I suppose it was inevitable, but a little jaw-dropping nonetheless. On Monday, the Reader’s Digest Association announced that it was filing for bankruptcy.

I spent approximately 2 years as a contributing editor to the magazine, including 2 in-house stints — producing the inaugural “America’s 100 Best” section in 2004, and filling in for an edit spot that had been vacated for a bit. I enjoyed taking the train up to Chappaqua and seeing the Pleasantville campus, though of course, there were signs that the lavishness the place was famous for was disappearing even then. The salad bar started to shrink. RDA sold the building and partially leased it back, which required lots of people with great offices to suddenly be in cubicles. By my last on-site visit in summer, 2006, I barely recognized the place.

I — along with all the other shareholders — sold our stock to Ripplewood Holdings in 2007, so there’s no financial loss to me from this. I hadn’t written for them since April 2008. They’d always paid well — up to $4/word in 2004 — though that seemed to be coming down awfully fast as well by 2008 (more like $2/word)

Nonetheless, it’s strange to see a magazine like Reader’s Digest mentioned in the same headline as “Chapter 11.” The economic winds have been against general interest magazines. Once, big advertisers were content to reach everyone. Now, only car companies, pharmaceutical companies and household products have much interest in that, and even these blue chips would prefer to segment their market a bit more. Reader’s Digest had responded with two editions — a regular one and a “Young Families” one — but still, it wasn’t enough to really get the niche marketing dollars. And even niche marketing dollars may not be enough to sustain a magazine these days. Magazines like Portfolio and BusinessWeek, which are specifically for business people with high incomes, predominantly male, haven’t been able to hold onto their revenue streams.

The problem seems to be that the ad-supported revenue model of media is broken. As an editor once explained to me, magazine journalism is largely advertising dollars seeking eyeballs. While many editors and reporters like to convince themselves otherwise — and try to maintain a Chinese wall between ads and edits — they’re kind of fooling themselves. Advertising is what pays the bills, because there’s no link between subscription revenue and the cost to produce a publication. And so when advertising revenue falls, magazines have to produce less content (because there are fewer ad pages to fill out the magazine), pay their writers less by lowering word counts or rates, lay people off,  etc. Unfortunately, all these changes lower quality and give people even less reason to purchase or subscribe to a magazine.

Changing technology undermined the Reader’s Digest model almost 2 15 years ago, as people could suddenly get access to lots of consumer magazines without subscribing, via the web. So suddenly there was less of a motive to condense other articles and reprint them. Reader’s Digest had tried to convert itself into more of a service magazine (think lots of articles along the lines of “How to swap anythingt”), along with telling its trademark “Drama in Real Life” stories, jokes, and book excerpts. But even the jokes still became subject to cost-cutting. I remember reading Reader’s Digest in the late 1980s and seeing that jokes were paying $400. In the latest issue, that’s down to $100.  This is almost like monitoring the number of pencils employees take from the supply closet. Why burn the goodwill when we’re not talking huge amounts of money anyway?

I’m increasingly thinking that the media world needs to get its head around the idea of reaching fewer readers, but readers who are willing to pay most of the freight of what they read. And that involves giving them something worth reading. Even then, this is not going to be an easy transition. I think Wired magazine and the New Yorker do an amazing job with their features, and they’re both losing heaps of money. But partly this is because I’m only paying about $1/issue for both of them. I would definitely subscribe to fewer magazines if I had to pay more, but I’d still subscribe to some. If this were repeated for millions of readers, there would be a major shake-out in the industry, but some players would survive, profitably.

At least I hope. One of the saddest things as a writer is ordering vintage magazines from the 1950s or so and seeing that something like Good Housekeeping ran real fiction, and sonnets, and long articles in between all its service stuff. Now, the feature well is much smaller, and everything is pushed to be about “you, you, you” when really, we’re not all that interesting to read about. The world, however, is.