Gourmet Succumbs to Bean Counter Diet
After the announcement that the bean counters would no longer publish Gourmet Magazine, my wife sent me an email with the subject line: 
End of the world as we know it
And the text:
Just saw that Gourmet is ceasing publication, a victim of the times. Sigh.
Thirty years of her loyalty ends with this brush off as written in the New York Times:
In an interview at Condé Nast headquarters Monday morning, the chief executive Charles H. Townsend explained why he had made the cuts he had. The simple answer: the magazines were losing money.
“We will not be in that position after today — we won’t have businesses that don’t make a contribution.”
That’s it. Nothing about quality. Nothing about loyalty. Just about money. Close to 1 million subscribers and if you if trust Condé Nast’s ABC figures (I don’t), close to 6 million readers are told in essence: Look it is not about you and never has been, it is about the money.
If we as consumers leave it to corporate America to decide what media we receive, it will eventually, always go for the money over all else. It is time that we as consumers take it into our own hands to pay for and thus decide what media we find worthy. That’s what we are working on over at the Center for Sustainable Journalism and my guess is that today we have found about 1 million allies who are thinking the same thing.
