Eventually I will have so many paid substack subscriptions that the writers will get together and charge one flat fee for all their writing in one place and thereby reinvent the magazine.
Yup, exactly. I want a magazine frankly! I don't want to have to subscribe individually to a bunch of different writers then do the work of trying to find new quality writing as well.... this is what I used to pay for a magazine for!
I concur with the entirety of your observations. And I'd like to add another:
The New Yorker and The Atlantic are held up as survivors and paragons. But while I subscribe to both, I am flummoxed by their daily/newsletter offerings. I wish to support thoughtful and observant editorial content - which just doesn't happen when such material is microwaved and not lovingly (and leisurely) prepared. I have the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer to allegedly provide me with "news" - although they seem to be following each other down the "lifestyle" rabbit hole. What I crave is a curated menu of well-prepared entrees that I can mull over and roll over my intellectual tongue - savoring every morsel. Fat chance.
The world is awash in cleverness; I seek wisdom from people much smarter and more accomplished than myself, who can weave their thoughts into a tapestry of provocative (and well-supported) clarion calls to my noggin. Knee-jerk responses from Remnick, et al really don't pass muster.
Long-form journalism may have left the building (I can recall when The New Yorker regularly had articles that spanned two or three issues). But I'm afraid the headlong rush to "punchy" content has led to a punch-drunk audience. And the cycle will continue to keep on unabated until...well, I'm not sure what turns it around. But the debasement and decline of intellectual property in all of its guises is but a tocsin of the death of a society.
I’ve been a subscriber to The New Yorker for years but mostly these days I read stuff related to culture. There are often issues in which I skip the entire body of “main” articles…because no, I don’t need to read a long thing about Tucker Carlson or whoever is the awful figure of the month.
It really is. Especially if you've been out of school awhile, a periodical that publishes and expects you to engage with challenging and enlightening essays rocks the system.
Could not agree with this more: "The world is awash in cleverness; I seek wisdom from people much smarter and more accomplished than myself, who can weave their thoughts into a tapestry of provocative (and well-supported) clarion calls to my noggin. Knee-jerk responses from Remnick, et al really don't pass muster."
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the magazine The Economist (I'm aware that it styles itself a newspaper, but in most people's minds, it is a magazine). I read it quite regularly and find that the quality has maintained consistency over time. It's managed to do quite well for itself: it reached over 1.2 million subscribers this March. Its 11 newsletters on LinkedIn have 2.7 million subscribers combined (I believe a few of the newsletters are free).
Nonetheless, it sticks very much to brand name—there are no bylines beneath any of the articles, in both the print and online versions, and finding its writers can be difficult at times. Why do you think it's managed to stay successful? You might chalk it up to financiers wanting to get an in-depth scoop on the economic landscape, but I think there must be something else at work.
There's an old saying about the news business. Everything you read in the newspaper is unreliable except the business and sports pages because people bet money on them. (e.g. It was in the Pecora Report back in the 1930s, but is probably much older.) One would expect publications like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and the Economist to stick around. You'll also find trade journals like Freightwaves, Foreign Affairs, Science, Onion World, HPAC Engineering and probably a host of others out there. I don't know where people who follow sports get their commentary, but I gather the New York Times has been successful with its The Athletic.
Excellent point - also, the New York Times has to play into this somehow. The NYT publishes a good deal of longform 'magazine-style' writing, not limited to its 'official' magazine (as if anyone could tell the difference on the website). Sometimes it seems that the chattering class basically reads the NYT, Twitter and that's it.
As the piece notes, Harper's, though it has struggled editorially since Lewis Lapham retired (not a surprise given that Lapham as an editor was the master), is still maintaining itself. The New York Review of Books and London Review of Books are still about the same. Those are the major examples I'd give instead of the Atlantic, which has taken more of the online clickbait model, and the New Yorker, which changed so much in the Eighties that it's hard to compare to its earlier, legendary version even if it's still a fine magazine.
That said, without more data I'm not sure what's the point of these ruminations. Indeed a piece like this shows the drawbacks of the Substack model: is it not just more and more opinion pieces, ad nauseam, lacking research and field work? When I say more data is needed, I'm thinking: at the turn of the century, say, were there not more magazines than ever? I haven't seen mentioned newer periodicals that seem to be stable: n + 1, the Baffler, the Walrus, and, after a brief stop, the Believer. Of course there were also more people than ever, and most important, more highly-(over-)educated people than ever. But there were also more specialized magazines to match the interests of a wealthier readership with all their diverse, if not refined, interests. When you get to publications like those appealing more to the literary world (n+ 1, etc.) or specialized interests, sometimes the devotion of those making the magazines keep them alive. I know Rock-oriented popular music in the UK and US very well, and despite the decline or disappearance of the likes of NME, Rolling Stone, Spin, etc., there are possibly as many print publications as ever. This is also true in the realm of genealogy and local history, which I happen to know about because of my job as a librarian. But they are undoubtedly dying off, just at a excruciatingly slow pace. So, given (1) the specialization of the readership, is it in fact perfectly normal that their interests would be met by (2) online publications that require less brunt work? In other words, is the bigger issue that many of our highly-educated citizens have no interest in supporting general-interest publications like National Geographic, Scientific American, the Smithsonian--or the journal published by their local historical society--or their university's alumni magazine, etc.?
Meanwhile, those who used to subscribe to Newsweek, Time, Life, Reader's Digest, are addicted to their mobile devices and don't seem to pay much attention to who's providing what content.
