Toronto Life's "little red books" discontinued

Toronto Life's "little red books", an innovation of outgoing editor John Macfarlane, are being discontinued. The content will be posted online and some of it will be incorporated into the ROP pages of the magazine, according to a story in mastheadonline (sub req'd).

The so-called monthly "outsert" magazines, which were polybagged with subscribers' copies, were something that readers valued highly. But, according to Group Publisher Sharon McAuley, publisher St. Joseph Media will be saving a considerable amount in printing costs by posting the material online, net of the costs of additional pages in the main magazine.

The original idea for the "little red books" came from a concern that supplements to the magazine on food, golf, real estate and other topics were "eating the parent", making it hard to find the core content of Toronto Life. The idea was to publish digest-sized guides and include them as a premium for the magazine's 90,000 subscribers. After a fairly lean time at the beginning, according to Macfarlane, all of the red books made money from advertising. And readers told the company that they kept the little books on hand for a whole year until the next issue came out.

According to the Masthead story, Toronto Life is also launching a third standalone newsstand title about real estate. It will join Shopping and Eating and Drinking on the newsstands.