Wow, so Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine will both cease publication in September. That, for me, came completely out of the blue. I haven't purchased a Dragon magazine in about three years, but I'm still sad to see them go. I held a Dragon Magazine subscription for about five years 'back in the day', and loved receiving them. It's funny to look back on them now and to remember reading 'Forum', the section that was the precursor to, and quite supplanted by, the forums of the internet now. Of course I want to speculate... was that what killed Dragon, revenue lost by the ease of finding free original material online? From the many accounts I've read (online, funnily) it sounds as though Dragon and Dungeon were doing quite swimmingly, were profitable, and were being well received, so who knows. Plenty of rumours abound (speculation is our pastime!) it seems, especially with the Digital Initiative announced by WotC, and that (Related? Unrelated?) WotC has begun to not renew IP they had licensed out (such as Dragonlance and Ravenloft).
Just starting out to be an editor of a gaming magazine, the ending of Dragon/Dungeon amusingly strikes me from another angle as well. 359 issues for Dragon when it ends in Sept - we're talking _the_ most premiere and well-known gaming mag of all. I'm disappointed to see it go because the magazine holds a place in my memory, and at the same time I've got this sense of something - not sure what exactly, but something - because of my new role as editor/manager. The magazine I manage in no way competes with Dragon (different game lines), but we are online (does this bode well for online mags, will WotC's official online mag lend credence to them?) and we are a magazine in a similar vein and structure to Dragon. Really, it doesn't strike me any particular way, but it strikes me that it strikes me within this new context I have in taking on the role of launching and creating a bi-monthly gaming magazine. (Er, did that last sentence communicate?)
Dragon and Dungeon. A long reign and a retirement perhaps too soon. For the moment it seems like a loss: you forged many a game, set aloft many a mind, and launched many a writer into the industry they love. What may succeed it could well pick up where it left off, or not. Either way, it's legacy is not yet at an end.
Some links to the announcement and from 'big' players in the field: here (includes press releases), here, here, and here (scroll down to Monte's posts).