A digital taste of Gourmet
Fans of Gourmet, wipe your tears away because Conde Nast is reviving the, errr, brand. As Conde Nast consumer marketing group president Robert Sauerberg said this morning during a briefing for the resurrection: “We closed the magazine last fall. We did not close the brand.”
So if you want to get your mitts on Gourmet and its extensive archives go out and buy an iPad and wait until the fourth quarter. That is when Conde Nast will officially relaunch Gourmet, reincarnated as an app.
So far it pretty much mines the library for material. It’s doubtful that editoral staffers will rise Lazarus-like with it.
Conde Nast partnered with the consulting company Activate to develop the app in HTML 5 with social aspects, some sort of fake payment a la Foursquare and its badges, as well as recipes, articles and videos from the Gourmet stacks.
Conde Nast: Flushing brides, extra food
Your Reuters media writers got a little flushed on Monday morning when we saw that Conde Nast was going to close some magazines. Would we see The New Yorker and Vanity Fair pulped? No such luck for us vultures who were craving a big murder-in-the-first-degree story. This appears to be more of a mercy killing.
Instead, here’s what we get:
- Consolidation in the bridal business. No more Modern Bride, no more Elegant Bride. Instead, we get a monthly edition of Brides magazine, the kind of phonebook-sized tome that it seems will pay for itself. After all, people love to get married, and many these days like to do it twice.
- Calorie cutting in the food format: Gourmet magazine gets purged, while the brand lives on. Or, as Media Memo’s Peter Kafka put it, it survives “Zombie-like” on TV and the Internet. Bon Appetit survives, meanwhile.
- Speaking of food, no more Cookies. Cookie magazine, the “stylish parenting magazine for the new mom,” dies. So much for news-you-can-use stories like “Parents and pot: Do you think it’s okay to smoke weed at a play date?”
Stephanie Clifford of The New York Times got an interview with Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend, who gave her the details of how this is going down. Since we’re not sure if Chuck will have time for us today (we’re hoping the phone rings presently), here’s what he said:
None of the about 180 employees of the magazines, including the Gourmet editor-in-chief, Ruth Reichl, are expected to stay with the company… The employees will receive severance packages this week and be out by the end of the week.
Other layoffs may be in the works. Mr. Townsend has asked editors and publishers of each magazine to meet certain budgets, and the executives can choose whether to lay off staff to get there. The executives’ plans are due in 10 days, Mr. Townsend said, and all layoffs should be completed by the end of the year.
This is it for magazine closures, he said, although he said three or four magazines were considering reducing their frequency.
This is pretty bad stuff. I’ve never heard of any of these magazines except Gourmet (it sounds like the people working at Cookie should be in jail not just out of their jobs anyway) – but I’m certainly scared for The New Yorker. I mean The New Yorker is maybe literally the only good thing that is currently being done by the 300 million-strong population of the United States. Sure, their glowing profiles of rich people and their economic analysis is often disgustingly reactionary, but nevertheless in general The New Yorker is still one of the most amazing institutions in the world with generally brilliant journalism and research writing coming out pretty much every week for, what, 50 USD a year? You can’t get anything like it for love or money anywhere else.
This company chief maybe is being reasonable by axing most of what he just axed, but it’s hard to say what they are going to end up doing. I mean anyone who thinks that any sustainable business should be 25% net profit, let alone businesses that are primarily about creativity and serious research and journalism, is frankly a foolish idiot. 25% net profit? Whatever happened to running a functioning organization that can pay for itself sustainably? I mean if he wants 25% net profit he should rob a bank not try to run an organization, where the point is supposed to be to put food on everyone’s table and still be there next year to do the same. I mean I’m just some kid who doesn’t know the first thing about executive leadership — but even I know the people trying to work at these companies for a living need to get rid of this irresponsible fantasist before he takes them all out. Being in the red is one thing but what’s wrong with 3% net if you have reason to think you’ve built a sustainable revenue stream that can still pay the bills next year?
I like “Nick” ‘s idea for the magazine to replace Cookie. “Minimum Wage” magazine – since nobody knows how to feed their kids on minimum wage this would be instructive and a good public service. And actually a service Conde Nast could inexpensively provide for the people they are firing. “Well, guys, it’s not like you’ll be getting a pension or health insurance – it’s 2009 not 1950, baby – but how does a free subscription to our new rag The Max on Minimum sound? It’ll be news you can use to keep from starving (maybe)!”
