Saturday Evening Post to End Print Edition

The Saturday Evening Post will end its print edition with the January issue, after more than 200 years, citing rising production costs, falling advertising revenue and changing reader habits.

The NYTimes reports Joan SerVaas, the magazine’s president and publisher, announced the decision in a letter to about 50,000 subscribers and confirmed it in an interview. “We’ve been dealing with it for over a decade,” she said. 

“We continued hoping it would turn around or life would get better. Now we’re pretty sure it’s not going to get any better.”

The magazine, which first appeared in 1821, will keep publishing new articles and fiction online. 

SerVaas said print had become a financial drain on the Saturday Evening Post Society, which owns the title. The archives — news, poetry, fiction and art, including Norman Rockwell’s iconic covers — will remain available digitally.

The choice was personal as well as financial. SerVaas, 72, is the daughter of Beurt SerVaas, the Midwestern businessman who, with his wife, Cory, bought a controlling stake in 1970 after the magazine collapsed in 1969 amid poor management and shareholder fights. They cut debt and staff; Cory SerVaas, a journalist and physician, rebuilt the magazine around health and wellness. Imagining her parents’ reaction, Joan SerVaas said: “I think about my mother a lot, because she would kill me. She would not be happy, but she would understand.”

The Post is falling from unusual heights even by the standards of print’s long advertising slump. A 272-page issue published months after the 1929 crash weighed nearly two pounds, according to a 1985 Harvard Business Review case study. It brought in $1.5 million from 214 national advertisers — about $29.2 million in today’s dollars — and consumed six million pounds of paper and 120,000 pounds of ink, printed on sixty 45-ton presses over three weeks.

Its pages once carried Jack London’s serialization of “The Call of the Wild” in 1903, Mary Roberts Rinehart’s World War I reporting from the trenches, Pete Hamill’s 1960s Hollywood pieces, and large portions of Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” For more than two centuries it helped define a homespun American identity. 

That print tradition ends with the next January issue.