E & P shutters the windows

A bit of surprise – but not shock – as we learned today about the closing down of Editor & Publisher magazine, the 125-year-old house organ for the newspaper business.

Considering the plight of newspapers all across the country, I suppose it shouldn’t have come even as a surprise. Ad revenues down. Subscriptions down. And morale down.

My familiarity with Editor & Publisher first came in graduate school at Iowa State University about 40 years ago. I’d already been in the broadcasting business for a dozen years or so and was very familiar with Broadcasting magazine, the institutional publication that kept tabs on the radio and television business.

As Broadcasting leaned more heavily toward the financial and entertainment side of electronic media, Editor & Publisher, it seemed to me, had a flair for keeping tabs on the journalistic soul of the media. I never saw much of that in Broadcasting magazine.

Perhaps it was an ironic omen of things to come, as Editor & Publisher fades into oblivion – or at least struggles to survive in another form.

Broadcasting & Cable, meanwhile, continues to dance with the business of broadcasting, though many of us old timers would hardly recognize it today.