RIP Gourmet magazine

I was sorry to hear yesterday that Conde Nast in the US will close Gourmet magazine, not only because Gourmet offered some top-notch food-porn but because I know how devastated the staff must be feeling. Upset about losing their jobs, yes, but also emotionally bereft at having the plug pulled on a magazine that they passionately believed in and gave 110% to produce every month.

I felt the same way when Pacific Publications announced they were closing Women’s Health back in 2001. It was the Friday before Christmas and I’d stayed late the previous night, putting the finishing touches on a fitness feature for the next issue. Arriving in the morning it was business as usual, right up until the point where the CEO walked in and, to borrow a word from Batman, kaboom!, it was all over bar the drinking.

Women’s Health (no relation to the Women’s Health magazine now available) was a fantastic magazine but I believe it was ahead of its time. Of the many health magazines now available, only Good Health (formerly Good Health & Medicine) was up and running in 2001. Consumer interest in healthy living was still weak and advertising was weaker. Good Health & Medicine had the advantage of being able to package ad pages with those of other ACP titles such as The Australian Women’s Weekly, but despite fresh, inspirational, exciting editorial content, we floundered. Given time and ideally, more marketing dollars, I’m sure Women’s Health would have found its feet but management, in their wisdom, decided it wasn’t to be.

Gourmet apparently also suffered a severe decline in ad pages in recent years but with a 70-year history and renowned foodie Ruth Reichl at its helm, it still must have come as a shock. According to a blog on the New York Times Website the Gourmet staff held a wake at Editor-in-chief Reichl’s apartment with “wine and liquor carted away from the office”.

From memory, our team went for a boozy lunch at Cargo Bar in King Street Wharf that stretched way past dinner and was charged as a last hurrah to our editor’s corporate credit card. As devastating as the reason for that get-together was, it was, ironically, a great team-bonding exercise.

Glib as it may sound I’d like to say to the Gourmet team that sometimes bad things happen for good reasons, even if those reasons aren’t immediately obvious, and that there will be other fantastic opportunities for them in the future. In my case, if I hadn’t been made redundant that day, then I probably wouldn’t have found my niche in food writing.