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On December 10, Nielsen Business Media announced that it was closing down its profitable trade publication Editor & Publisher, the award-winning “bible of the newspaper industry” which has published continuously for 125 years without missing a deadline.

The news was met with shock and dismay. As WalletPop.com observed: “In a year that saw 40,000 journalists [in the USA] lose their jobs and 143 newspapers fold, Editor & Publisher magazine stood like a sentinel, reporting every layoff, bankruptcy and closing with accuracy and integrity.”

Speaking to Walletpop.com, E&P editor Greg Mitchell noted:

“We’ve exactly mirrored the industry with layoffs, plus having to downsize, cut expenses and push our owners,” Mitchell said. At E&P, overly frugal ownership forced the publication to scrape by with an antiquated Web site — even though E&P advocated since the mid-1990s that newspapers and magazines embrace the Internet, or else suffer the consequences.

“For four years we were pushing our owners to update our site, and we couldn’t do it,” Mitchell said. “As a result, we have this dinosaur of a Web site. It hasn’t been updated in five years; we can’t do video, you can’t leave comments.”

Read the full WalletPop.com article.

Staff stayed on till the end of the year in order to put out the final print issue. For now, the website is expected to remain up. There had been some doubt on that, but a post dated December 29, 2009, affirms: “This web site will not be taken down.” However, it won’t be updated.

Check out ‘E&P In Exile‘, the official blog of former staffers:

This is the (we hope) temporary new home for longtime staffers at the award-winning “bible of the newspaper industry.” The Nielsen Co. on December 10 announced the closing of the magazine after 125 years of operation, but several possible buyers have since stepped forward. Stay tuned here for news, links and commentary by once and we hope future ‘E&P’ staffers.