FLICKR/PAUL SABLEMAN
In addition to its print and digital journalism, Sauce also sponsors events like the wildly popular Food Truck Friday in Tower Grove Park.
Sauce Magazine is saying goodbye to print — and doubling down on digital.
Publisher Allyson Mace announced Friday that the magazine's March issue would be its last.
"Starting April 1, we'll no longer distribute a printed copy of Sauce Magazine," she wrote. "Instead, you can find all our content online: on our website, our weekly Edible Weekend e-newsletter, social media, and a monthly digital edition of the magazine. We invite you to embrace this change with the same warmth and comfort of your favorite read, now reaching an even greater audience."
In a phone call this morning, Mace said there would be no cuts to the paper's team of eight staffers and 25 "flex team members" (which include part-timers and freelancers). "We're not cutting anybody," she said. "We're not downsizing. This is growth."Mace founded Sauce as a website in 1999 with partner Cat Neville. It launched its print edition two years later.
Mace acknowledged the paper's return to its roots was bittersweet. Her father Gene Mace, a longtime newspaperman who spent years owning publications in Ste. Genevieve and Jefferson County, died unexpectedly at age 56. He was posthumously induced into the Missouri Newspaper Hall of Fame in October 2001, the same month as Sauce’s print launch.
"It was an emotional time in my life, looking at the paper and saying, 'Here you go, Dad,'" she recalled. "And here I am 23 years later, still in the business."
Eleven years after Sauce's founding, Neville left, and that summer, with backing from St. Louis Post-Dispatch parent company Lee Enterprises, she founded a different St. Louis-based food-based monthly, Feast Magazine. Last week, Feast also made a big announcement — it's moving to quarterly after its May issue.
The competition between the monthlies has been fierce, and Mace didn't resist a dig at the corporate-owned Feast.
"They have their own shareholders to take care of," she said, referencing the major cuts ordered by Iowa-based Lee this year. "They're bottom-line-driven. We're not. We're driven by the passion of the food scene, by people who spend every day grinding in the restaurant community, creating new things."
She also sounded a defiant note. "We're here to stay. Twenty-three years is a long time for an independent publication in the city of St. Louis."
Sauce, she added, "is my baby." "We're going to keep moving forward."
This story has been updated on March 13 at 3:53 p.m.
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