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For many of us out here in the great and wide world of online pop culture sites that occasionally put finger to keypad and ruminate on box-office openings and which actor got cast in the latest super-hero extravaganza, Entertainment Weekly, in its glory days, was a veritable religion which stoked our early flames of interest in cinema, television, music and literature. And the names of many of EW’s staff-writers resound to us 2022 pundits as being quite god-like: Owen Gleiberman, Lisa Schwarzbaum and Cable Neuhaus are not so much names of individual scribes that at one time or another plied their wares with EW so much as they are lofty heights to be looked upon with awe and reverence as we attempt to make even a small iota of an impact on our beloved world of movies the way that they did.
It was announced by The Hollywood Reporter yesterday that Entertainment Weekly – along with five other periodicals from Meredith Corp. – will end the publication of print issues, transitioning at least stalwart entertainment magazine EW to a strictly digital format. This announcement comes with the doubly sad news of at least 200 folks who work for the printing side of Entertainment Weekly being handed their walking papers.
In one of the more insensitive and callow press releases that I’ve ever come upon, with absolutely no notable regard for the history of Entertainment Weekly or the 200 people who are now out of a job, a company Big Wheel for DotDash Meredith called Neil Vogel said that “We have said from the beginning, buying Meredith was about buying brands, not magazines or websites. It is not news to anyone that there has been a pronounced shift in readership and advertising from print to digital, and as a result, for a few important brands, print is no longer serving the brand’s core purpose. As such, we are going to move to a digital-only future for these brands, which will help us to unlock their full potential.”
Ladies and Gents, may I present to you the future of the entertainment industry, Mr. Neil Vogel?
For many of us that learned about films like Citizen Kane, The Godfather and It’s a Wonderful Life through magazines such as Entertainment Weekly, Premiere and Movieline, these periodicals are not the lifeless entity that Mr. Vogel insists upon referring to as “brands.” They were- and are – the things that dreams are made of, physical objects which started a lot of us down the path of discovery and actually wanting to spend our lives in service of spreading the gospel of pop culture. At least that’s the way I’d like to remember them as.
Rest in peace, Entertainment Weekly; you always served our “core purpose” which was about the love of the zany and kooky entertainment industry. You will be missed.
