On the same day Graham Rice reveals the declining sales for most gardening magazines, Conde Nast announces that their glitzy House & Garden magazine will close. Is this just coincidence?
After loosing the mag’s publisher, Joseph Lagani, to Glamour.com the group reconsidered their options and found the magazine unviable in the current market. The current market, according to Rice, is being swallowed up by “the plethora of TV programs, expanded gardening coverage in national newspapers and free online information and advice.” (Yeah! Go Blogs….)
House & Garden will publish for the last time with their December issue. And, not only will the mag conclude but according to sources, their flagship website – http://www.HouseandGarden.com – will shut as well.
This is the bit I don’t get. The site has a PR8 ranking yet it’s getting far less traffic than the two biggies Gardenweb.com and DavesGarden.com.
In fact, compared to some of our more trafficked blogs, it’s only just marginally better.
Whatever the case, it’s a sad demise for a well-established gardening magazine. Anyone interested in buying a cheap PR8 domain?
Setting aside my supposed prophetic skills… I can’t help but suspect that if the publisher of House & Garden is considered an ideal appointment at glamour.com then perhaps he was not best suited to House & Garden! And as magazines close or suffer financially, are readers continuing to get good, authoritative information (to some extent – but it needs picking out amongst the dross) and are writers making a living from blogs in the same way that we once made a living from writing for magazines (I don’t think so)? .