The Death of the Magazine

I have a bit of a theory on this.

I used to edit a newsstand leisure magazine here in the UK. It was founded in the 1970s. We sold about 18,000 copies a month in our peak, making us the market leader.

I'm not the editor any more (I went off to do something else) but the magazine is still going. It won't surprise you to learn that it sells much less than it used to.

But that's not because the magazine has got worse. It hasn't. The writing is still as good as ever, the news reporting still pretty sharp. It's not because the market has changed. It's not because you can get the same information online for free. Much to my amazement, in 20+ years, no one has really catered for this particular market online - there's a lot of chuntering on forums and Facebook groups, but no one really doing compelling content. We were turning over £1m+ a year. I don't think anyone is even turning over £50k writing about this subject online.

So what changed? I think it's ultimately about attention. When I edited the magazine (c. 2010), people still chose to spend part of their leisure time reading about one of their hobbies. We were a fun way to do that. Today, people don't need to spend £5 to happily while away a few hours: they can just scroll through their phones. The magazine habit has gone.

Crucially, it's not that the information has gone online. It really hasn't. I read all the various forums and groups, and still when the magazine plops onto my doormat every month, I read it and find a load of stuff I didn't know. It's just that the time that was once filled with reading magazines is now filled with something else.

This is an important piece. In the last decade a lot of what was considered valuable has been thrown out. I saw them on streets on monthly furniture disposal. Encyclopedias, books, tapes, magazines, devices of all kinds. None of it seemed to matter anymore. Yet I don't feel there's something equivalent that replaced it. Wikipedia maybe but .. not really.

And the trend of "replace in-depth well paid work by cheap short term attention catching hooks" keeps spreading.

It's very very strange to witness that kind of social waves.

I feel like the author either has an enormous blind spot or is intentionally failing to observe the fact that magazines exist in a completely different landscape today than they did even a decade ago, much less nearly 100 years ago (in the example cited from "It's a Wonderful Life").

The cycle didn't start with publishers shrinking page count and cutting back on long-form content - publishers started shrinking page count and cutting back on content after they started losing money (at least in many cases).

Print publishers were/are competing for attention as much as dollars, and there's so many other things that grab people's attention. There's so many other sources of information. Advertisers have many, many more venues and -- sadly -- they tend to choose the venues that they can track over the ones they can't.

I used to write for several print magazines in the tech space -- and I watched their ad budgets get hollowed out by online options because (generally) buying ad space in a magazine is an act of faith vs. "we ran this online campaign and we see we have this conversion rate and can track that 1,023 people downloaded our ebook and that this marketing 'touched' 75 accounts that closed or renewed deals for more than $1m."

I love print. Love it. But I also have realized that, honestly, I have very little time for reading the print magazines I subscribe to. I subscribe to a few sci-fi print publications and they just gather dust. I have a Mother Jones print/online subscription. Usually the print version goes into recycling without ever looking at it.

What is lacking here is any suggestion of a solution. He gestures at the problem being cutting content, but then closes with a "we need to work on building something else" without actually describing the something else worth a damn.

Others already chipped in the obvious arguments (onlinereading, other hobbies). I want to talk about a successful magazine instead: Retro Gamer UK. It's still alive and kicking and well worth a read. It started as an "also-ran" between all other gaming magazines from the publisher but now it's the best running and one of the only ones left. Why is that? Of course because retro gamers grew up reading those magazines and love to do it again. But also because the articles are really great. Why? Because they interview the developers and research the topics (games) quite well. And the developers also have no worries to talk about stuff that didn't work out (they don't really have to sell the game or their extinct studio anymore). And of course with these "scopes" (and the retro gaming niche) they make a type of content that is quite difficult to find online. Much easier to just read the magazine (of course an online/PDF version exists as well...).

Another advantage is that the content of an issue of the magazine doesn't really get old.

There is a resurgence of small-run print zines which lean into the strengths of print as consumed alongside digital content

MagCulture [1] has 600 zines in stock and Printed Matter [2] has nearly 8,000

At present I'm enjoying n+1, The Baffler, Granta and The Fence

Counter-intuitively, a zine can be an easier way for writers and creators to get niche/unusual content seen than battling the algorithm online

[1] https://magculture.com 270 St John Street, London

[2] https://www.printedmatter.org 231 11th Avenue, Manhattan

I used to subscribe to general news magazines, and of course there's some obvious reasons for it: - Competition for attention - Emerging miche magazines - Conservatism of investigative reportage - Shorter news cycles due to social media - Journalism becoming partisan - Opinion pieces and narrative building instead of histories

As a reader, I am more than satisfied with the current state of niche magazines (e.g., guitar, drones, motosports, and lifestyle), where the access to the internet in those places became some kind of meta-curation on interesting topics.

