I was the editor of P&T magazine for 21 years. Dayton Matlick, the owner of SpecComm, which was the publishing company that owned P&T, was 80+ years old when he decided to sell the company. I left about a month before that sale was to take place. We were told that the new company, TMA, would maintain all the magazines and retain staff. I didn't believe it so I left (there were other personal/family reasons as well); I was too cowardly to watch what I believed would happen to the magazine that I loved and nurtured and took my identity from. It took another year for the sale to take place, with Cliff Nelson running P&T after my departure, and he did a great job, though he was forced to reduce the size of the publication. Once the sale went through, the new company folded most of SpecComm's magazines and let the staff go, and that was the end of P&T.
One of our sales guys, Ben Stimpson, left the company before my departure, and he started a new magazine, Tobacco Business, owned by Kretek. TMA sold P&T magazine to Kretek and now all of that content belongs to Tobacco Business. I've received no reply from Ben regarding the possible republication of P&T content in some form. They also bought tobaccoreviews.com, which has seen a redesign since.
So P&T is gone and I'm sad. Maybe Ben will bring it back someday. However, I continue to work in the hobby at Smokingpipes, and they employ me to continue producing content similar to that of P&T for our blog, the Daily Reader. I've written more than 140 articles so far for the DR, more than I wrote in my 20 years at P&T, and I'm not alone; we have an enormously talented staff. Truett Smith, Andrew Wike, and Jeffrey Sitts are wonderful writers who know pipes inside and out and we have some truly talented colleagues starting to contribute as well, people who I have no doubt will become household names in the hobby. Our content includes famous pipe smoker profiles, in-depth tobacco articles, tips, news, and entertainment, and it is my hope that some may find it a reasonable substitution for P&T -- and we have the advantage of publishing new content weekly. It's a shame that we no longer have a physical, glossy magazine for our hobby, one that we can find in our mailboxes and hold in our hands, but we're trying to fill the void. I wish we'd have had this staff for P&T; it would have been spectacular.
I miss my job at P&T. It was a job of a lifetime. Times change, though, and I continue to enjoy the work I'm privileged to do, and for a company that is ethically superior to and more supportive than any I have worked for in the past. Not trying to make this a commercial for Smokingpipes, but I'm grateful to be part of it, and to earn a living by writing about pipes is as close to impossible as you can get.
Anyway, the possibility exists that old P&T content may one day be available, but it's in the hands of Tobacco Business magazine. It would sure be cool to see it online.