Us News & World Report, best known for its ratings of colleges and hospitals in recent years, is throwing in the towel on the regularly printed monthly magazine.
“The December issue will be our last print monthly to subscribers, whose remaining print and digital replica subscriptions will be filled by other publishers,” said Editor Brian Kelly in a memo to staffers.
The magazine will publish eight newsstand-only special issues focusing on colleges, grad schools, hospitals and personal finance guides, plus four other themed issues on topics like history and religion.
The magazine, which went from a weekly to a monthly in the span of two years, is concentrating on its digital offerings.
“We’ve been working on this for a long time,” Kelly told The Post. “We’re living in the new media world and have been for some time.”
The magazine, owned by Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman, was once a combative newsweekly that competed with Time and Newsweek for the ad-page category crown.
In recent years, it has been bleeding red ink, and Zuckerman has tried a number of incarnations to stem the losses. Over the past two years, it was cut to a bi-weekly and then to a monthly, but nothing seemed to work.
In the six months ended June 30, its total circulation plunged 17.3 percent to 1,129,618. Of that number, more than 1 million — or 1,056,385 — came from paid mailed subscriptions, which will now be handed off to some other publisher to fulfill.
Newsstand sales were a relatively tiny component of the overall mix in print. In the six months ended June 30, it sold an average of 39,143 copies on newsstands, down 2.9 percent from a year earlier.