The latest magazine to cancel its print version for a less expensive online model is—the envelope, please—Hachette Filipacchi Media’s Premiere. The magazine was up for sale earlier this year; now, the April issue will be the last print edition, according to the NY Post.
At AdAge, Nat Ives points out that it’s the first major closure of the year but won’t be the last. I agree: dropping print for online only is the new brown. In the past, magazines just disappeared; now they hang around as bits and bytes. What remains to be seen is how many of these online-only titles will be around in a year and whether they will be advertising shells or real magazines online.
I just dropped by premiere.com for a moment of nostalgia—not for the site, which never became a must for me even when I was doing Oscar roundups, but in memory of those days long ago when I actually bought the magazine. This site has a long way to go to become more than a monthly magazine’s online appendage. Going to the staff blog Rushes—“an ongoing conversation about the movie world with the magazine’s editors and writers”—requires going through two screens to see four posts from the last five days or so. The blog launched in November, had no posts in December or January, and—no surprose—has no mention of today’s events. Memo to Hachette execs: if you want this magazine to live online, you will have to do better than this.
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