About two months ago, I saw on Twitter that Entertainment Weekly would cease its print publication, becoming exclusively online. I had been a subscriber (although I probably let it lapse for a month or so around the turn of the millennium) since Issue #10, which I believe had on the cover Bernadette Peters and, of all people, Kevin Spacey as Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker in the made-for-TV biopic Fall From Grace. I was interested in the magazine as it was being rolled out because I loved all things entertainment and celebrity; it was a small factor as to why I went out to college in Los Angeles. But I was a kid back in 1990, and I had no money to buy a subscription. I remember my brother and I did a really stupid thing several years before that and subscribed to Sports Illustrated not knowing that, you know, we needed to pay the magazine money. We finally confessed to Father about our mistake, and he somehow got SI to cancel the subscription.
That bad memory didn't seem to deter Father from cajoling me into subscribing, on his dime, EW after I had indicated I wouldn't mind reading the magazine. (Have I blog posted about this before?) I said no, he said why not ... he wouldn't fuckin' stop. The reason he was so damn relentless was because he wanted to enter Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, and either you needed to subscribe to a magazine or he thought you needed to subscribe in order to get a chance to win. He can't read English, so used me as the way to get a subscription in order to enter the sweepstakes.
He didn't win, of course, but I got to read Entertainment Weekly, and frankly, I loved it. The mag was informative, fun, and taught me a lot about both the entertainment industry and about writing. I would spend a good hour or so reading it the afternoon I got it from the mail. And, with some possible exceptions (a few issues may have been tossed as I laid them in the communal bathroom of my dorm floor), I would never, ever throw it away. It just never occurred to me to toss them. I bought them; why would I throw my EWs away?
Soon, the piles of magazines grew and grew, and so I had to find a box, and then a bigger box, and then two boxes, and so on, just so I could store them all. In the meantime I got busy and so I couldn't read as much or as long as I used to. Then, much of television entertainment shifted to cable, then satellite, then streaming, all three vehicles that I could not afford to spend money on, which made much of what the magazine covered foreign to me. And all the while magazine publishing industry had taken (and continues to take) a massive hit thanks to the Internet, so EW would publish more "double issues" spanning this and next week. Finally, about two-and-a-half years ago, the publisher said that Entertainment Weekly would become a monthly. The logo still had "WEEKLY" watermarked on the bigger typeface of "ENTERTAINMENT" ever since August 2019, but there was so much equity to the name "Entertainment Weekly" that it wouldn't make sense if it re-named itself Entertainment Monthly. With that drop in frequency, however, the news and reviews of movies and albums were too stale for me to read and care about. They became less journalism to read through then, well, collector's items.
And collect I have. I think I should have about 1,600 issues. I've been chronicling my mostly half-ass efforts to store each issue in a protective bag, then file those issues away in boxes until I've done all of them. I have about five boxes filled, which of course barely makes a dent in my stash. All the rest of the EWs are in my storage unit, divvied up in paper bags stacked on top of each other amidst all the sports programs, old copies of City Pages and The Onion, and souvenir cups I've collected. Still, it's my goal to preserve them all. To what end? Who knows. If I die with all of them sealed, someone might just throw them all away. But hey, I blame My Father.
Anyway -- and have I blog posted about this already? -- when the news came that Entertainment Weekly was going to cease print publication (the last issue was dated April 2022 but released last month), while I was sad, I was also relieved. Since my joy of getting to read the journalism in an issue had devolved into feeling obligated to encase that tangible issue in PVC plastic, my main concern with the mag had become finding the time and the means to store them all. It never felt as though I was catching up with these unsealed issues continuing to pile up. I had wondered, considering the slow death of the industry, that the parent company of EW might one day stop printing print issues. Since it has, that means there will not be a pile-up of new editions anymore. There is now a set, uh, blob of issues I need to tackle, a blob that thank Buddha will not be able to metastasize anymore. I now have a chance to finish what could be my life's work, as pathetic as that may sound.
And then I get sad again. Entertainment Weekly has been a part of my life since 1990. It had a good run, but I and we as a culture should always be sad at the death of a magazine publication. It was a source of information that, well, entertained people, and that should never have a shelf life. Also, as shady as the start of my relationship with it was -- seriously, if Father never pushed me to say yes to subscribing, I never would have, as curious as I would have been to read it back when I was a child -- it was a connection to my life when I was younger, when times were easier, and when I didn't have to worry about things such as breaking down and dying.
Well, EW just broke down and died. And while I might be happy that I can see an end to packing up each and every individual issue I have, when I tape up that last loose edition and put it into a box, I'll be doing the same for the memories of my youth.
RIP, Entertainment Weekly.
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