The fading of mass culture has led the famous newspaper insert to shut down its print edition. Sunday will never be the same.
The fading of mass culture has led the famous newspaper insert to shut down its print edition. Sunday will never be the same.
P arade magazine, a publication with an audience old enough to appreciate the Spanky and Our Gang reference above, published its final print edition earlier this month. For decades, Parade, founded in 1941, was inserted into Sunday newspapers across the country. More than 700 papers with a total circulation of around 32 million included the magazine at its height but, by January 2022, that number had been cut in half.
Parade will continue in an “e-edition,” available for local publishers to tack on to the distribution of their digital product. But, divorced from the physical Sunday paper, the utility of an online-only Parade is an open question. Its charm and appeal might not be obvious to the type of reader accessing a newspaper on a tablet or mobile device because the information found within is not immediately useful in the traditional sense of the word.
The true value provided by Parade translates into a greater familiarity with what our fellow citizens find interesting and entertaining. These are the topics we used to talk about at parties and get-togethers and around water coolers at work before the proliferation of the siloed worlds of Twitter and Slack, in which we can choose to limit our exposure to others outside a pre-screened social circle.
Parade, as its name implies, is a celebration — a celebration fueled by elements of the common culture that are fading by the year. There are fewer blockbuster films, hit TV shows, best-selling authors, and pop stars that cross geographic, cultural, and generational lines. It seems politics is one of the few topics that has become more universal over the past decade, but it can’t be healthy to have the latest machinations of the government leading nearly every conversation.
In its prime, Parade was a weekly showcase for small slices of American life. The cover story usually featured a well-known, beloved celebrity with a new mass-appeal project to promote. Turn the page and be greeted by “Walter Scott’s Personality Parade,” answering mostly entertainment-themed gossip questions submitted by readers from across the country. The prestigious annual “Parade High School All-America Teams” honored the best prep athletes in various sports. “Ask Marilyn” gave us brain-twisters and logic puzzles answered by Marilyn vos Savant, who at one point was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as having the highest-recorded IQ. “What America Eats” suggested recipes and drink concoctions for your next gathering with friends and neighbors. And through the year, Parade was there to suggest gift ideas and interesting ways to celebrate the holidays with family.
Special themed issues appeared annually like clockwork. The “What People Earn” edition polled dozens and dozens of Americans and reported annual salaries for various jobs all across the country (10-year-old me found the information fascinating). “The Giving Issue,” usually released around Thanksgiving, helped to promote philanthropic gifts near the end of the year. For a while, the magazine even updated a list of “The World’s 10 Worst Dictators” each year (usually bringing bad news to Robert Mugabe).
Parade’s success even helped spawn imitators such as USA Weekend (killed in 2014) and American Profile (shut down in 2020). In recent years, though it survived, Parade became more pamphlet than magazine. Pages were trimmed. Long-time features were shelved. Ads targeted only the highest end of the age demographic, hawking Jitterbug phones, walk-in baths, and battery-powered Zoomer chairs.
And, occasionally, the long lead time needed for production and insertion into newspapers across the country led to embarrassment. Recently, Parade featured Betty White on the cover of its January 16, 2022, edition, wishing her a happy 100th birthday, which would have been celebrated the following day. White, however, passed away on December 31. It was too late to recall and redistribute the magazine, so the cover and feature ran anyway. It’s a problem that won’t crop up again in an e-edition.
Parade’s print demise can’t come as a complete surprise to anyone. Sunday newspapers across the country have been getting slimmer and slimmer as circulation and revenue numbers decline. Recently, I asked around 30 journalism students at Hillsdale College if anyone read the Sunday paper. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, not a single hand went up.
When I was young, Parade, the comics pages, and the sports section were the gateways to a lifelong habit of appreciating all the other offerings inside the paper. To this day, I save Parade to read last. It’s a tonic that reinvigorates me following the ingestion of pages and pages of more dense and consequential information. For those of us who swim in the deep end of the news pool, it’s also a reminder that the focus of much of the country can be on very different things.
Flipping through the final printed edition from Sunday, November 13, one found a cover story featuring 77-year-old Steve Martin discussing his life in movies. Peter Billingsley took part in a Q&A to talk about a sequel to 1983’s A Christmas Story, a film set in the early 1940s. And Parade went into the archives, showing us a series of animal-themed covers from the 1950s and explaining its advocacy in the 1960s for a Moscow–Washington hotline.
It was a whole lot of backward-looking content. Despite the “e-edition” coming in future weeks, it felt like an end. I hope it’s not.
In a quickly changing world, we could use the encouragement to slow down and appreciate the bigger things we have in common. Because when the parade is actually over, we’ll all leave the streets, crowded with people, and go back, isolated, to our individual homes.