Condé Nast Closes Gourmet and 3 Other Magazines - NYTimes.com

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By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

It’s Rachael Ray’s world now — we’re all just cooking in it.

Gourmet magazine, which has celebrated cooking and travel in its lavish pages since 1941, will cease publication with the November issue, its owner, Condé Nast, announced on Monday.

Gourmet was to food what Vogue is to fashion, a magazine with a rich history and a perch high in the publishing firmament. Under the stewardship of Ruth Reichl, one of the star editors at Condé Nast, Gourmet poured money into sumptuous photography, test kitchens and exotic travel pieces, resulting in a beautifully produced magazine that lived, and sold, the high life.

Ms. Reichl, formerly a restaurant critic at The New York Times, will most likely leave Condé Nast, though it is not entirely clear, a Condé Nast spokeswoman, Maurie Perl, said. The company will continue with the more recipe-focused food magazine Bon Appétit.

Condé Nast also announced it would shut three other magazines: the parenting magazine Cookie and the wedding publications Elegant Bride and Modern Bride. About 180 people will lose their jobs as a result of the four closings. For Gourmet’s legion of fans, the loss particularly stings — it is the end to a long relationship between readers and the magazine’s depiction of food as exploration.

In choosing Bon Appétit over Gourmet, Condé Nast reflected a bigger shift both inside and outside the company: influence, and spending power, now lies with the middle class.

Advertising support for luxurious magazines like Gourmet has dwindled, while grocery store advertisers have continued to buy pages at more accessible, celebrity-driven magazines like Every Day With Rachael Ray, which specializes in 30-minute meals, and Food Network Magazine.

It was an unexpected decision from Condé Nast, which said it closed the magazine because it was losing too much money.

“In the economics of the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, this would be a business decision balanced by the cultural reticence to part with iconic brands,” Charles H. Townsend, Condé Nast’s chief executive, said in an interview. “This economy is a completely different bag.”

With the decline in luxury advertising, the company lost about 8,000 ad pages through the October issues, compared with the same period in 2008, according to Media Industry Newsletter.

With a 43 percent drop, Gourmet was among the hardest hit. This summer, Condé Nast brought in the corporate consulting firm McKinsey & Company to “help in looking at every one of these businesses clinically, not emotionally,” Mr. Townsend said.

Gourmet was smaller than Bon Appétit, with a circulation of about 980,000 versus Bon Appétit’s 1.35 million. Bon Appétit had higher newsstand sales in the first six months of this year, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Though its sales dropped, Gourmet’s dropped much more sharply in that period, compared with the first six months of 2008. Their editorial approaches differed, too: a recent Bon Appétit cover line promised “America’s Best Hot Dogs,” while Gourmet ran an article on how restaurant critics would spend $1,000 in their hometowns.

“You have to look at the advertisers that support food magazines — they tend to be mass manufacturers, and those are the companies that have the money,” said Dorothy Kalins, founding editor of the food magazine Saveur.

Barry Lowenthal, president at the Media Kitchen in New York, part of the advertising holding company MDC Partners, said that Gourmet’s reliance on travel and luxury advertisers had hurt it. “If you have to make a bet who will support you,” he said, “it’s going to be the Bon Appétit advertiser.”

Gourmet did not lack for impassioned readers. Alice Waters, the California restaurateur, said she nearly started crying when she heard of the closing. Gail Zweigenthal, a former editor in chief of Gourmet, said she was saddened. “I think it was the first magazine that taught people how to navigate the intricacies of foreign travel, where to stay, what to eat,” she said. “It was such a special magazine. It had such history.”

And Dana Cowin, the editor in chief of Food and Wine, praised Ms. Reichl’s “sociopolitical and cultural commentary,” as well as the magazine’s literary sensibility.

The death of Gourmet doesn’t mean people are cooking less or do not want food magazines, said Suzanne M. Grimes, who oversees Every Day With Rachael Ray, among other brands, for the Reader’s Digest Association.

“Cooking is getting more democratic,” she said. “Food has become an emotional currency, not an aspiration.”

It has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Ms. Ray and the Food Network stars. Ms. Reichl is a celebrity in the food world, but of an elite type. She “is one of those icons in chief,” said George Janson, managing partner at GroupM Print, part of the advertising company WPP. But what harried cooks want now, it seems, is less a distant idol and more a pal.

Of Condé Nast’s decision, Abe Peck, professor emeritus at Northwestern’s journalism school, said “they didn’t make the glamour bet here.”

With the news about Gourmet and the other publications, which employees received on Monday morning, another era ended within Condé Nast itself.

The company has developed a reputation for luxury. Part of that means keeping cars and drivers idling outside restaurants for its top executives, but it has also spent years holding on to money-losing publications, including, at points, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

But Mr. Townsend said that the current advertising picture was too dismal. “The tide’s not coming back in,” he said. “It could take us five years to get back to 2007 levels if we’re lucky enough to.”

So, he said, the company could no longer afford magazines that lost money. “We won’t have businesses that don’t make a contribution,” he said. “This economy has pinched us and sobered us up.”

The consultants from McKinsey issued specific budget recommendations for publications, and executives at some magazines, who asked not to be named as they were not authorized to discuss the cuts, said they were told last month that their budgets needed to shrink by 25 percent.

Mr. Townsend said each magazine was given a profit-margin goal, and it was up to the editor and publisher of each to figure out how to reach those goals. After that, he said, there will be no further cuts for a while. “Done. Done,” he said.

Mr. Townsend said that much of his effort going forward would be focused online, where he wants to move away from dependence on display advertising. He will also expand the wedding magazine Brides, increasing its frequency to 12 times a year, and invest in its Web site.

Mr. Townsend said the closed magazines could have some future on the Web or in other media.

Cookie, for instance, “may very well be an electronic brand of substance,” while Gourmet could have strong books, broadcast and Web businesses.

It is unclear what plans for those businesses are; the company has contracts to fulfill in some of the side businesses. Ms. Reichl, after packing up her office, was expected to return to her book tour for “Gourmet Today,” a new cookbook.

“Sorry not to be posting now, but I’m packing. We’re all stunned, sad,” she posted on Twitter on Monday afternoon.

Stuart Elliott and Kim Severson contributed reporting.