Reader's Digest's golden era recalled as last workers leave

The Straight Story

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Mon Dec-27-10 07:38 AM
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Reader's Digest's golden era recalled as last workers leave

CHAPPAQUA � The immense winged Pegasus statues will stay � but only because the symbols of Reader's Digest are too heavy to be moved from atop the Georgian cupola. The stretch of blacktop off the Saw Mill River Parkway is still called Reader's Digest Road. But the company that gave these things to Chappaqua is gone. Some might say Reader's Digest as they knew it has been gone for a while. But this month the Digest officially moved its last workers out of the building in Chappaqua where it put out the world's largest-circulation magazine since 1939. The Digest's new headquarters are in Manhattan and a few departments work out of White Plains. The Chappaqua headquarters building that was for decades filled with thousands of employees will be leased to other companies by its new owners. But the memories of the Digest's days in Chappaqua will linger.<[br />In its heyday during the lifetime of its founders, DeWitt and Lila Wallace, the company took its place as the premier corporate citizen of Chappaqua, a place where locals could go down and get a job and employees were treated to legendary perks. But after its founders died and the company went public in 1990, the things that made both the magazine and the business distinctive began to change as it tried to remake itself to fit a new media landscape.

For decades, though, the Digest was different.

"It was a very great place to work," said Ed Thompson, a former editor-in-chief for The Reader's Digest Association. "I can't imagine a company being better."

For DeWitt Wallace, the most important thing was his employees, not the readers, said Thompson, who joined the company in 1960 and lives in North Salem.

"He wanted them to be as happy as can be and paid well," he said.

http://www.lohud.com/article/201012260343

Key sentence from the above:

"But after its founders died and the company went public in 1990"

Invenstors, I am guessing, did not care so much about the product as they did about squuezing every cent out of it they could get. Private companies want to make money too, but see the long haul and care more about the actual product, it's customers, and employees - investors in this day and age want a quick, short term profit, and will chop away all they can for a number.

Sure, some will say 'so, it was a RW mag, etc and so on' still does not matter.

From later in the article:

As the 1990s wore on, the way the Wallaces did business began to be seen as quaint and old-fashioned. Where DeWitt Wallace would subsidize foreign editions that were losing money instead of closing them, the new leadership began launching reorganizations and cutting staff in waves of layoffs.

They also started changing the magazine, doing away with the condensed articles and adding features about celebrities.

"There's 100 magazines that do that better than the Digest," Thompson said.