Soap Opera Digest is Ending its Weekly Print Edition
by Todd Spangler
Oct. 27, 2023


The weekly print edition of Soap Opera Digest — the newsstand chronicler of daytime drama — is ending after nearly five decades.

Staffers were informed of the decision Friday, according to sources.




A spokesperson for a360Media, the company that owns the brand, confirmed that the weekly edition is being discontinued. The company plans to continue publishing special print issues of Soap Opera Digest four times per year.

“Soap Opera Digest, like many other brands, is adjusting its print frequency and shifting more resources to digital to better accommodate its audience,” the a360Media rep said in a statement to Variety.




Soap Opera Digest was first launched in 1975. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp bought the publication in 1989 for $70 million before selling it two years later, per the New York Times, and it has had a succession of different owners ever since.

In its heyday, the magazine had a circulation of 1.5 million in 1991, according to the Times. But the reach of its print edition, as with many magazines, has sharply fallen off in the decades since.

https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/soap-opera-digest-discontinuing-weekly-print-edition-1235770929/

When my mother and I loved watching soap operas we had two soap opera magazines we would buy one being Soap Opera Magazine and the other magazine we bought was Soap Opera Digest and we would buy Soap Opera Digest so we could learn about The Young And The Restless's new actors/actresses and learn about the other soap operas too and in fact we liked Soap Opera Digest so much that my mother even subscribed to it. What a shame that Soap Opera Digest is stopping print issues because it has been the only surviving soap opera magazines and people could learn about what happened on recent episodes of All My Children to learning about the finales of All My Children One Life To Live As The World Turns and Guiding Light and Soap Opera Digest would have interviews with soap stars such as Eric Breaden of The Young And The Restless to Hunter Tylo and many other soap stars and learning about important times in soap opera history such as the famous Luke And Laura wedding from General Hospital to new babies in soap opera episodes and many other things. But why I think Soap Opera Digest is mainly stopping print issues is to save money and with soap operas soon to be streaming I think it mainly ran it's course and many will grab the last Soap Opera Digest issue as a collector's item because many people collect TV magazines as a hobby. Speaking of collector's items which vintage issues of Soap Opera Digest are collectible and is the very first Soap Opera Digest issue collectible too as well?

EXCLUSIVE: a360Media Transferring Soap Opera Digest Subscriptions to Woman's World Magazine (https://www.soapoperanetwork.com/2023/11/a360media-transferring-soap-opera-digest-subscriptions-womans-world-magazine)

“Soap Opera Digest subscribers will soon see their subscriptions transferred to Woman's World, a health, beauty and nutrition magazine.”

So many magazine titles have really dropped in newsstand circulation -- it's not only due to the digital option people take, but also cover prices of the print editions have really risen. In the case of digests like these, what used to be an impulse buy in checkout lanes has people hesitating, especially given the fact that their groceries have become more expensive.