Anybody who was ever in the newspaper trade knew E&P—as in, “Did you read the latest E&P?”  When you mentioned E&P in mixed company, the outsiders invariably misheard, thinking you were talking about the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co, Inc.. That’s longhand for the A&P supermarket chain..

Well in truth, they weren’t completely wrong about that.

E&P, which was short for Editor & Publisher magazine, was a kind of supermarket in the sense that on a weekly basis it offered a broad array of  highly digestible bits of inside information about the media world.  Some of it was gossipy and delicious and some of it was as tasty as cauliflower—especially the more technical stuff.

But then there are those who really love cauliflower.  And even if you didn’t necessarily want to read an E&P article about say, the latest in high-speed printing presses, you read it anyway  because like cauliflower, you knew it was good for you.

One of the great things about E&P was that it really was a trade publication. It wasn’t dressed up with color photos and snappy page design. Frankly, its look was homely.

In fact, there was nothing pretentious about it. I can’t recall reading any high falutin’ thumb sucking pieces within its pages. E&P was just the facts. Short, sweet and concise.

E&P wasn’t meant to seve only journalists either. It was accessible and relevent to the circulation guys, the production crews and the classified ad sellers, which is to say just about everyone who was involved in putting out the newspapers.

What’s more, it didn’t merely dwell on news from the major media centers of New York and Washington, D.C. It was all inclusive. Every 10,000 circ. rag in America was important to E&P

The Help Wanted ads in E&P were classic. Looking back, it seems the Toledo Blade was always hiring. Often, any given  ad would  leave out a newspaper’s precise location, and simply mention a geographical zone.

Example: “Zone 6 daily, circ. 16,000, seeks bright, self-starting news reporter to cover four-county region. Salary $12,000 to $15,000, depending on experience. Must have car. Send resume and cover letter to managing editor Fester Adams, PO Box, 2135, c/o Editor & Publisher.”

After reading  the ad, you’d go to a map, which would tell you that Zone 6 was a somewhere between North Dakota and Utah.

E&P had a regular feauture called “Shopt Talk At 30” which  appeared on the last page of the book and was supplied mostly by ink-stained types trying pick up a few extra bucks. I wrote a few of these for which I gratefully received $100 apiece. I remember writing a Shop Talk article on urban legends in the pre-Internet days when fake stories spread by word of mouth.

The numeral “30” is old typesetter code for the end of a story. And the end for E&P is at hand. This week, it was announced that the magazine will be closed.

I will miss E&P. It was a good friend, if that can be said about magazines.

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