Six magazines operated by the media mogul Barry Diller through his Dotdash Meredith group will immediately stop publishing in print and move online.
The move, which affects Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, EatingWell, Health, Parents and People en Español, will lead to 200 job cuts, according to a memo sent to employees on Wednesday. The cuts amount to less than 5 percent of the company’s total work force.
The magazines were acquired last year by Dotdash, a subsidiary of Mr. Diller’s InterActiveCorp, when it bought the publishing giant Meredith Corporation for roughly $2.7 billion.
“We have said from the beginning, buying Meredith was about buying brands, not magazines or websites,” Neil Vogel, the chief executive of Dotdash Meredith, wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times. “It is not news to anyone that there has been a pronounced shift in readership and advertising from print to digital, and as a result, for a few important brands, print is no longer serving the brand’s core purpose.”
The online audience for Parents, InStyle and EatingWell increased 40 percent compared with last year, according to the memo, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Dotdash Meredith also runs People, Better Homes & Gardens, Food & Wine and other publications that will remain in print. Mr. Vogel said that the company planned to invest more than $80 million in content this year and print more than 350 million magazines.
“Today’s step is not a cost savings exercise and it is not about capturing synergies or any other acquisition jargon, it is about embracing the inevitable digital future for the affected brands,” he said in the memo. “Naysayers will interpret this as another nail in print’s coffin. They couldn’t be more wrong — print remains core to Dotdash Meredith.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
