Monday, February 18, 2013

Reader’s Digest Files for Bankruptcy

RDA Holding Co., publisher of the 91-year-old Reader’s Digest magazine, has filed for bankruptcy.

The company listed assets and debt of more than $1 billion each in Chapter 11 documents filed yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, New York, reports Bloomberg.


“We have had an ongoing process to simplify and rationalize our international business by licensing our local markets to third parties, to other publishers, to other investors and that has been a big part of our effort to streamline the company and bring in proceeds to bring down debt,” Robert Guth, Reader’s Digest’s chief executive officer, said yesterday in an interview.

The company’s flagship print magazine is read by more than 25 million people, according to its website. The company publishes 75 magazines globally including 49 editions of Reader’s Digest, Taste of Home, the Family Handyman and Birds & Blooms. Reader’s Digest “sold more digital editions in December than we did newsstand editions,” Guth said.

UPDATE;

Lew Rockwell points out:
Readers Digest was a hugely influential national institution, in part because, in its heyday, it was a CIA house organ. With all its international editions and offices, it was useful to the agency in more ways than just propaganda. And it provided well-paid sinecures to many war intellectuals and Republican ex-officials.

9 comments:

  1. I hope Time, Newsweek, the NY Times are all not far behind. Good riddance.

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  2. Growing up, I read Reader's Digest, though as time went on I grew away from it. I tried a few years ago to see how it was, and ordered a year's subscription. Half the magazine was ads, including the obnoxious kinds that are so thick and unlike the regular glossy pages. The articles were more like self-help classes, and the magazine was packed full of military worship. Not surprised it went under.

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  3. Actually Newsweek doesn't publish anymore and was sold for something like $5, the NY Times is on the brink of bankrupty and might even have to sell its headquarters, and Time is still struggling and not far behind.

    It feels real good to see this sort of undeniable justice. God bless the internet.

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  4. When I last picked up an issue of Reader's Digest, about a quarter of the pages at the back were devoted to publishing an abridged version of a contemporary popular novel or work of non-fiction. Hence the name of the publication. Today I checked the RD website and found no evidence that such a service is still be offered. Can you imagine an issue of Playbill without stories about Broadway? A copy of Golfer's Digest without articles about golf? No wonder Reader's Digest is going under. Who needs about magazine devoted to health and diet tips?

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  5. The phrase "Laughter, the Best Medicine" might have been one of the few things Reader's Digest ever published that was true.

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  6. I read Readers Digest in doctors' and dentists' offices growing up in the 60's and 70's. It used to focus on ordinary people doing extraordinary things, but it began to go downhill when it switched to TV, film and political celebrities, most of whom are legends only in their minds.

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  7. I found that the magazine had such a "conservative" bias, that it kept falling off the right side of my coffee table. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

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  8. In my lifetime the only place that I've ever seen a Reader's Digest was in the stall of a head. Draw from that what you will ...

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  9. They had an article dissing men's rights. After that I never purchased another copy. Good riddance.

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