The bimonthly lifestyle magazine Giant, which has been owned by Radio One since 2007, will shut down its print operations and move its content online to GIANTlife.com from here on in. “The economic downturn has had a tremendous impact on print media and we had to make the decision to suspend printing the publication,” said Tom Newman, the president of the Radio One division that runs Giant. When it was purchased, it was the company’s only print title. At that time, Radio One installed editor Smokey Fontaine to turn the title in a different direction, toward a young African-American audience. Beforehand, it had hovered at a 300,000 readership level aimed more generally at twentysomething men who liked entertainment, celebrities, and games, in a field where competitors like Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly had readerships of over a million each. For much of this year, the magazine has been denying rumors (some started by rival title XXL) that it was folding. So far, the magazine’s ownership has not announced whether there will be job cuts in relation to this change.
Giant Magazine suspends print edition [Washington Business Journal via Gawker]
