of the week.  More layoffs are expected for other Conde Nast publications by the end of this year.

For the record, or for the few who needed to be told, Gourmet is "a magazine of almost biblical status in the food world," according to The New York Time's Media Decoder blog.  The magazine has a rising circulation of about 978,000.

Corby Kummer, named "dean among food writers in America" by the San Francisco Examiner mourns Gourmet's demise.  "What I most admired about Gourmet under Reichl was not just the far broader range of writers she cultivated but the broadening of the magazine's scope, to include among many other subjects U.S. regionalism, food production both industrial and sustainable, character studies of food producers. It became timely."

The closure of Gourmet and three other magazines -- Cookie (a parenting magazine), Modern Bride and Elegant Bride -- plus cuts across the board for Conde Nast follow a three-month study by McKinsey & Company, which analysed Conde Nast’s costs.

Other Conde Nast magazines and their executives were told to cut costs by about 25 percent. Townsend said, the executives’ plans are due in 10 days, budgets can be met by layoffs, and all layoffs should be completed by the end of the year.

Earlier this year, Conde Nast also shut down the newer publications, Portfolio and Domino.

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