BREAKING: Greg Mitchell on Twitter - Editor & Publisher is Folding

Hissyspit

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Thu Dec-10-09 11:58 AM
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BREAKING: Greg Mitchell on Twitter - Editor & Publisher is Folding

Edited on Thu Dec-10-09 12:47 PM by Hissyspit

I have just found out via Greg Mitchell's tweets that Editor and Publisher is folding. This is not good. Editor & Publisher was indispensible (along with McClatchy reporters) during the Bush/Cheney era.

Mitchell says the New York Times will have a piece up soon, and Politico's Michael Calderone has the memo.

Greg's Tweets:

"Yes, it's true, my magazine, E&P, axed today, out of job. At office until end of year--and here, of course."
24 minutes ago from web

"E&P was one of oldest magazines in USA -- since 1884. Long battler for First Amendment, reporter rights, watchdog of industry."
17 minutes ago from web

"We'll have story on site soon but, frankly, everyone shocked and trying to cope. Not even going online? Maybe someone will step forward?"
16 minutes ago from web

"Thanks for all the kinds words on E&P closing. Great staff, some here 20-25 years. NYT doing piece."
13 minutes ago from web

Calderone says that Nielsen Business Media is selling eight of it's maganzines, including Billboard and AdWeek, but that E&P will be shut down. Neilsen President Greg Farrar wrote this morning that the move "will allow us to strengthen investment in our core businesses – those parts of our portfolio that have the greatest potential for growth – and ensure our long-term success. We remain committed to building our trade show group and affiliated brands." Nice. What about the public good?

Will update.

In 2004, Greg Mitchell was interviewed by the Echo Chamber Project. They asked him what influence E&P had had in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Here was his response:

Yeah. Well, we noticed in the months leading up to what became the invasion of Iraq that most newspapers were kind of going along quietly with the Bush administration claims. And we were quite alarmed with that and we speak to the entire newspaper industry. So we thought we had a real role in continually calling attention to the questions that the press was not asking. In fact, we ran a cover story in January of 2003 -- more than two months before the invasion -- and the cover story was called "Unanswered Questions" and it had a picture of Bush. So we recognized early on that a lot of the assumptions and declarations of evidence from the administration were very weak and that the press was not pressing them hard enough. And unfortunately we had to keep that up during the war -- after the war. And unfortunately we’ve been proven correct on virtually everything that we were warning about because the weapons of mass destruction were not found, the links between Iraq and al Qaeda were not discovered, the fact that the war was gonna be incredibly more costly, there were going to be more casualties, it was gonna go on longer than anyone imagined -- All these things that we were raising at the beginning of 2003 have all come to pass. So despite our warnings -- I mean, in some ways, it made us feel good because we got a lot of attention -- a lot of credit for doing that. We won a major award for our news coverage throughout the year. But on the other hand, it made us also feel a little helpless because we weren’t able to swing the newspaper industry as a whole behind some of the alarms we were raising.

http://twitter.com/GregMitch

http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/1209/Editor__Publisher_folding.html

December 10, 2009
Categories: Magazines
Editor & Publisher folding

Editor & Publisher, which has chronicled the closing of numerous publications in recent years, now suffers the same unhappy fate.

Nielsen Business Media is selling eight magazines -- including AdWeek, Billboard, and Backstage -- to a new consortium, e5 Global Media Holdings. But two of their other brands, E&P and Kirkus Reviews, will be shuttered in the process.

Editor Greg Mitchell tweets: "Yes, it's true, my magazine, E&P, axed today, out of job. At office until end of year--and here, of course."

Shuttering E&P is a real loss for the media beat, given that the publication has comprehensively covered the newspaper and magazine world (while breaking a lot of news in the process). Their reporters are typically the first to break down circulation numbers, while offering monthly listings of newspaper website traffic rankings and other essential information.