It’s not about Gourmet. Well, not exactly…

November 03, 2009

Filed in: The Middle Ages, The Way We Live Now

So yeah, The 50th State is about my quest to get to all 50 states before my now rapidly approaching fiftieth birthday. But it’s also about what middle-class midlife looks and feels like in America right now. Which is rougher than Kachemak Bay when the wind is whipped up; more offputting than North Dakota roadhouse chicken-fried steak; and more anxiety-producing than a mama brown bear looking your way.

T and I have been very, very lucky this recession, which is to say we have kept our jobs. And for this we try to be deeply grateful, each and every day. I just have put that out there loud and clear at the outset.

Having said that, we two, along with all the editors and writers we have worked with over the past quarter of a century, are like a family of polar bears huddled together on a smaller and smaller chunk of ice. Our entire industry, meaning print media, meaning maybe journalism in general, is disappearing around us – rapidly and undeniably.

It’s not slow and gradual, though certainly some of the seeds of this meltdown were planted back in the 90s. It’s immediate and brutal. Newspapers are folding, tech publishing is literally 1/10th of what it was when we got into this business, general interest mags are collapsing, and nobody has figured out how to move the writing and editing of ideas to the web and still pay the people who make that happen a living wage. For those of us lucky enough to still have jobs, salaries are down and frozen, and freelance rates are wayyyyy down. Trust me on all of this; I’m living it; I know.

So when I read, as I did a couple of Mondays ago, that they’re folding Gourmet, it hit close to home. A magazine of that caliber – beautifully written by name-brand writers, beautifully photographed, beautifully edited – when that magazine gets whacked, it’s a bad omen and a dark day in an industry that sees nothing but darkness ahead.

I am not a big-G gourmet cook by any means, but T and I have been Gourmet subscribers since someone gave us a one-year subscription when we got married 19 years ago last month. Which we renewed and renewed and renewed (both the marriage and the subscription, heh). Happy us, and until last month, happy Gourmet. We get 17 or 18 magazines in our house (still!), and Gourmet was the one we read the most. Even more than The New Yorker. And it was the only one we used. I have a shelf full of old Gourmets, and a recipe notebook stuffed past its broken binding, with recipes ripped from the magazine.

In the time since the announcement, I have been equally moved by the outpouring of emotion from like-minded readers and enraged by the snarky comments, not only from the blogosphere but also from People Who Should Know Better, including more than a few People Who Are Very Close To Me.

People apparently have very strong emotions about food magazines, it’s weird. It’s as if they can’t just like their magazine, they need its competitors to be bad and wrong and deserving of demise. And some people felt very strongly that they needed Gourmet to be labeled as elitist and out of touch and to have failed because of those things. When in fact it was thriving among its readership, it was only the economy and the way magazines are funded that brought it down.

Read Amy Bloom’s essay on Gourmet‘s closing—she said what I feel only phrased it better. Money quote: ”Gourmet was certainly an elitist magazine, if by that we mean not any old mundane and familiar crap would do.”

Bigger picture, it just feels to me that right now we are going through a particularly stupid phase of human history – okay, that’s unfair: we are going through a particularly stupid phase of American history. Some people, but by no means all of them, still want well-written, well-thought-out, well-edited, well-fact-checked factual journalism, but only a fraction of that fraction wants to pay anyone to provide them that service.

Just not sure how this will end, for society in general but for us, as writers and editors, in particular. Or T and I in very particular—we’ve got babies to put through college! Maybe, as our neighbor T (also a reporter) said, “We’re all going to wind up in marketing.”

I’d end with some “mundane and familiar crap” play on words if I weren’t afraid of offending my future employers. Marketing ho! Or is that, marketing ‘ho?