Ladies’ Home Journal Folds After 131 Years

Ladies’ Home Journal will cease publishing, parent company Meredith said Thursday. The July edition will be the last monthly issue, and then the magazine will become a special interest publication sold on newsstands but not through subscriptions, Ad Age reports.

The women’s magazine has existed for 131 years and has a circulation of 3.2 million, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. It was one of the original so-called Seven Sisters magazines for women that included Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Red Book, Woman’s Day and the since-defunct McCall’s. At its peak in 1968, it had a circulation of 6.8 million. Meredith bought the publication in 1986.

Ladies’ Home Journal‘s ad pages had fallen 23 percent this year. “It’s not a consumer issue, it’s an advertising issue,” Meredith spokesman Art Slusark told Ad Age. Ladies’ Home Journal was “more challenged than our other titles because it wasn’t a category leader.” He also said that the magazine had a higher median reader age than many of its other publications.

The entire editorial staff for Ladies’ Home Journal was laid off, and production of the new special issues is moving from New York City to Des Moines, Iowa where Meredith’s corporate headquarters is based.

[Ad Age]