(CNN) — Jet magazine will stop publishing a print edition and switch to a digital format in June, the magazine’s publisher announced Wednesday.
“We are not saying goodbye to JET. We are embracing the future as my father did in 1951 and taking it to the next level,” Linda Johnson Rice, chairman of Johnson Publishing Company, said in a statement.
Rice said the African-American publication is living up to its name.
“Almost 63 years ago, my father, John Johnson, named the publication JET because, as he said in the first issue, ‘In the world today, everything is moving faster. There is more news and far less time to read it,'” she said. “He could not have spoken more relevant words today.”
It’s not the first magazine to shift its focus to the online market.
Newsweek ended its print edition in 2012, but returned to newsstands this year. In December, New York magazine announced it was scaling back publication of its print edition to a biweekly format.
“As long as the (publishing) business model in the United States is based on revenues from advertising and not on circulation, we are going to see more decisions as such,” Samir Husni, a professor at the University of Mississippi who directs its Magazine Innovation Center, told CNN last year.
While readers increasingly gravitate toward electronic versions of magazines on tablets and phones, magazines in print are increasingly “collector’s items,” Husni said.
Jet chronicled the civil rights movement and also became known for news, entertainment, fashion and health coverage.
CNN’s Brian Stelter contributed to this report.
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