AUSTIN, Texas — So Gourmet is gone.
Blame it on the economy, which forced advertisers and subscribers to cut back.
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Blame it on the Food Network, which has encouraged millions of people to get back into the kitchen but shortened their attention spans and created celebrities out of cooks with ebullient personalities and mediocre kitchen skills.
Blame it on the Internet, the land of the free, where few pay for anything, including recipes.
Blame it on Conde Nast, which when urged by a consulting company to choose between Bon Appetit and Gourmet picked the magazine that looks the most like nearly every other food magazine in print.
Rumors of Gourmet magazine's closing swirled for months, but avid readers of the 68-year-old publication refused to believe them. Institutions like Gourmet can't fold, they said. Gourmet is too grand, too important, and editor-in-chief (and queen food bee) Ruth Reichl can do no wrong.
So when Conde Nast announced last week that it was going to close the oldest food magazine in the country after the November issue, the outcry among foodies, bloggers and the food writing community was louder than the whizzle of a pressure cooker. With its thoughtful observations on the culture of food and museum-worthy photos to go along with them, the National Geographic of food magazines was no more.
Yet the response of the masses — heard during a commercial break during a Rachael Ray show on the Food Network — was this: "Ruth Reichl who?"
The fallen Gourmet
The fall of Gourmet didn't surprise Samir Husni, founder and director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi.
"I was surprised by the surprise of the people in the industry," says Husni, one of the country's leading experts on the magazine industry. Long gone are the days of institutional magazines thriving on their longevity and stature alone, he says.
Husni explains that the post-World War II magazine model, in which publications rely almost entirely on advertising and sell subscriptions for less than the cost of printing and mailing each issue, broke once and for all after last fall's economic collapse.
So not only was Gourmet's business plan flawed, its editors, like many in New York's once-powerful inner magazine circle, refused to give in to two American addictions: celebrities and food that's fast and easy to make, which explains how Gourmet is gone but "Cooking with Paula Deen" is still around.
After several Food Network stars, including Ray, Deen and "Semi-Homemade Cooking" host Sandra Lee started magazines, the network followed suit with Food Network Magazine. Within a year of its launching, the magazine has more than a million readers, more than Gourmet did after nearly 70 years in print. "Now everyone is cooking like star," Husni says.
Rachael's world
A powerhouse in the food world, Reichl is relatively unknown outside of it, even with several successful memoirs and a television series, "Adventures with Ruth," debuting on PBS this week.
In her years as the New York Times restaurant critic, Reichl is credited with highlighting a layman's point of view by reviewing restaurants that didn't have French names. As editor of Gourmet, she tried to steer the publication from its image as a magazines for food snobs, but the magazine never seemed to find the balance between sophistication and mass appeal.
Ray, on the other hand, is a multimillionaire, but her middle-class appeal draws viewers and readers who don't see her as being too good for frozen spinach.
Only a select group of people want to read about food as culture, Husni says, and Gourmet should have charged more for that unique content. "That cult follower will pay because they can't get that information in any other way," he says. Gastronomica, one of the only magazines left with a focus on insightful articles on food culture, charges $50 for four issues a year.
Food & Wine, despite articles on international travel and wine you've never heard of, came down from its elite high horse enough to maintain a sizable reader base, Husni says. "Those days of the inner circle are gone," Husni says.
On newsstands now
With a circulation of more than 3 million, Taste of Home can back up its claim as the No. 1 cooking magazine in the world, but its subscriber base has fallen since it decreased the cost of subscriptions and added advertising in recent years. With reader-submitted recipes short on complexity but long on country charm, the magazine seems to target a slightly older and more rural demographic than its competitors.
Saveur is the most likely candidate to replace Gourmet on foodies' coffee tables. Although the magazine currently has less than half of Gourmet's circulation of nearly a million, its articles are a balance of cooking how-tos and longer, thoughtful pieces on the cultural significance of food, with rich photos that tell stories instead of just glamorizing dishes.
Magazines have figured out that high-quality photographs are key to keeping readers. Recent covers of Food & Wine and Taste of Home, magazines on opposite ends of the food spectrum, each touted photos with every recipe, and Cooking Light's recent redesign was partially prompted by readers' requests for more photos.
Considering how important pictures are to readers, it's surprising that Bon Appetit, regularly packed with photos that are harshly lit and shot too close for comfort, will outlast Gourmet, which for years had been a leader in food photography.
As people have less time to devote to a magazine meant for readers to sit and enjoy, expect to see magazines creating even more bite-sized content that can be digested in the waiting room at a doctor's office or in the car while waiting to pick up the kids from soccer practice. People seem to want magazines about ingredients and cooking at home, not the farmers who grow it or the restaurants and chefs that serve it.
Fine Cooking, with its own budding celebrity nutritionist-turned-cook Ellie Krieger, is a fresh addition to the food magazine rack, with its ingredient- and technique-focused articles and explanatory photography. The magazine is slightly more relevant and hip than Cook's Illustrated, which for years has rejected advertising and relies entirely on subscriptions and the countless cookbooks and specialty magazines it also publishes, including its more colorful bimonthly offshoot Cook's Country.
Cooking Light has long been a leader in the food magazine industry, and its redesign this year has brought the magazine to the attention of readers who aren't making a dish based on how few calories or grams of fat it has. A recent issue, for example, has a photo-heavy feature about noodles that doesn't try to sell the dishes as particularly low in fat, even though the recipes stick to Cooking Light's health-focused mission.
Many magazines, including those with celebrity names attached, still rely heavily on advertising, but the recession has been good to big food brands like Campbell's and General Mills, whose profits were up more than 50 percent last quarter. So feel-good food companies like these, not luxury brands, can afford to buy page after page of advertising in magazines directed at home cooks instead of jet-setting restaurant-goers.
With so many recipes online as it is, will bloggers eventually replace food magazines altogether? Don't bet your blogspot address on it. Husni says that because technology allows anyone to create content, including recipes, magazines are in a place to save audiences from the mediocre content that readers are bombarded with. Everyone wants to focus on the Web and social media, but 90 percent of revenue is still coming from print, he says.
Without a doubt, we'll see more celebrity-driven magazines, but the food magazine market is getting saturated. More food magazines were launched last year than any other category, Husni says. Of the 103 new food-related publications, 60 percent will die within a year of starting. "But the question is, how much do you need to feed the addiction?," he says. "How much can you eat?"
Addie Broyles writes for the Austin American-Statesman. E-mail: abroyles(at)statesman.com.
