Entertainment Weekly is Safe.. For Now (but the Peopleization of the mag is Coming)

http://gawker.com/5125119/entertainment-weekly-lives

As the print publishing industry caves in on itself, Entertainment Weekly (one of the few mags I subscribe to and read voraciously every week) has announced that they are letting go of a few staffers and naming Jess Cagle of PEOPLE as the new editor.

I started reading EW in the early 90s when it was at it's snarky best .. they blazed the trail with their features and their attitude.. but they lost that along the way as well as making a few missteps - specifically getting rid of Jim Mullen who had the best column in the mag, letting a couple truly awful "reporters" virtually run the magazine into the ground with mediocre writing (there was about a year or two when I couldn't read a damn article in the mag without Dalton Ross's fucking byline on everything) and most recently letting the less than talented (and even less interesting) Diablo Cody have a full page every four weeks. Attention EW writers: just saying something is 'lame' or it 'sucked' might be funny to you but without telling me WHY, your opinion matters not.

So, too, EW made a big boner mistake in giving away their mag content for FREE online. Why should I pay for a subscription when I can get all their same coverage for free online? I mean, the EXACT same articles the same day they're published. Worse, sometimes in the mag they'd say "for the rest of the article, go out our site".. whaaaaaaa? How is that helping the magazine?

Kudos to the mag though for keeping Mark Harris and Stephen King as well as Lisa and Owen writing for them, they never disapppoint. Ever. Other things I love about the mag? Their episode guides which they never do anymore. Yeah, I'm a geek and proud of it and have their collectible episode guides from Sex and the City, Xfiles, Friends and Seinfeld. This is the type of thing that EW became famous for and that they aren't doing it anymore is one of the reasons they are failing.

Ugh and now they're bringing in the editor of PEOPLE. People??????? "The World's Sexiest Man"- People? Really?? UGHHH!