This Publisher Thought Ecommerce Was Its Savior. Now It’s Dead.

It was a rough final decade for 106-year-old F+W Media

After 106 years of creating content for hobbyists, F+W Media has filed for bankruptcy, citing $105.2 million in outstanding debt after a failed decade-long attempt to reinvent itself as an ecommerce company—and the exorbitant tech contracts it signed as a means to that end.

To be sure, 2008 was a rough time to be in media. And as consumer demand for print declined, F+W decided to focus more on ecommerce. In 2014, former CEO David Nussbaum doubled down on the space, announcing a new name—F+W, a Content + Ecommerce Company—and announcing that F+W was “strategically moving away from our traditional roots in the media business” to focus on “its fastest-growing businesses, digital and ecommerce.”

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