Earlier this week there was a bit of hubub around Gourmet magazine, the beloved foodie bible tossed out with the fish guts last year by its cost-chopping publisher, Conde Nast, under the guidance of its knife-sharpener McKinsey. Yesterday morning, Ruth Reichl, the Gourmet editor at the time of its demise, used her Twitter account to turn the heat off any talk that Gourmet was coming back in print form.

“Thanks Tweeps,” she wrote, “you’ve really made my day, week, month with all your support. Re: Gourmet; they’re reviving the brand, not the magazine.Pity.”

Distinguishing between channel of distribution and brand is nothing new, especially for print media companies as they try to reinvent their business models. For years, the purveyors of glossy magazines have thought of their titles as having intimate connections with carefully aggregated, loyal, engaged and, to advertisers, highly desirable audiences that will follow a Vogue or a Vanity Fair or a Wired anywhere they might go. Online, events, TV — wherever. It’s a rightly-placed belief that it’s the editorial voice and sensibility that matters, not whether that voice is being distributed on dead trees or in pixels.

As magazine-cum-brand success stories go, Gourmet would seem to have been a classic case study. That’s why so many very vocal readers mourned its end and it’s why Conde Nast feels comfortable with the reincarnation it’s now ordered up, which will come in the form of a free iPad app called Gourmet Live. There’s still brand equity and possibly revenue in them thar hills; how do we suck it dry?

As such, the phenomenon of the zombie brand — products, like the Ford Taurus, the Commodore 64 or Life magazine, that are killed but don’t really go away — is something media companies should probably familiarize themselves with. The media graveyard, after all, is a big one and, despite low bars to entry in theory, it’s not easy or cheap for big publishing outfits to launch new outlets. For many, it’ll be tempting to go the way of Gourmet and raise the dead where possible.

But we know from the rash of zombie films in recent years that there are different genres of the renanimated. There’s the grunting, drooling, dumb, loping zombies of Romero “Living Dead” movies, so easily dispatched with a leadpipe. And then there’s the quick, vicious zombies of Danny Boyle’s “30 Days Later” for whom death seems more a technicality than anything else. Publishers, as they figure out how to wind down once essential publications that are now outmoded, can choose to find ways to invest smartly and efficiently in these resurrections.

You can’t blame Conde for seeing what it can get out of Gourmet’s trove of excellent content, pieces like the late David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster,” an essay that figures prominently — and sort of touchingly — in the PR campaign.

But if you were a reader of Gourmet, it would be difficult to get excited about any announcement that didn’t include a clear commitment to new content or involve Ms. Reichl. Not everyone loved her, but she stood as a symbol of the title’s finely-curated, high-end approach to food, travel, life in general. That sensibility, expensive as it might be to produce and tough as it might have been to sell to advertisers in a downturn, stood in sharp relief to the messy democracy of recipe sites commanding more and more attention of kitchen dwellers.

Tellingly, the star of Conde’s Gourmet announcement can’t even boil water. In fact, it isn’t even a person. It’s the iPad, which is fast becoming the default solution for the magazine industry as it tries to funnel its brands into places that are more relevant to today’s readers and advertisers. And that increasingly feels very dangerous. It is not a little depressing to see Gourmet threaten to go the way of the zombie Life, which withered over decades, going from weekly magazine to monthly to newspaper supplement to a website that’s really a Getty photo archive.

You can say the Life brand still exists there on the web and now the same appears to be true of Gourmet, whose sexy new form alone won’t give it purpose. And that’s no way to live.

Matt Creamer is executive editor of Breaking Media. You can follow him on Twitter at @matt_creamer.