Reader's Digest Changes

At the doctor's office Thursday, while waiting my obligatory hour in the waiting room, I looked briefly from time to time (when headache and fever would allow) at the latest issue of Reader's Digest. What a colossal waste of time and tome. How far the mighty has fallen! RD has been reduced to a collection of advertisements broken up by a multitude of lists such as "Twelve Things Your Pediatrician Won't Tell You," and so forth. The book condensation at the end is now about the length of what an earlier feature article used to be, and there are no more than maybe four articles of any substance at all--and I use the term "substance" very loosely.

There was a card in the magazine for ten issues for eight dollars--something that five years ago I would have snapped up as being a good deal. Now I wouldn't waste my time.

Contrast that with a couple of issues from the early '90s that I picked up somewhere along the way and have read in these last few days of illness, when reading or studying anything extensive would not have been easy. It took quite awhile to wade through all the good reading in those issues. Decent articles and a true book condensation. I closed the covers of both issues feeling somewhat more informed on a number of different subjects.

I wonder what the editors of RD really think they are accomplishing by dumbing down the magazine so far.