by 
Updated on December 10, 2021
I bring news of a trio of long-running magazines/catalogs finally going under.
“SkyMall,” the ubiquitous back-of-the-airplane-seat filler, is filing for bankruptcy. The catalog, offering all sorts of odd knickknacks that were pricey and useless to anyone not prone to buying stuff from infomercials, has finally been run out of business by the Internet. Specifically, it’s cited that with airplanes now offering WiFi, there’s no longer a need for the catalog/magazine.
Elsewhere in print media, long-running pet magazines “Cat Fancy” and “Dog Fancy” are ending their runs, with February seeing them replaced by bimonthly magazines “Catster” and “Dogster,” both spinoffs of existing websites. The new magazines will run on alternate months. As for why the older pet magazines are being cancelled, New York magazine cites changing times and attitudes toward pet ownership, especially cats, and the magazines coming across as too old-fashioned/staid. The magazines’ current subscribers will be rolled over into the new magazines, however. “Cat Fancy” (and presumably, the new “Catster”) still has 160,000 subscribers, which outpaces any single issue American comic book’s sales in a typical month. The most recent sales figures puts December 2014‘s top-selling comic, “Batman” #37, at 113,255 issues sold.
Of course, whether the new pet magazines will succeed given magazines as a whole’s bigger problems nowadays remains to be seen. Below are the covers to the new and improved “Catster” and “Dogster.”
