The cover photo of Radar’s October/November issue was shot by Kurt Iswarienko.
For the third time since 2003, the entertainment and gossip glossy Radar is folding.
In a related announcement October 24, American Media, publisher of Star and other magazines, said it has acquired Radar’s popular Web site, Radaronline.com. AMI plans to re-launch Radar Online as a site for celebrity news in 2009.
Also on October 24, Manhattan Media said it was folding 02138 magazine after two years of publication. The bimonthly magazine, named for the zip code of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was a high-end lifestyle title for alumni of Harvard University.
The publishers of both magazines blamed bad economic conditions.
Radar editor Maer Roshan told The New York Observer that the magazine’s investors were losing more money than they expected.
Radar staff, who were in the middle of putting together their 16th issue, were asked to leave the office, The Observer reported.
Radar’s design director was Kate Elazegui and the photography director was Gregory Garry. Garry has also had the poor fortune of working as photo director for Weekend, which folded in August 2006, and Budget Living, which folded in February 2006. (He left both of those titles before they closed.)
Other creative staff on the masthead include senior photo editor Stacey Pittman, photo researcher Sandy Jordan, deputy art director John Sheppard, associate art director Nicole Mazur and assistant managing editor Akiko Carver.
Headquartered in New York, the latest incarnation of Radar magazine was published eight times a year and had a cover price of $3.99. Its covers occasionally made a splash with celebrity photo illustrations – Tom Cruise pierced with arrows like the famous Esquire cover of Muhammed Ali; or Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton recreating Vanity Fair’s famously tasteless Tom Ford cover.
The first incarnation of Radar, in 2003, lasted just two issues. A 2005 resurrection lasted for three issues. In 2005, the investors who pulled the plug on Radar blamed the “current economic environment.”
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Dec 15, 2005: Radar Magazine Suspends Production
