Less than a year after starting a hybrid magazine and paid membership organization, the Rev. Rick Warren and the Reader’s Digest Association said Wednesday that they were pulling the plug.Their plan was to capitalize on Mr. Warren’s best-selling books, like “The Purpose Driven Life,” to create a group patterned on his calls to Christian evangelism and charitable works.
They sold $29 annual memberships to Purpose Driven Connection, built around local chapters and online social networking tools. Members received a quarterly magazine of the same name — edited by Mr. Warren — DVDs and study guides. The magazine were also sold through retailers.
But their timing could not have been worse; the project began near the worst of the financial crisis, in the depths of the recession.
“The numbers for the membership were quite disappointing,” said William K. Adler, a spokesman for the Reader’s Digest Association. The partners declined to release sales figures for the memberships or the magazine.
They plan to keep operating the organization’s Web site, purposedriven.com, which has been free.
“Our biggest discovery was learning that people prefer reading our content online rather than in print, because it is more convenient and accessible,” Mr. Warren said in a statement.
The fourth and last issue of the magazine will be published this month. The Reader’s Digest Association said it had just one employee who worked on it full time, Frank Lalli, the editorial director, who recently left the association.
The company filed for bankruptcy protection in August under a plan that would make its lenders its majority owners, while reducing its $2.2 billion in debt to $550 million.
