JOURNALISM -- December 10, 2009 at 9:12 PM EDT
Stopping the Presses: Venerable Media-Watcher E&P to Cease Publication
After more than a century of covering the journalism industry, Editor & Publisher magazine is stopping its presses. The chronicler of newspapers and journalism reported today that its print and online are both shutting down.
Its parent company, Nielsen Business Media, also announced it was selling eight magazines to a new conglomerate, e5 Global Media. Those eight include recognized brands such as Adweek, Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter, but Nielsen said in a statement that it would "cease operations" for E&P and Kirkus Review, which published roughly 5,000 book reviews a year.
Greg Mitchell, editor of E&P, tweeted:
"Yes, it's true, my magazine, E&P, axed today, out of job. At office until end of year--and here, of course."
In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, Mitchell spoke about the coverage gap that E&P's closing will create:
We cover the entire newspaper industry, down to newspapers with 2,000 circulation. I'm sure larger newspapers got more coverage, but we certainly covered smaller publications, and weeklies, alternative magazines, the gay press, all sorts of things. I don't know who's going to cover them now--1,200 daily newspapers alone, let alone all the weeklies. It's an incredibly wide universe to cover.
E&P's closing is yet another sign of the troubles facing the print media industry, which E&P has covered since 1901. (It later merged with a magazine called The Journalist, which traced its roots back to 1884.)
Even in a world of new media platforms, Editor & Publisher has been a "trending topic" on Twitter today.
In a possibly prophetic cover story, E&P's December issue asked the question, "Who's in Charge Here? When will Web editors take over newsrooms?"
