Hong Kong blog Flying Chair posted an obituary for the Far Eastern Economic Review which attracted a number of comments. One of them came from someone who identified himself as a FEER insider.
This is where he placed the blame for the demise of the magazine:
To sum up, the problem with FEER was a tectonic shift in advertising that left behind possible profits for local and global publications but is crushing regional ones. FEER had a circulation that ran between 90,000 and 100,000 over the past few years, which is as big as or bigger than any competitor in Asia… It won the best magazine in Asia award from the Society of Publishers in Asia (its peers and competitors) and won best investigative journalism. Not one week has gone by in the past years without other media quoting scoops in the REVIEW. You can check this in any media database. So to say FEER went soft or lost its way is patently false. Don’t let a cocktail of revisionist history and nostalgia cloud the reality of what really happened. (Emphasis added.)
Read the whole thing here.
FEER’s website is still up, with no mention of its own imminent demise.