The precursor to Gourmet, and the first truly successful American food publication, was founded in the 1890s and called The Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics. It eventually changed its name to American Cookery and then died in 1947, forced under, in part, by the founding of Gourmet in 1941 by Earle MacAusland, who had patterned his new brainchild on the catalog-magazine of a famed Boston food purveyor, S.S. Pierce. It was the end of domestic science and food economy and the beginning of the era of the gourmet, "the honest seeker of the summum bonum of living" as set forth in the charter issue. MacAusland's recipes made few accommodations to reality; he even suggested that subscribers save the issues and use the recipes once rationing had ended.

Now, 68 years after its founding, Gourmet has followed American Cookery, ending a long and masterful turn at the helm of the food publishing world. This, hard on the heels of the death of Julia Child in 2004, makes one tremulous about the future. Is American magazine publishing on the verge of being devoured by the democratic economics of the Internet? Has the media industry fully become an everyman's playing field, without the need for credentials or paid membership? Or, to ask the questions that every media executive is really whispering, "Will I have a job next year?"

My first experience with Gourmet was a head-on collision. In 1990, 10 years after I had founded Cook's Magazine, Conde Nast purchased Cook's and then immediately shut it down, with Gourmet swallowing up our subscribers. It was the triumph of the American magazine model, one driven by lifestyle rather than nuts and bolts, and floated by the billions of advertising dollars that poured through a narrow spigot into the magazine industry, controlled by a select few, the chauffeured, hard-charging publishers of New York's powerhouse magazine corporations. It was a top-down, winner-take-all proposition, an oligarchy of sorts, a business with a huge barrier to entry and no welcome mat for the upstart entrepreneur.

In a serendipitous turnabout 19 years later, Cook's is today alive and well (I restarted the magazine in 1993) and Gourmet has foundered. The difference? We abandoned advertising in 1993 for a 100-percent subscriber-financed model, including a thriving paid Web site.

Yet the media world was not without charm, as I learned in 1985 during my first meeting with S.I. Newhouse, the chairman of Conde Nast. (Newhouse had just purchased The New Yorker, a magazine that already owned a controlling share in my Cook's Magazine.) It was 7 a.m., his favored meeting hour, and I discovered him shoeless, stuffed into a baggy gray sweater, and shuffling about, half-swallowing his words in a manner that spoke of humility and intellect, rather than New York arrogance. Here was a guy, I thought, who really loves the magazine business. He poured his fortune into his magazine properties and his editors, even when the prospect of return seemed dim. His was a world of philanthropic publishing.

Gourmet, then, was not just a piece of editorial flummery; it represented the hopes and dreams of its owner, a respect for those who had earned the chops, as it were, who had a lifetime of good breeding and experience in order to stand at the cultural helm.

One is reminded of M.F.K. Fisher's "Alphabet for Gourmets," published in 1949; the noted epicure Samuel Chamberlain, one of the magazine's first stars; or culinary luminaries like James Beard, who was a frequent contributor.

Both the economic and editorial models were in sync: advertisers had to pay premium prices to join the club, and editors, like Ruth Reichl, had to become stand-alone cultural icons, not mere backroom scribes.

The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.

To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice. Google "broccoli casserole" and make the first recipe you find. I guarantee it will be disappointing. The world needs fewer opinions and more thoughtful expertise — the kind that comes from real experience, the hard-won blood-on-the-floor kind. I like my reporters, my pilots, my pundits, my doctors, my teachers and my cooking instructors to have graduated from the school of hard knocks.

Julia Child, one of my Boston neighbors, epitomized this old-school notion of apprenticeship. As her dinner companion one evening, I watched as she became frustrated by the restaurant's dim lighting, grabbed a huge watchman's flashlight from her pendulous satchel and proceeded to illuminate her main course. She wanted to investigate her food before eating it, the waiter's recommendations notwithstanding. This act of spontaneous journalism evolved from a lifetime love of education and reverence for true expertise. Her first question upon meeting a young chef was always, "And where did you train, dear?"