SYLVIA MCKEOWN: Publications drop like flies as beast of social media gobbles up advertising revenue
Start of 2019 has been rough for people in the SA publishing industry, but US media and jobs have been culled too
I found out about the final closure of Elle magazine in a Sowetan article. I had been the food editor — yes, I love both tech and eating — and was proud of what the team had achieved over the course of the previous year. For most of that year editor Kelly Fung had done pretty much everything herself; with precious few resources, she worked tirelessly to scrape together a magazine that was not only beautiful but meaningful in the way it was trying to position itself in the SA market. Finally, a little more than a month before it was announced that Ndalo Media was in financial trouble, a cracking assistant editor was brought into the mix. We finally had a solid, rounded-out team and I was excited to see what we would achieve. But as of last week, Elle is no more. The start of 2019 has been rough for people in the media industry, and we have only just hit February. Four magazines went down with Ndalo, and Associated Media has just gutted a nice chunk out of their mastheads. And this af...
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