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You know something? Bushwah. A friend who, like me, is a longtime subscriber to Gourmet recalls having seen an article estimating how much Conde Nast would have had to charge per issue in order to make the magazine sustainable without advertising. The answer: Roughly $18 per issue. That's quite a bit LESS than it costs to buy some European and Japanese fashion magazines, and I can't imagine that Gourmet's readers wouldn't have been willing to pay it. It's impossible to know, of course, how many options Conde Nast entertained -- making the magazine into a subscription-based website; raising the per-issue price to, say, $10 per issue and cutting out half the ads; shifting to bi-monthly; etc. -- but the fact that the company doesn't seem to have offered its readers any of these options suggests that Conde Nast wasn't particularly interested in trying to save Gourmet. The company is struggling financially, its executives are terrified of going down with the ship, and they have -- like so many executives before them -- decided to believe that only the Taylorites at McKinsey could save their asses. It was a desperate measure taken by desperate men, and like most such moves, it will neither better the environment overall -- the magazine world will be a poorer place without Gourmet -- nor accomplish what it is supposed to do.