For the general magazines, I feel bad about how this trend is going. For instance, in South America, magazines used to cross-communicate with some points of society (Class A, B, and a bit of C), and the rest of the society (Class D and E) used to have some of this work downstream via night news.

Another thing is that wristleblowers knew that the enditorial support in magazines is way higher than in TV news channels, since the latter used to be more compliant with some of the power systems.

Back in the day, it would be impossible for any TV news editor to ignore any history from the magazines (that in this time was upstream), and the lifeblood of this kind of vehicle was to denounce corruption of the government, investigative reportage, and obvious discussions related to societal trends. The sad thing is that only the latter is happening.

but good writing isn't worth good money because you can get ok copy free from people who do it for the attention. the magazine business was cool but what made it cool was it was powerful. It isn't now.

business wise, the closest analogy today is podcasts, not because of writing, but they're the curators of the discourse. now Fridman and Rogan are each a one man Atlantic or Harper's, providing the platform for ideas and selling attention and wielding influence on it. we don't need journalists to tell us stories when the people doing the things can just tell their story themselves.

we've lost some of the insight that came from writing as a craft and those insights formed the previous culture and identity, but we get these direct now.

maybe writing polarizes, where only writers who can do fiction well can add any value or insight into anything real.

I disagree with the notion that publishers "don't know it". Here I think malice really is a better explanation than incompetence. Or not malice but willful indifference. Investors don't want to be in the business of educating and informing people. They want to be in the business of renting out things that people need, or want so much that it's next door to need. This can't be done with long form journalism. The opportunity in investing in magazines is pure short term gain. Squeeze money out of the brand reputation and recognition, then move on.

> Is there a single web magazine making big bucks?

The Spectator has been growing both in print and online. The editor wrote about this, in the wake of the title's sale, this week:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-spectators-new-owner...

> In this trade, there is always pressure to go for the digital ‘quick wins’ (clickbait articles, advertorials, etc.) but we rejected this as a false economy – so commercial that it’s uncommercial. It would take us downmarket, deform our character and, ergo, reduce the company’s value. So we went the other way, using our success to double down on the magazine’s finest traditions in the belief that quality of writing matters above all. We did a lot that went against the conventional digital wisdom. We put together a different business model and a unique way of working, based on close collaboration between all departments and journalists equally comfortable with print, digital and broadcast.

> When other publications were shedding sub-editors, we poached the best ones we could find. When newspapers shrank their books sections, we proudly kept Sam Leith’s at ten-plus pages and gave him a podcast. We created a research team who apply perhaps the most robust pre-publication scrutiny on Fleet Street (mindful that it matters more than ever that readers can trust the facts they read). When other weeklies started cutting costs by not printing over Easter and the summer, we put more effort than ever into the issues released in those holiday periods.

> The digital temptations that can lure publications to their grave (‘The world has changed! Look at the clicks! Drop the opera review!’) are dangerous as they come dripping in what looks like supportive data. You can end up not just being edited by algorithm but stripping a publication of nuance, variety and soul. Our belief was that if we innovated, and used the proceeds to double or treble down on what makes The Spectator different, we would maximise the value of the company as well as serve our readers. Much of what we did could be seen as uneconomic on an individual basis – but put it all together and you get a five times valuation uplift.

What about relatively new publications with longform writing such as Aeon, Atlas Obscura, Nautilus, or Quanta Magazine?

A few years back I thought to myself hey, I used to love magazines when I was younger. I've basically completely stopped reading them or thinking about them. There are some with digital editions that are very inexpensive to subscribe to. Maybe they've got some high quality content really targeted to specific interests that I'm not finding on the web.

So I went out to take a look at some magazines both digital and print. It was immediately apparent why they are dying, and it's not just because people read everything on the web for free these days.

Every magazine I checked out was MOSTLY ads. Even during the Super Bowl, the commercials will be less than 1/3 of the total broadcast time. In the magazines the ads took up well over half of the available pages. Who in their right mind would pay money for that?

Magazines back in the day where nothing less than lavish. Elaborate foldouts of maps and photos in NatGeo. In depth strategy guides and customized demo discs on a monthly basis in video game magazines. All that is gone. The modern day magazine is a stack of ads with a few blog posts scattered throughout.

