Editor & Publisher ends century-long run

Editor & Publisher, a magazine that for a century chronicled the rise and now decline of the U.S. newspaper industry, fell victim itself to the wrenching changes on the media landscape. Its owner announced Thursday that it will be shuttered at the end of this year.

Founded at the turn of the 20th century when William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were rivals in the competition to build big-city newspapers, E&P began a struggle to survive at the turn of the 21st century as print advertising peaked and journalism's business model was disrupted by the Internet.

In the course of selling off several trade publications including The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, a division of Nielsen Co. decided to cease publishing E&P and Kirkus Reviews, a pre-publication book review magazine.

E&P's editor, Greg Mitchell, held out hope but, like a doctor diagnosing his own terminal illness, laid out the bleak scenario that led to E&P's demise.

“We're part of a besieged industry, magazine publishing, and we're covering another besieged industry, newspapers, so it's kind of a double whammy,” said Mitchell, taking a break from updating his Twitter account about his magazine's death.

Mitchell said he was unsure whether the January issue his staff was working on this week would be published: “We'll keep putting stuff on line for awhile, but like I said, we're hopeful that someone may step forward and buy us.”

With the closure of E&P and Kirkus, 18 people will lose jobs.

Predictions that the glossy magazine wouldn't survive began in 2002 when it went from a weekly to monthly publishing cycle. But Mitchell, who became editor that year, said E&P instead started making money, winning awards and gaining attention not only by breaking news online but by advocating for beefed-up newspaper Web sites.

Popular online journalism news aggregators such as Romenesko.com regularly relied on stories by E&P, linking to them for fresh reporting on a study or analysis of anything relating to the newspaper industry.

But this and other free sites also snatched readers and job listings that might have landed in E&P's go-to classified advertising section that Mitchell said “had somehow turned into a black hole.”

E&P's more journalistic competitors also have faced cutbacks and reduced their frequency of publishing, but they stay in business with support from non-profit foundations and university institutes.

With 10,000 subscribers and 800,000 unique monthly users of its Web sites, the small magazine that chronicled the decline of an industry was ultimately itself brought down by similar factors: It lost revenues because its advertisers had business problems or had moved to the Web with the less-profitable nature of selling advertising there.

Lauren Rich Fine, a former media analyst for Merrill Lynch who now teaches at Kent State University, said she remained among E&P's loyal subscribers -- and even graced its cover -- but knew it was fighting an uphill battle.

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