Ladies Home Journal, which traces its roots back to 1883, is ending its run as a regular monthly magazine.
Editor-in-Chief Sally Lee and Publisher Diane Malloy, along with 33 staffers in New York where it is based, were laid off.
Owner Meredith Corp. is turning the title into a quarterly special interest magazine that will be published out of its Des Moines, Iowa, headquarters and sold only on newsstands.
“It’s not a consumer issue, it is an advertiser issue,” Meredith CEO Steve Lacy told analysts during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.
The magazine boasted 1,269.8 ad pages as recently as 2009. But it has suffered through four years of double-digit ad page declines, ravaged by the recession, competition from print and digital sites, and the changing tastes of women in the modern era.
Last year, ad pages dropped 17 percent to 614.6, according to Media Industry Newsletter. Ad pages tumbled another 19 percent, to 140 ad pages, through May.
LHJ also suffered from an aging readership — the median age of its readers was 57 years — that is not in the target of many advertisers, who migrated to newer, smaller circulation magazines, with lower ad rates.