NewsWeek.com: Preacher Don’t Publish
Another week, another failed magazine. But while the collapse of print media is hardly news, this demise is different.
Today’s Christian Woman was founded in 1978 to reach evangelical Christian women who wanted a publication that reflected their values. They didn’t want the crass sex talk of Cosmopolitan. They didn’t want the mainstream relationship advice of Redbook. They wanted inspirational stories of faith and Bible-based help in managing their children, friendships and marriages. Anita Bryant graced the first issue’s cover. “It was as close to what people were looking for as anything,” remembers its founding editor, Dale Hanson Bourke. Last week, TCW’s parent company, Christianity Today International (CTI), announced that the magazine’s September/October issue would be its last. “I feel like a dinosaur,” Bourke moaned in an e-mail.
The death of TCW is important for two reasons. First, it shows that Christian magazine publishing is in the toilet along with almost every other kind of print publishing. In its announcement, CTI also said that Ignite Your Faith—formerly the historic Campus Life—would close, and that 22 percent of the CTI staff would be laid off. (Christianity Today, CTI’s flagship publication, founded by Billy Graham in 1956, will remain in business.) Other Christian magazines—Discipleship Journal, Pray and CCM, the Christian community’s version of Rolling Stone—have also been shuttered in the past 18 months. New Man and SpiritLed Woman, published by the Charisma group, have abandoned print and are now available only online. “The perfect publishing storm that’s hitting everyone is hitting us,” says Harold Smith, CTI’s CEO and editor in chief. “It has hammered us.”
