Entertainment Weekly (1990-2022)

Unlike a lot of my friends on Film Twitter this week, I don't actually remember the first issue of Entertainment Weekly that I ever read.  The magazine, which started in 1990, was certainly not on my radar when it began, both because I wasn't really old enough to read such a thing at the time (I was more invested in something like National Geographic Kids at the time), and because I didn't have access to it.  Entertainment Weekly came onto my radar in the mid-1990's, when my school library was getting it, and I became beyond enamored.  The school would keep several years of back issues of the magazine on file, and each week during our library checkout period, I would come in, checking out a couple of books (I was a fervent reader), but would also get a little tan envelope filled with 2-3 old Entertainment Weekly issues.  Initially I read them all cover-to-cover, and then would start to pour over old issues whenever I'd see a new movie or a new TV show or just wanted to read about an old Oscar race or box office battle.  I read them religiously, to the point of memorization-every Tuesday I would rush into our school library before school to get a copy; I used to, in fact, volunteer on Tuesdays every week to stamp the magazines just so that I could see that week's issue of Entertainment Weekly, memorizing it from cover-to-cover.  I had favorite issues, but regardless of the cover subject, I was spellbound.

This continued for years afterward.  Even with the advent of the internet, which took off when I was in high school (I remember the old Entertainment Weekly message boards, where my brother & I would spend hours tracking different discussions about awards seasons & really learning the beginning of internet culture from the ground-up), I still read every week.  When I went to college, I worked at the library, and for four years I spent every Tuesday religiously reading EW.  After college, for some reason I never got a subscription to the magazine (to my memory, the only magazine I recall ever having a subscription to as an adult is Vanity Fair, which I've had for at least 20 years since I started it in middle school), but I would still frequently read it, either picking up an issue at a local Target or Barnes & Noble, or reading it on a newsstand.  I didn't read it as religiously as I once had...the news in the magazine was stuff I'd already heard due to the speed of the internet, and the quality of online journalism allowed me to better keep up with the magazine's stats & figures, but it was a place to go, something to pick up at airports & for long car rides & family vacations.  In the years that followed, though, especially when I got my smart phone, I just didn't have time for Entertainment Weekly, my once devoted bible.  When it went to monthly, I'd pick it up when it was at my parents' house (they had a subscription at that point, despite this being something they smartly refused to do when we were in high school as they knew we'd never read anything else), but I can't remember the last time I bought an issue direct from a newsstand.

So it comes as melancholy but not unsurprising that this week Barry Diller announced that Entertainment Weekly will no longer have a print publication.  In a world where print journalism is dying, there's no place for a magazine like EW, a relic in a fast-moving world.  I am aware that my lack of interest through the years has been indicative of this decline, and I know that in the large scheme of things this is inevitable, but it still makes me sad.  EW gave me glee & anticipation in a childhood where I didn't have many friends, and certainly not ones who celebrated the things I most loved.  I still have a back collection of every issue of the magazine with an Oscar-related cover.  I think that the hardest thing about this is, in a world where so many of the things I once loved are now amended or discarded or forgotten, this is just one more sweet, cherished part of my life that I have to say goodbye to...a part I don't entirely know that what replaced it ever felt quite as joyous.  

So Entertainment Weekly, goodbye & thank you.  Count me among the ones who will never forget how much you once meant to us, and who will miss you when you're gone.