Drishti – Santa Barbara Yoga Store: Yoga Clothing, Workout Clothes, & Yoga Supplies

Have you noticed the significant number of yoga magazines which have sadly disappeared as of late?  Do you remember, for example, the glossy, full-color publication Yogi Times out of Los Angeles?  It had a several-year run, but is now nowhere to be found on magazine racks.  (If you visit their website, you’ll see that the ‘current issue’ featured is from May of 2008.)  And what about Elephant Journal out of Boulder, Colorado, which we wrote about here on our blog last year?  They stopped publishing a physical magazine and are now a web-based-only journal.  And Namarupa, the cool non-commercial yoga publication put together by respected luminaries Eddie Stern, Robert Moses, and Robert Svoboda, is no longer anywhere to be found.  The great down-to-earth magazine Ascent out of Canada just notified readers that their next issue will be their last, and the magazine Yoga + Joyful Living (formerly Yoga International), recently announced that they were scaling back to a quarterly publication schedule.

The yoga world is clearly not the only industry to experience the loss of printed publications – magazines and newspapers everywhere are in crisis mode, due in part to the internet’s rise in prominence as our new information go-to, and also to the current state of the economy.  But it’s interesting to note the vast number of publications which were widely-read by the yoga community and which have now disappeared.

By our calculations, Yoga Journal and LA Yoga are the two main yoga magazines left standing today.  (Please forgive us, any yoga magazines out there still in publication which we might not be familiar with… )  What’s your prediction: will they make it through the economic crisis, or will they close down like Ascent or morph into a new identity like Elephant?