Papercrafts, Creating Keepsakes Magazines To Merge, End Print Editions

Creating Keepsakes magazine announced today that the magazine is ceasing publication after their November/December 2013 issue. Paper Crafts magazine is ceasing print publication as well, and the two publications will be merged together into a new all-digital publication called Paper Crafts & Scrapbooking.

The announcement blamed the change on the difficulty of competing against the immediacy of the increasingly digital world of publishing when dealing with lengthy "print lag" in producing a paper magazine. Creating Keepsakes had recently gone to publishing split issues, part paper and part digital, in an attempt to deal with this challenge.

Paper Crafts & Scrapbooking will be a monthly publication, and should look familiar to readers of the previous publications:

Created by some of the same editors from both Paper Crafts and Creating Keepsakes magazines, you’ll find many columns and features you’ve always loved in CK, including Latest & Greatest, Sketches, and Tips & Tricks.

The Creating Keepsakes announcement says that subscribers will receive two issues of the new magazine for every single issue remaining on their Creating Keepsakes subscription. No information has been offered about the conversion of Paper Crafts subscriptions to the digital publication, other than that their Facebook page is directing people requesting refunds to contact their Subscriber Services.

If you only want to read the magazine periodically, single issues will be available for purchase via iTunes or via the magazine's online store.

Print lovers won't be entirely left out in the cold, however. Creative Crafts Group will continue to publish special issues once a month in paper, which will be available through print outlets. The company also plans to continue its CK Conventions in 2014, promising a schedule for those will be announced soon.

This move by Creative Crafts Group, coupled with the recent digital shift of Northridge Publishing, leaves Stampington (which publishes Somerset Memories, Somerset Studio, Stamper’s Sampler, Where Women Create, and Art Journaling, among others) as the only major print magazine publisher remaining in the industry in the U.S. Print publishing, as I detailed in my editorial last year, is on a march towards extinction due to a variety of factors. Digital content is the future in all industries, not just crafts. (Correction: All-American Crafts is still publishing Scrapbooking & Beyond and Paper Creations, as well.).

UPDATE: Despite the promise that "some of the same editors of both Paper Crafts and Creating Keepsakes" will be creating the new Paper Crafts & Scrapbooking digital magazine, sources connected to Creating Keepsakes tell this site that the entire staff of Creating Keepsakes editors has been let go by Creative Crafts Group. The company's senior editors, who were working for both PaperCrafts and Creating Keepsakes, were retained.