Olly Mann was at his grandmother’s funeral a few months ago when he had an unexpected conversation with the presiding rabbi. Mann is a podcaster and radio presenter, and his grandmother’s eulogy had mentioned the pride she felt when she heard him broadcasting on BBC Radio 4.
After the ceremony, the rabbi explained apologetically that he hadn’t heard him, so Mann rattled through some recent work. “He looked at me blankly, and then he twigged: ‘Oh, you’re the guy who writes the Reader’s Digest column!’ and his eyes lit up,” says Mann. “He said: ‘I remember reading a column you wrote about choosing a mattress at Dreams.’
“That’s such a weird environment to have that conversation,” he says – not least because the column had been published four years earlier.
Mann was a Reader’s Digest columnist for 12 years – but no longer. Earlier this week, he learned from social media that the magazine’s UK edition had been shuttered, effective immediately.
The title was closing “after 86 wonderful years” editor-in-chief Eva Mackevic wrote on LinkedIn, because it “just couldn’t withstand the financial pressures of today’s unforgiving magazine publishing landscape”.
These have long been challenging times for magazine sales with many titles falling by the wayside, but the collapse of Reader’s Digest is a particularly dramatic one. Founded in the US in 1922 by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace as a roundup of diverse stories from various magazines, it became a huge and rapid success.
A British edition was launched in 1938; almost 50 other international editions would follow, making it one of the biggest-selling monthly publications in the world, and a ubiquitous presence in libraries and dentists’ waiting rooms everywhere. At its peak in the 1970s, the title had 17 million subscribers in the US, its homespun columns such as “Laughter: the Best Medicine” and “Humour in Uniform” proving so enormously lucrative that its Manhattan HQ was hung with paintings by Picasso, Monet and van Gogh.
Such glory days are long gone, however. Reader’s Digest sold 1.1m copies in 2000; from there, the figures fall precipitously to 2016, when it sold just 106,000. That year, it stopped publishing sales figures.
In part the title was vulnerable because of its very nature as a digest of diverse content, says Abi Watson, a senior research analyst at media specialists Enders Analysis. In the digital media revolution, she says, “the brands and the magazines that have done well tend to be those that are specialist” – what she terms a “flight to niche” content.
A bigger challenge for Reader’s Digest, however, was the ageing, decidedly analogue demographic of its readership. It’s not impossible to survive with older readers, says Watson, but you do need to keep finding new ones as, put bluntly, they die off. “Because Reader’s Digest didn’t have a particularly strong digital presence, they’re not refreshing that audience. So they lost that input at the top of the funnel.”
More recent challenges may have proved the final straw: the pandemic was disastrous for off-the-shelf sales, while the financial crisis means one in five adults are spending less on magazines, according to analysis by Mintel, with many opting to buy individual issues rather than keep up subscriptions.
For generations who grew up reading Reader’s Digest, however, the magazine will always evoke special memories. Chris Merriman, now a technology writer in south London, recalls visiting his grandparents in Swansea as a child where back issues of the magazine would be lined up on the shelves – “there was something really pleasing about that”.
A family tradition was to challenge him, aged eight or nine, to complete the monthly dictionary quiz, “and if I did really well, I got a pound”. As “a slightly precocious child”, he also began to explore the condensed stories. “For me … it was actually a good way of starting reading. Everybody remembers the endless offers and prize draws. There was also another side to it that was instrumental to my early education.”
Sally Orman-Chan, a teaching assistant from Derbyshire, says: “My father always subscribed. I think he enjoyed all the random articles – he would have loved the internet. Sadly, he died in 1977 when I was only a child, [but] as he had just renewed his subscription, my mother kept it on for the year.”
She wasn’t old enough to read the articles, she says, but enjoyed the funny columns and word quizzes. In addition, “every so often my father would order one of their books … The Reader’s Digest Cookery Year [is] still here, held together by tape, still in regular use and one of my most treasured books, 50 years later.”
