THE precursor to Gourmet, and the first truly successful American food publication, was founded in the 1890s and titled The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. It eventually changed its name to American Cookery and then died in 1947, forced under, in part, by the founding of Gourmet in 1941 by Earle MacAusland, who had patterned his new brainchild on the catalog-magazine of a famed Boston food purveyor, S. S. Pierce. It was the end of domestic science and food economy and the beginning of the era of the gourmet, “the honest seeker of the summum bonum of living” as set forth in the charter issue. MacAusland’s recipes made few accommodations to reality; he even suggested that subscribers save the issues and use the recipes once rationing had ended.

Now, 68 years after its founding, Gourmet has followed American Cookery, ending a long and masterful turn at the helm of the food publishing world. This, hard on the heels of the death of Julia Child in 2004, makes one tremulous about the future. Is American magazine publishing on the verge of being devoured by the democratic economics of the Internet? Has the media industry fully become an everyman’s playing field, without the need for credentials or paid membership? Or, to ask the questions that every media executive is really whispering, “Will I have a job next year?”

My first experience with Gourmet was a head-on collision. In 1990, 10 years after I had founded Cook’s Magazine, Condé Nast purchased Cook’s and then immediately shut it down, Gourmet swallowing up our subscribers. It was the triumph of the American magazine model, one driven by lifestyle rather than nuts and bolts, and floated by the billions of advertising dollars that poured through a narrow spigot into the magazine industry, controlled by a select few, the chauffeured, hard-charging publishers of New York’s powerhouse magazine corporations. It was a top-down, winner-take-all proposition, an oligarchy of sorts, a business with a huge barrier to entry and no welcome mat for the upstart entrepreneur. In a serendipitous turnabout 19 years later, Cook’s is today alive and well (I restarted the magazine in 1993) and Gourmet has foundered. The difference? We abandoned advertising in 1993 for a 100-percent subscriber-financed model, including a thriving paid Web site.

Image Credit... Ivory Simms

Yet the media world was not without charm, as I learned in 1985 during my first meeting with S.I. Newhouse, the chairman of Condé Nast. (Mr. Newhouse had just purchased The New Yorker, a magazine that already owned a controlling share in my Cook’s Magazine.) It was 7 a.m., his favored meeting hour, and I discovered him shoeless, stuffed into a baggy gray sweater, and shuffling about, half-swallowing his words in a manner that spoke of humility and intellect, rather than New York arrogance. Here was a guy, I thought, who really loves the magazine business. He poured his fortune into his magazine properties and his editors, even when the prospect of return seemed dim. His was a world of philanthropic publishing.