Meredith’s More magazine is no more after April

Meredith Corp. is pulling the plug on More magazine after nearly 19 years of publication. The April issue will be its last.

The title aimed at older, affluent women tried to go more upscale and a little younger in the past year but failed to click with enough advertisers.

In the age of the Photoshopped stars, Jamie Lee Curtis made history in 2002 at age 43 by posing for the cover without makeup or airbrushing, wearing only a sports bra and underwear, in a statement about not pursuing an artificial version of perfection.

Katie Holmes, a mere 37 years old, ditched her makeup for the magazine’s February cover.

But the publicity and goodwill it reaped by featuring celebrities ages 40 and up was not enough to keep the magazine going.

“After a comprehensive review, Meredith Corporation has decided to discontinue publishing More magazine, effective following the April 2016 issue, deciding rather to invest and align its resources against more profitable activities,” the company said in a statement.

Editor-in-chief Leslie Jane Seymour and about 30 staffers are out of a job as a result.

“The problem was advertisers who wanted to sell products to this demographic — whether skin care or the high-end fashions the readers could afford,” said More founding editor Myrna Blyth, who is now editorial director of AARP Magazine. “They would only put their ads in magazines for far younger readers who don’t buy or can’t afford their products.”

The magazine closure comes after Meredith’s plan to merge its print and TV stations with rival broadcaster Media General was scuttled earlier this year. Media General is moving ahead with a different deal with Nexstar Broadcasting.

One reason Media General shareholders balked at the Meredith deal was that their company had jettisoned its newspapers several years ago and did not want to be burdened by a slower growth print business again.

Meanwhile, Des Moines, Iowa-based Meredith, headed by CEO Steve Lacy, insisted it tried mightily to save More.

“Despite a significant investment in More in 2015 — including an increase in trim size and higher quality paper stock that aligned it with with its upscale and affluent audience — More continued to face advertising challenges in the luxury marketplace,” the company said.

More slashed its rate base from 1.1 million to 750,000, causing a 39.5 percent drop in paid subscriptions as cheaper priced subs were allowed to expire. Single-copy sales dropped 4 percent, which was better than the industry’s overall 7.2 percent drop. But it meant total circulation was down 40.9 percent.

The lower circulation meant lower ad prices and should have translated into more ad pages — but advertisers were not responding. Ad pages in 2015 dropped 17 percent, to 784 pages.