I'm going to guess it's some sort of death spiral. They lose money to the web, so they had less to invest in content and had to take more ads. That resulted in further loss of readership, and so on.

I do believe that a highly targeted and extremely high quality magazine can succeed in the present day. Of course the definition of success won't mean selling millions of copies on newsstands everywhere. It will mean having a loyal subscriber base that provides a largely flat, but sustainable, flow of revenue.

It'll be interesting to see how substack tries to hold these authors and avoids fading into the background. Their monetization options are the best in the industry right now, but I wonder how authors feel about the network effect they receive. I'm surprised Chris Hughes didn't find a way to pivot New Republic to a substack competitor somehow.

honest-broker is the only Substack publication I have found to consistently hold my attention. Reading Gioia's writing feels like eating nutritious food.

I am most likely ignorant, however. Are there any other Substack publications of the same quality?

Sometimes, I miss paper-based magazines, and when I have an opportunity to stay and look through newsstands in supermarkets or bookstores, I do, and sometimes buy. Harvard Business Review is good one. Wired is sucks, one of the worst.

Does anyone know good magazines about tech/programming/engineering?

I found CODE Magazine [*], which looks promising, but it is primarily about C#/.NET.

[*] https://www.codemag.com/magazine/

I would just like to record for posterity in the comments that this discussion occurred simultaneously with a relevant story about how MrBeast games the tube of yous

I'd counter that with the rise of high quality niche publications [0]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/16/business/media/outdoors-p...

This has impacted the photography industry profoundly. Not only the magazine content but also all the ads that were produced.

Photography budgets have been plummeting for years and there are less paid gigs now than there were even a decade ago.

I like that he raises a comparison with the big Hollywood media companies, yet fails to remember the recent strikes that reminded us that the studios don't want to pay their writers either.

The irony here is that Ted Gioia is at the very top of the power law distribution of writers' incomes: he makes a ton of money on Substack and is very vocal about it. He deserves it all, too, just to be clear.

However, most writers are way out on the long tail of the curve, making next to nothing. I subscribe free to 100's of them, but "upgrade to Paid"??? Nope, nope.

> Nowadays authors at that level would be on Substack, or some other similar platform. That’s because their name would be their personal brand, and they wouldn’t need a periodical—and certainly not a magazine in terminal decline.

They ARE on Substack, and a precious few are like you, Ted: making the big bucks.

I'd be willing to pay for an aggregate of 100 or so of them, where their output this week is omitted if they've got nothing. The catch is, I wouldn't pay huge money for that. This isn't going to bring back the days of Readers Digest and Esquire. There's just too much on the Web that's free to occupy my attention.

This hit home hard:

> Imagine if you owned the Lakers or the Yankees, and put all the emphasis on the team brand—but kept reducing the pay to actual players. You might continue to sell tickets over the short and even medium term. But to survive over the long haul, you eventually need to support the team brand with commensurate talent at each position—and that talent needs to be nurtured and paid more than peanuts.

There was a time people paid for a cable connection and channels. You might pay extra for more channels, but that was about it. Then we all watched online via Netflix. Then HBo, Hulu, Skyshowtime, Disneyplus and AppleTV+ all came along and now we just shuffle through these subscriptions to see the stuff we want to see, but not whole year round. Most of the people I know will have a subscription for one or two month and then shuffle to the next.

If magazines where that easy, you just subscribe to a separate month or you just buy loose articles from past issues, they could still be making money.

Are magazines still wildly popular in Japan? I have not been there in years now but I sense they still are. Maybe someone can set me straight.

This is a great example of creative destruction. Back before the internet took over distribution, it took a small army of typesetters, graphic designers, printers, delivery services, etc. to publish and distribute magazines. There was simply no way an individual, or even a small group, could scale production and distribution. The logical extension of the old model would be for Google or Meta (who now own distribution) to hire staff writers in order to improve ad revenue. So far, they don't think they need it - turns out they can sell ads just fine with the low-cost garbage spewed by your crazy uncle. We will see if the direct-pay model of Substack has staying power before enshittification takes over. I haven't found anything on Substack compelling enough justify spending sometimes ~$10/month on a single writer.

Just look at all the new magazines at a bookstore. There are at least 10 Taylor Swift magazines. Trump has at least two magazines about him. There's plenty of growth in the gun and prepper department. Food magazines are available in quantity.

Magazines are still around, but they're addressed to niches.