InStyle, Entertainment Weekly drop print magazines, go fully digital

NEW YORK - Mushtaq Ahmed has been running an Upper East Side newsstand for about 30 years and says the decline in magazine sales has hurt business — and it's probably only going to get worse. 

"Not too many people buy magazines," Ahmed said. "Now, it's a different time, everybody has Internet, nobody's buying."

Some decades-old magazines that made their marks in American pop culture are now going completely digital. Entertainment Weekly and InStyle are two of six that will no longer publish print editions, effective immediately.

"I spent my entire life watching the demise of different forms of media," said Janet Kolodzy, the chair of the Journalism Department at Emerson College in Boston. 

She said this is a sad move for the industry but not a surprising one. She has witnessed the decline and fall first of afternoon newspapers and then even daily newspapers.

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"You are looking at demographics of people that do not care for a physical piece of paper to look at," Kolodzy said. "They want the information, they want it the way they want it, and it may not happen in a physical magazine form."

In a statement, a spokesperson for Dotdash Meredith confirmed that the publishing giant will no longer print magazines for EatingWell, Entertainment Weekly, Health, InStyle, Parents, and People en Español and will lay off about 200 people, which is less than 5% of its workforce. 

"These brands have seen significant growth on digital platforms and will continue to grow and thrive digitally as they benefit from the big investments we plan to make across all of our brands in 2022," the spokesperson said.