Ladies’ Home Journal, the venerable women’s service magazine that traces its roots back to 1883, is ending its run as a regular monthly subscription magazine.
Editor-in-Chief Sally Lee and Publisher Diane Malloy, along with 33 other staffers based in New York, were laid off Thursday.
Owner Meredith Corp. is turning LHJ into a quarterly special-interest publication sold only on newsstands. It will be published out of Meredith’s headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa.
“It’s not a consumer issue; it is an advertiser issue,” Meredith CEO Steve Lacy told analysts during a call to discuss its latest quarterly results.
As recently as 2009, LHJ was selling 1,269.8 ad pages per year. But it has suffered through four years of double-digit ad page declines, ravaged by the recession, new competition from other magazines and digital sites, and women’s changing tastes in the modern era.
Last year, ad pages dropped 17 percent, to 614.6, according to Media Industry Newsletter.
Through May, they tumbled another 19 percent, to 140 ad pages.
LHJ also suffered from a maturing readership — the median age is 57 years old — which sent advertisers to newer, smaller circulation magazines with lower ad rates and younger readers.
Although the magazine still delivers 3.2 million copies a month, it has to keep newsstand and subscription prices low and give away more than 150,000 free copies each month to meet the rate base pledged to advertisers. When advertisers fled, it became too costly to maintain the huge circulation.
“I’m sad,” said Myrna Blyth, the editor-in-chief from 1981 to 2003 who now serves as editorial director of AARP Media.
“It was always the most journalistic of the women’s magazines, but you need the support from your company to be able to deliver a unique message,” Blyth said. “It had become more and more a generic magazine in recent years, and you can get women’s service from a lot of different outlets these days.”
In 1984, Blyth gave the 100th anniversary issue to President Reagan at the White House, where he received it personally. “Great, something older than I am,” he quipped, according to Blyth.
July will be the last time the 131-year-old magazine appears as a monthly publication. It will reappear “sometime in the fall,” said a spokesman.