Entertainment Weekly (print)

» see ew.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i knew ew from american movie reviews cited in the letterboxd era, from the letter grade at the top of each review and from the cover screenshots that ended up in image searches when i looked up a 1998 film. the actual weekly cadence, the paper artifact arriving on doormats every friday with a photograph of the cast of friends or the sopranos on the front, was never part of my life. the magazine was almost aggressively american in its subject matter: fall network tv schedules, the summer movie season, oscar prediction charts.

time inc launched entertainment weekly on 16 february 1990 with jeff jarvis as its founding editor. the pitch was that people magazine covered celebrities and time covered news, so nobody was covering the movies and tv shows themselves at a weekly cadence with reporting attached. the launch cost time inc a hundred and fifty million dollars over its first three years, which was reported at the time as one of the most expensive magazine launches in american publishing history. by the mid-1990s it was profitable. by 2013 circulation peaked at one point eight million.

meredith corporation bought time inc in january 2018 for one point eight billion dollars. dotdash, the digital publishing arm of iac, then bought meredith in december 2021 for two point seven billion. on 9 february 2022 dotdash meredith announced that the april issues of entertainment weekly, instyle, health, parents, eatingwell and people en espanol would be the final print editions. six brands moving to digital-only in one press release. entertainment weekly's last print issue shipped in april 2022 after a thirty-two year run.

~ the case file ~

~ the letter grades ~

ew's format innovation was the letter grade. every review, every album, every tv pilot, every book, everything with a byline got a report-card score. this was aggressively populist. it flattened critical judgment into a report card that a busy reader could scan in three seconds. the letter grade influenced the whole american pop-culture press through the 1990s and 2000s, and rotten tomatoes eventually did the same thing at scale by aggregating percentage scores instead of letter grades.

the fall tv preview issue was the other cultural artifact. every september ew shipped a double issue with capsule reviews of every new fall broadcast pilot and returning series. for the entire pre-streaming era, this was how american viewers decided what to record on their vcr or their tivo for the coming season. once streaming replaced the fall schedule, the whole framing lost meaning. by 2019 the preview issue was mostly capsule reviews of netflix originals that had already been reviewed twice online before the issue reached mailboxes.

~ the merger churn ~

ew's ownership history through the 2010s tracks the collapse of american magazine publishing. time inc was spun off from time warner in june 2014, meredith acquired time inc in january 2018 mostly to get people magazine, then meredith itself was acquired by dotdash in december 2021. every ownership transition triggered layoffs in the ew newsroom. by the february 2022 print-end announcement, the editorial staff had already been cut multiple times and the remaining print work was concentrated in a small team dependent on the ad market for celebrity-cover issues that no longer sold.

dotdash meredith's framing of the february 2022 announcement was that the six killed print editions represented "brands moving to their digital future". this is the standard line for a print shutdown, the accurate translation is that the ad market for weekly celebrity coverage had collapsed to a level that no longer supported paper printing at national scale. tv guide had already made the same transition in 2008. the difference by 2022 was that even the readers who wanted print had mostly given up expecting it.

~ what got buried ~

the archive lives on ew.com under the current owner, but the back issues themselves are difficult to find at scale outside university library microfilm. the fall tv preview double issues from 1993 to 2005 are minor artifacts of pre-streaming american television criticism, and there is no consumer-accessible full digital archive of them. the letter grade tradition survives on the site in a diminished form. the weekly rhythm that gave the magazine its name has been gone since the print shutdown.

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