Entertainment Weekly To Halt Print Edition, Along With Other Meredith Magazines Now Owned By Barry Diller’s IAC

deadline.com:

After more than three decades in print, Entertainment Weekly will stop producing a physical copy of its magazine, shifting fully online.Other titles owned by EW‘s new parent company, InterActive Corp., are also ditching print, among them InStyle, EatingWell, Health, Parents and People en Español.Barry Diller’s IAC bought Meredith last year for $2.7 billion.

Meredith had acquired all of Time Inc. in 2018 but soon moved to unload core brands Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. Retaining People, EW and other brands, it created a new organizational unit called Dotdash Meredith.

The mostly digital stable of brands managed by Dotdash since before the merger includes The Spruce, Serious Eats and TripSavvy.The division’s CEO, Neil Vogel, confirmed the news about the shift away from print in an email to employees, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.The shift will result in 200 layoffs, the company estimates, or about 5% of the total staff, though some of those losing jobs could move into some of the company’s 100 open positions.The economics of print magazines have been in flux for some time.

The internet had started to disrupt it nearly two decades ago, but in recent years print across the board has declined sharply while digital has seen an influx of advertising.EW had been branching out already in recent years, creating a streaming video network along with People and presence on satellite radio via SiriusXM and other ventures in pursuit of alternative revenue streams.“We have said from the beginning, buying Meredith was about buying brands, not magazines or websites,” Vogel wrote in the staff memo. “It is not news to anyone that there has been a pronounced shift in readership and advertising from print to