In early September 2012 — three months after LA Times Magazine was shut down and they lost their jobs — Nancie Clare and Rip Georges announced Noir Magazine, a new tablet-only publication covering the mystery, thriller, and true-crime genres across books, film, TV, graphic novels, and video games. The tablet-only positioning was the most distinctive bet of the launch. It didn’t age well.
Then
Clare had been editor of LA Times Magazine; Georges had been its creative director. The LAT Mag had been one of the city’s premium long-form Sunday-supplement publications, and its closure was part of the broader Tribune-bankruptcy-era contraction at the parent paper. The Clare-Georges pivot to a new launch in 90 days was unusually fast.
Noir Magazine’s premise leaned into the iPad-as-publication moment of 2012. Clare told FishbowlLA the tablet-only decision was only partially about cost (avoiding print) — it was also about the design opportunity the iPad’s format created and the genre’s audience overlap with early-adopter device buyers. The launch issue was being prepared with a clear editorial vision: long-form genre coverage that didn’t compete head-to-head with the bigger general-audience entertainment titles, in a format that allowed for the visual approach Georges wanted.
The original FishbowlLA framing was supportive — Matthew Fleischer was flagging a launch by two senior LA-print veterans who had moved fast after losing their jobs — but FBLA was, structurally, skeptical of tablet-only publication strategies, since the iPad-magazine model had been struggling visibly across most attempts.
Now
The tablet-only publication model that Noir Magazine bet on did not survive the decade. The iPad-magazine boom that publications like Wired’s tablet edition, Project (Richard Branson’s), and others had been pioneering in 2010-2012 largely failed by 2015 — readers preferred web reading on their tablets to walled-garden app magazines, and the format never produced the subscription numbers that would have supported the production costs. Noir Magazine ran for a stretch but did not achieve the scale needed to sustain a full operation.
Nancie Clare has continued in podcast hosting, true-crime publishing, and writing, including her long-running Speaking of Mysteries podcast which interviews crime fiction authors and has run successfully through the 2010s and into the 2020s. The true-crime-and-mystery vertical that Noir Magazine identified as underserved in 2012 has, of course, become one of the dominant audio-podcast and streaming-documentary categories — though in formats Noir’s original tablet-app premise didn’t anticipate.
Rip Georges has continued in art-direction and creative-direction work across magazine, book, and digital publishing through the rest of the decade. The LA Times Magazine itself never returned in a form resembling what Clare and Georges had been running before its closure; the LAT now publishes various lifestyle and culture supplements but not under the LA Times Magazine brand or with the same editorial scope.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: September 2012 snapshot