Lee Enterprises has killed the St. Louis-based food publication Feast and is also eliminating positions at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Jeff Gordon, president of the United Media Guild that represents staffers in St. Louis and other cities, earlier this week announced his retirement as a sports columnist for the Post-Dispatch. Gordon confirmed to SLM yesterday that he took a voluntary buyout from the daily newspaper as its Iowa-based owners looked for cuts.
Keep up with local business news and trends
Subscribe to the St. Louis Business newsletter to get the latest insights sent to your inbox every morning.
Gordon wasn’t sure yesterday how many others might avail themselves of the offer, but confirmed that one journalist working on the high school sports beat was laid off this week.
“It’s been a tough year,” Gordon said, citing the costly cyberattack that crippled operations at papers across the Iowa-based chain and also resulted in several lawsuits over privacy issues. “Not a big surprise, I guess.”
The sports department layoff comes in addition to the managing editor at Feast, Shannon Weber, who posted on Instagram that she was told at 11 a.m. Thursday that Lee Enterprises had “killed Feast, effective immediately.”
“We joke that I am basically Feast, but that also means I go down with the ship,” she wrote. “I urged them to announce this, but there was no plan in place to do so, and I can’t let this hang because it deserves more than that.”
Reached by email this morning, Lee spokeswoman Tracy Rouch confirmed the closure. “Feast magazine will no longer produce an e-edition after the October 2025 issue or update feastmagazine.com,” she wrote. “Local food and dining content, including reviews and features, will still be featured on STLtoday.com and in the Post-Dispatch print edition.” She did not address questions about how many staffers were affected or the staff reductions at the Post-Dispatch.
Weber did not respond to a message seeking further comment this morning. Feast staffers have never been part of the United Media Guild and it’s not clear how many staffers were affected by its closure.
Lee Enterprises launched Feast as a monthly publication in 2010. It was headed by Cat Neville, who’d pitched the company on the idea after her departure from Sauce Magazine, which she had co-founded in 2001 with Allyson Mace. (Mace continued to run Sauce as an independent publication until selling it in 2023; it’s since changed hands a second time and is now owned by the founder of STL Bucket List.)
Feast had big ambitions, and at one point, its content appeared in many papers across Lee, as well as newsstands around the state. But it scaled back as print media saw big declines in the last decade, dropping from a monthly to a quarterly in 2023 and, last November, scrapping its print issue and going digital only.
Weber mourned the magazine’s demise in her Instagram post. “This magazine made me,” she wrote. “It has carried me. I’ve been here for 12 years, and I have no idea what I’d be doing without it. It has shaped every skill set I have, it has given me most of my closest friends, and it has made me fall deeply in love with this industry. I just need to figure out where I can land that lets me continue to do what I do best, which is … you.”
As for Gordon, he made clear his departure was completely voluntary. He’s been at the Post-Dispatch for 39 years. “I was thinking about that for some time, and especially with the end of the fiscal year coming through, I knew there might be an opportunity to get a nice opportunity to leave with a bonus,” he said. “I’m almost 69, and you know what the situation is: It’s going to keep getting smaller. … I was very happy with the outcome.”
