Calling in those McKinsey folks to review your profit and loss numbers in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s is a little like having Dr. Kevorkian over to offer a second opinion.

“No, really, I’m feeling fine. Just a little touch of the flu.”

“Not at your age. You know, if you were a new publication, you might pull through. But Harold started you back in 1925. That’s a long, long haul for a weekly. But look on the bright side: it’s been a good run.”

When Si Newhouse decided that Gourmet was wearing a Do Not Resuscitate bracelet this week, a great many people were stunned. My wife even called Condé Nast to leave a message for Mr. Newhouse, but the switchboard said there was no way to leave a message for the boss. Maybe that’s the way it is when you’re the emperor. You can begin to feel as if you don’t need to listen to anyone, even your customers. And I guess that’s true.

That’s what bothers me. In the equation that McKinsey puts forth, if a magazine loses money for X period of time, no matter how brutal the overall business climate, you kill it. It’s just a product that failed. The stakeholders are the shareholders of the corporation, aren’t they?

I don’t think so. Enlightened business thinking holds that the stakeholders in a business actually form a broader constituency. For one, the customers have a stake in the organization. You invited them, encouraged them, brought them into a relationship. The employees are stakeholders, too, planning their lives and careers around the enterprise. There is the community that supported you, as well. That’s the food community, the New York publishing community, and the magazine distribution communit

We learn from Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times how Charles H. Townsend CEO of Condé Nast sees things. And just between us, if I was Elizabeth Hughes or whoever has P&L responsibility at the New Yorker, I would examine these quotes carefully, since someone might be saying them about me before too long. And then I might take a few moments to make sure I could find the exits in an emergency. You can’t be too careful.

So, New Yorker, ask yourself, could this be you? “In the economics of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, this would be a business decision balanced by the cultural reticence to part with iconic brands,” Charles H. Townsend, Condé Nast’s chief executive, said in an interview. “This economy is a completely different bag.” Feedbag? Trashbag? Bodybag? Just wondering.

Then there’s this thought from Suzanne M. Grimes, who oversees Every Day With Rachael Ray, among other brands, for the Reader’s Digest Association. (Ah, excuse me! EXCUSE ME! Didn’t Reader’s Digest go bankrupt last month? This is The N.Y. Times’s expert on where Gourmet went wrong?)

“Cooking is getting more democratic,” she said. “Food has become an emotional currency, not an aspiration.”

Now if you’re at the New Yorker and not hiding under your desk, just play along with me here. It might strengthen you for the future. Just substitute the word thinking for cooking and you get this: “Thinking is getting more democratic,” someone might be saying someday. “Thinking has become an emotional currency, not an aspiration.”

So if you’re in the thinking and not the cooking business, it could look bad for you, too.

Now try the same device with this farther down in the article:

It [food] has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Ms. Ray and the Food Network stars. Ms. Reichl is a celebrity in the food world, but of an elite type. She ‘is one of those icons in chief,’ said George Janson [advertising guy] But what harried cooks want now, it seems, is less a distant idol and more a pal.

So the New York Times obit for the New Yorker in a few months might read:

Thinking has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Twitter and Facebook. Those New Yorker writers like Malcolm Gladwell were celebrities in the thinking world, but of an elite type. Gladwell is one of those icons in chief. But what harried people want now, it seems, is a less distant idol and more a pal.

Hey Malcolm! How come you never call?

So if you ever have the chance to get Si Newhouse on the phone, or just happen to run into him at a party or at the opera or something, you might want to have a little chat about who you think are some of the stakeholders in the New Yorker. Just cause a racehorse tripped doesn’t mean you have to put it down.

My heartfelt condolences to Ruth Reichl and all the other employees and freelancers who made Gourmet Magazine the most-waited for package in our mailbox every month. We have been subscribers, with occasional time off, since the 60s, when few of us would venture to actually cook any of the insanely complex recipes.

Now, I wasn’t the actual subscriber to Gourmet. The person of record was my mate. At the time, I was very serious about being serious about everything and dwelling on food seemed to me to be about as distinctive an occupation for a serious person as thinking about sex. In my mind at the time, if everyone did it, i.e. eat food or have sex, then it was a lower activity compared to making movies and discussing Important Ideas.

In other words, Gourmet was pornography. Fortunately, over the years, it has remained pornography. What changed, I guess, was my feelings about food. I have always enjoyed good food, and now I can even talk about it for a few minutes without feeling guilty.

So now that S.I. Newhouse has protected his fragile billions by shutting down the principal source of pornography in our household, I am forced to ask myself, “What have we lost?”

For one thing, I will never undergo another challenge as I faced some years ago when I decided I would cook the Complete Gourmet Thanksgiving (We’ll call it CGT for short). That year was the year of the incredible boneless turkey. I needed to go to Chinatown in Los Angeles and buy a huge cleaver with which I would be able to decimate an uncooked turkey carcass, necessary for some brew that was part of the CGT. I also needed to buy the nastiest knife I have ever owned — a boning knife, necessary for removing the skeleton of the turkey before it was cooked and without its permission. The boning knife would turn on me several years later, inflicting the only major cut I have ever received cooking. Fortunately, I don’t cook that much. I still own the knife, but I keep my eye on it, of that you can be certain.

Now here’s the terrible part about that boned, stuffed, CGT turkey. Twenty guests. Out comes the turkey. Being sans bone, it cuts like a roast. Fast! Put said turkey on plates. Guests go silent in that creepy way they’ll do once in a while as they devour the main course. CGT turkey vanishes in 2 minutes flat. Two days work for two minutes of eating.

And worse, there were requests to make it again the next year, and the year after that. Not until I bought a smoker was I able to obliterate the CGT boneless turkey memory.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: I know I can go online and get recipes, and there are a lot of food blogs out there. But the fact is, I like my porn once a month and on shiny pages. I can’t believe a million subscribers wasn’t enough to keep Gourmet going. Is nothing sacred? And you Playboy readers: Lookout.