This is the cover to the issue of Entertainment Weekly that showed up in my mailbox last week:

This will be the last issue I receive via subscription unless the number crunchers at Time Warner decide to provide a couple extra “grace period” issues in the hopes that I’ll belatedly decide that I just can’t live without it. In some respects, this is not notable. Subscriptions end all the time, and this is an especially dire time for magazines. One more isn’t that significant. Except that I’m a charter subscriber, receiving the first national issue at my college apartment nearly twenty years ago. I’m a complete media junkie, as this digital space routinely demonstrates. I’m exactly who the periodical should be able to maintain as a devoted reader, yet I’m giving it up without regret. If anything, I’m glad to finally be rid of it.

That cover is purely perfect for the final issue, since it’s a perfect reflection of the sort of hungry niche pursuit the publication has aggressively engaged in for the past year. This isn’t entirely a new flaw. I recall the editors acknowledging that they put various derivations of Star Trek on the cover during the early years because it always spurred on record newsstand sales. And during the years of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, it seemed that they were putting Sarah Michelle Gellar on the cover with a frequency that was totally out of proportion to the show’s broader popularity (as opposed to the fervent devotion of its cult fanbase, of which I am a member). But it’s reached extreme levels and been accompanied by a steady and significant drop in the substance of the magazine.

Maybe it’s as simple as the magazine’s time having come and gone. When it arrived in 1990, it was a unique resource for entertainment news that got deeper than the publicist fluff that filled the likes of People and Us. Now the magazine is inevitably outdated before the ink dries on its glossy pages, outdone by a battalion of Interweb media mavens who rapidly share entertainment information, from the ridiculous to the scholarly. With it’s immediacy stripped away, maybe relentless pursuit of the collector class is the only route to continued fiscal viability.

I’m not regretful about giving it up, but I am a little sad that it’s reached that point. There should be some separation pangs, or preemptive curiosity about where the magazine will go. Unless they make a completely unexpected return to the sort of daring, thoughtful material that was part of the magazine’s personality at its inception, I’m flatly not interested.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)