2 Bride Magazines Shut Their Doors

Condé Nast, a major magazine publisher has decided to permanently shut the doors of four of their magazines including Gourmet magazine, parenting magazine Cookie, and 2 bridal magazines Modern Bride and Elegant Bride. The unfortunate demise of printed media has sunk its talons into newspapers around the country and now taking many magazines into the abyss with them.

In an almost bizarre coincidence, wedding website Get Married launches their premiere issue of their wedding magazine Get Married.  With what some may see as a bold move to enter into a crumbling industry, Get Married took many tremendous strides to insure that the magazine vaulted onto the scene with sure footing.

They set up a solid foundation starting with naming Stephanie Davis Executive Editor of the new publication who has written for GQ, Self, Brides and the now foiled Gourmet magazine which had been on news stands since 1941.

Then to solidify the positioning, Get Married entered into the technology arena by being the first bridal publication to incorporate Microsoft tags into its magazine so that readers can take a photo of the tag and watch more in depth content on products and other items of interest right on their camera phones.

Regardless of how you view Get Married’s risky venture into the territory, the overall plan was very well executed and very timely in order to pick up the scattered brides left by Condé Nast’s unfortunate decision to shut its doors on 4 of its more prestigious titles.

Brides are even being offered a free issue of the new wedding magazine at http://www.getmarried.com/magazine to take it out for a trial run.

The Knot’s Big Problems

Photo by Graham Minchkin and obtained via Flickr

I’m pretty sure that we’re all familiar with TheKnot.com and its many branches of government. However, it appears that The Knot has been on a downward spiral with brides and now wedding vendors.  Their release of “The Knot’s Best of Wedding Guide 2009″ had some major issues and it became glaringly obvious that it wasn’t based on feedback, but greenbacks.  The Knot’s Editors Pick of DJ companies was a company that had 50 complaints on Ripoff.com, multiple complaints filed against them from the Better Business Bureau who also graded them with an F, and additionally had a few negative news stories on them on television including Inside Edition.  Great advice, Knottie.  Just wow.

Then to make matters worse, posts ordained by The Knot informed people to not choose local bakers over the venue’s in-house bakers to avoid cake cutting costs.  Really?  This along with other suggestions that kick the local vendors to the curb entirely. Not to mention their wealth of bad advice that people seem to be getting downright agitated about.

Truth be told, it appears as The Knot has become a victim of themselves and appear to have lost focus.  Either that or they don’t have time to properly manage their resources which has been consistently sending out bad advice pretty much all of 2009.  And with the presence of competitors on the horizon like Get Married at GetMarried.com that just announced a wedding magazine to further compliment their online presence and their already popular daily television show on Lifetime, The Knot may be a little too comfortable with their lead.

Brides are a fickle bunch and once you give them bad information, you’re hard pressed to get a second chance with the amount of resources available to them online.  I’ll be very curious to see how GetMarried’s offerings align with The Knot’s efforts once the Get Married magazine launches in September and especially since there are major changes that are sure to come with it.  Maybe The Knot should start looking for a good moat digger.