From the Publisher: Parade magazine opens new chapter with format change
“The times they are a-changin’.”
None of us can disagree with the truth expressed so succinctly in the 1964 song by Bob Dylan.
Indeed, the times, they are a-changin,’ and come Nov. 20, our readers, along with those nationwide, likely will notice something has changed about their Sunday newspaper.
Parade magazine will be missing. The last printed edition of Parade will appear on Sunday, Nov. 13. It will continue to be published as an e-magazine and will be available every Sunday, just as it is now, in the online version of the Delaware State News.
Marshall Field III, an investment banker and heir to the Marshall Field department store fortune, founded the Chicago Sun in 1941 — a newspaper that eventually became the Chicago Sun-Times — and then, later the same year, on May 31, he launched Parade as a supplement for his and other newspapers in the United States.
In a mere five years, circulation topped 3.5 million copies per week, and by 2013, Parade became the nation’s most widely read magazine, with a pressrun weekly of 32 million copies and more than 54 million Sunday morning readers.
After nearly two decades of ownership by the private holding company Field Enterprises, John Hay Whitney, publisher of the New York Herald Tribune and America’s original venture capitalist, purchased Parade in 1958.
The magazine swapped hands four more times in the next 64 years: First, in 1973, Booth Newspapers purchased it from Whitney, then sold it three years later to Advance Publications. In 2014, the Athlon Media Group, later known as AMG/Parade or Parade Media, bought the magazine from Advance, before selling it in 2022 to The Arena Group, which also publishes Sports Illustrated.
A change in approach accompanied the repeated sale of the magazine. On the last weekend in December 2019, Parade reduced its publishing schedule to skip six weekends a year. The plan was to publish combined holiday issues, and the first, a Christmas-themed issue, appeared the weekend of Dec. 21, 2019.
This plan and the lag time between news and publication deadlines resulted in some serious unanticipated and downright embarrassing consequences.
Perhaps the worst example of out-of-date reporting occurred Jan. 16, 2022, when the magazine featured a cover story about actress Betty White, whose 100th birthday would have been the next day, on Jan. 17. Ms. White, though, unexpectedly died Dec. 31, 2021 — too late to recall, reprint and redistribute the magazine — and the erroneous feature ran anyway and required many newspapers to print clarifications.
Despite these goofs, I know many of you, like me, have a long and fond connection to Parade. In the 1960s, as someone just learning to read and love newspapers, the Sunday comics and the sports pages, along with Parade, offered me a gateway to start reading the rest of the paper and led to my lifelong devotion to newspapers, their role in our republic and ongoing importance to our communities.
Parade’s regular features were among my favorite things to read. Of course, I faithfully follow Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, Laugh Parade and Cartoon Parade, but my all-time favorite remains Ask Marilyn by Marilyn vos Savant.
She was born Marilyn Mach, and I have always loved her witty pseudonym, Savant — which is an actual family name and means “a learned person” — because it so perfectly matches her spot in “Guinness World Records,” where she is recognized as the person with the highest recorded IQ in the world.
Her status as a savant is not to be taken lightly, either. In 1990, she popularized and solved the brainteaser, known as the Monty Hall problem — a probability puzzle loosely based on the television game show “Let’s Make a Deal.” After she explained the answer to the puzzle, some 10,000 readers of Parade, including more than 1,000 with Ph.D.s, wrote to the magazine to complain that Ms. vos Savant got it wrong, but suffice it to say, she was, indeed, right.
The times, though, they are a-changin,’ and I, for one, am so glad I will not have to give up the pleasure I take in reading Parade, and I hope all of you who love Parade as I do will join in celebrating the silver lining here: Parade is not going away. It is evolving and will continue to live online, and all who enjoy the magazine, its regular features and annual special editions can continue to read to their hearts’ content.
All you need is a subscription to the Delaware State News’ e-newspaper, a digital replica of the print edition, that contains every story, every ad and, on Sundays, Parade in an e-magazine format. It is easy to sign up. If you have questions about your online access, or if you need to obtain a subscription, just contact customerservice@iniusa.org or call 302-741-8298.
Darel La Prade is the group publisher for INI Delmarva. Besides the Delaware State News and BayToBayNews.com, the group includes three weekly newspapers in Maryland, a fourth weekly in Delaware and three monthly newspapers that cover Smyrna, Milford and Georgetown-Millsboro.
