Editor’s Note: Anyone who has read a women’s magazine in the last 25 years has most likely read the work of Myrna Blyth, who weighs in at wowOwow with this provocative piece. Myrna is the founding editor of More magazine, was the longtime editor-in-chief of Ladies’ Home Journal, and was senior editor for Family Circle magazine. She is the chairman of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. She has received many awards including the Matrix Award from New York Women in Communications, Inc., the Woman of Achievement Award from the New York City Commission on the Status of Women, and was named Publishing Executive of the Year by Advertising Age. Currently she writes for The National Review Online.

In recent weeks, the Manhattan magazine buzz has been all about whether Anna Wintour, the imperious editor of Vogue and the model for the devil in “The Devil Wears Prada” was about to leave the job she had held for almost 20 years. Wintour, 59, at a panel of Condé Nast editors at the Plaza, discussing the magazine business, denied the rumor. She said, "I have no plans to leave American Vogue now or in the foreseeable future.” She also commented, “My father always said to me that when you get too angry that’s the time to stop. The day I get too angry is the day I take up gardening."

So though Wintour is not yet ready to gather her rosebuds, she did admit that the current economic downturn has even made her high-fashion editing more sensitive. For example, she noted she had recently decided against photographing a sequined mini-dress with a $50,000 price tag. (But in the September issue Vogue did include a feature about a $64,000 gold-dipped mink coat. Ah, those were the days.)

She also saw an upside for magazines in these hard economic times. “I think it makes you a little edgier,” she declared, and later added, "I think we’ve been in difficult times before and we’ve come out of them and I’m sure that we will again.” The others on the panel, David Remnick of The New Yorker and Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair agreed.

“I think magazines have a future,” said Remnick. The New Yorker’s ad pages are down 26% so far this year. “If your magazine — or your company, whatever it is — has a point it can do well in tough times," said Carter. An interesting response from Carter, given that Vanity Fair had to close in 1935 for a "drop in advertising" and didn’t publish again for 48 years. Vanity Fair’s ad pages are down 13.6% and Vogue’s are down almost 10% through the November issues.

All this bland cheerfulness and glad tidings was even too much for some in the panel’s audience made up of devoted media watchers. For the magazine industry is currently in a meltdown. Ad pages have cratered. Several magazines, both old and new, have shut down. And hundreds of magazine workers, both on the editorial and advertising staffs, have been fired. By the end of September more than 3,000 had been laid off. Just a few weeks ago hundreds more were added to that list by Time Inc. on what their employees called “The Day of the Ax.” Right now there is a hiatus to the bloodletting because many magazines do not hand out pink slips at holiday time.

It may be brief.

Just as worrisome is the precipitous drop in the stocks of the publicly owned publishing companies. Eight stocks have lost more than 80% of their value in the past year and six are lower than they were on Black Monday in 1987. And the privately owned media giants like Condé Nast and Hearst have shown they are hurting by also firing staffers and shutting magazines. Hearst closed CosmoGirl, O at Home and Quick&Simple. Condé Nast reduced the frequency of Portfolio and Men’s Vogue.

So do magazines really have a future? Yes, of course, some very strong magazines will survive. But magazine publishing, overall, is really a small business that for too long has acted big, often lavishing salaries and perks out of proportion to the profits a magazine as a business earns. In the future as print advertising continues its downward spiral, staffs will be smaller and less well-paid and budgets for everything far tighter. There just may be no more editors like Anna Wintour. Unless publishing makes some big changes, by the time she starts gardening, it will be the industry itself that will be pushing up the daisies.