KUALA LUMPUR – Beloved by previous generations, the British edition of popular family magazine Reader’s Digest has announced its closure after 86 years, citing financial pressures.
Its editor-in-chief Eva Mackevic said on LinkedIn that the UK edition had to “come to an end” as the magazine publishing landscape had become “unforgiving”.
“Unfortunately, the company just couldn’t withstand the financial pressures,” she said in her post.
UK’s Mail Online, meanwhile, said the closure comes 14 years after Reader’s Digest UK had troubles over a £125m (about RM746 million) pension fund deficit.
It was bought over by another company and sold again in 2014 to a venture capitalist, although it struggled to match its sales of one million copies a month that it achieved in 2000.
The magazine’s origins are in the United States, where it was founded by DeWitt Wallace and his wife Lila in 1922. Wallace’s idea was to collect articles of public interest and compile them into a magazine.
By 1938, Reader’s Digest had grown in popularity and the first international edition was published in the UK.
By the early 1960s, it had 40 different international editions, was published in 13 languages, which were read by 23 million people. – May 2, 2024