Those advocating for some kind of Substack print periodical... sorry, I don't see that. It goes against what Substack mostly offers: highly specialized editorial stances appealing to people willing to pay 8 dollars per month to read a single person's work. If you choose to subscribe to 3 or 4 Substack blogs with the money that could have gone to a Harper's subscription, you're making a clear choice: that you want print periodicals to die.
One of my prized possessions that I somehow luckily obtained around the year 2001, possibly in a Costco, was the complete set of National Geographic Magazine from its inception to the year 2000. An additional add on to this was a complete set of their glorious maps from inception to the year 2000. All on CDs if I recall. All before the whole thing went woke and crapified by Disney. Over the decades, they published at least 3-4 pieces on pretty much every locale in the world. My kids use them all the time for school, and when I help them search, it brings back all kinds of nostalgia. When I have glanced at a National Geographic magazine in the bookstore in the modern era, it is easy to tell it is a complete sham and a shadow of its former self. By they way - I have a similar set for The New Yorker. I do wonder at times what The New Yorker writers of old would think about things now - when the readers have to put on their waders and read through all the fiction featuring "pronouns". It is completely unreadable - and I do wonder at times if it will survive its current decline - and if it does survive say 20 years from now, will readers be holding this current New Yorker junk up to the derision it deserves?
One caveat: National Geographic did not go 'woke' it went digital, or mainstream or corporate. Referring to a change one doesn't like as woke is a dog whistle, blaming the social justice for something it had nothing to do with. The change was to the business model and the marketing, not the content.
Well except they did make a big todo about dropping and apologizing for their deriguer monthly depictions of topless natives .. you know, the very reason for the mass subscriptions.
I have kept a stack from my father’s collection from the 40’s to 60’s. He passed away when i had no room in my first apartment and consumed with making a living, not storing ild NG magazines. Luckily, a handful survived.
Sounds about right. Curious about Vanity Fair which your didn’t mention. That said… Perhaps there’s something here for Substack to capitalise on.
Substack Writers could “opt in” for their articles to be considered to be included in thematic “Substack magazines” - these could be curated by Substack themselves, or other writers who are willing and able to do so.
When a writer’s work is included in a magazine edition, they would share in the revenue from said magazine - the details of this revenue sharing need not be debated or discussed here - but the opportunity lies in Substack being able to build the backend to allow for this to happen.
It also helps to counteract “subscription fatigue” - people may not have the budget (or time) to subscribe to 30 Substacks for 6 bucks apiece per month… but with a “magazine” approach, they could read selected works from 30 writers for 20-30 bucks per month, and while the writers would get “less per article” on one article, they’d be compensated for this by the increased reach which might lead to more direct subs.
Or… does this devalue writers’ work? I don’t think it does, but given this is wading into the territory of subscription models which you’ve previously criticised, perhaps I’ve missed something.
Substack definitely needs some sort of consolidation and discovery method.
I pay for about 4 or 5 substacks. I don't know how to find others I'm interested in. But I don't really want to spend more money on them and I'd like to have more variety. I also think some authors sometimes publish weak articles just to have content. If they were able to earn more per article they probably wouldn't do that.
You’re right about the drive to focus on quantity over quality - this is because very few have reached a critical mass of relevance which would allow them to remain silent for longer periods and still keep the audience engagement high. It’s like social media; People are rewarded for daily posting and engagement, over high quality content which may be more infrequent. In theory Substack should be that place - but as a writer it takes a lot of self awareness and discipline to avoid that dopamine-seeking and limit oneself from rushing to put out content. This perhaps comes down to writers’ “why” - if people write because they love to do so, that’s usually a good outcome. When the writing becomes a source of income and they depend on it, the pressure to perform can be a poison pill. Every writer knows they have peaks and troughs, and people (readers) have become more accustomed to shorter cycles and more instant gratification, to the point where they might just unsubscribe and stop paying if they are getting less - unless of course, the content remains so good that they are happy to wait. Therein lies the rub!
Fantastic article. I'm not old enough to remember the early days of NatGeo, but I have been re-reading old issues with my kids, and I can see the change over time. The older articles were reports written by the actual explorers in the field, and later articles become thinkpieces written by professional writers visiting the explorers. By one definition, the professional writers should have been able to bring more "quality writing," and they generally have more literary style. However, I prefer the raw substance of the articles written by the true adventurers, and that feel of being a part of a scientific. journal of explorers comes through even today.
Good riddance I say. Magazines and newspapers sold their collective soul and began publishing narratives instead of facts. Why should I pay money to be inundated by propaganda? Pissing off 1/2 of your customer base is a lousy business strategy/
Magazines run off of advertising. The social media, google, and the rest grabbed most of the advertising dollars and this is a big reason the mags couldn't afford to hire the good or great writers from what I have been reading and seeing over the years. Plus, they are monopolies so they dominate the spaces where you can read good writing.
Anyway, go to Substack. Go right to your writers is what I do. Cut to the chase. And nobody usually owns these writers they are free to write the truth MOST of the time it looks like to me. With the mags money influenced a lot of writing. Substack seems to be a good platform that lets them write. Probably better this way.
I don’t yet believe it: that there are truckloads of readers out there who want quality, long-form writing and that magazines are dying because they refuse to offer the kind of produce these readers demand. This is what good writers and those of us who love culture WANT to believe, but where is the evidence? You demonstrate the fact of magazine decline but not the cause for the decline.
The multiplication of convenient and inexpensive entertainment choices attendant on the rise of the home computer, internet, and smart phone—including video gaming, tv and movie streaming, and social media socializing; the consequent shift of ad dollars from print to electronic media; the expansion of work hours and the diminishment of leisure time; the slow but general decline in educational standards—all these seem more likely as causes for the decline of magazines.
It's my weekend read over breakfast, with the diagrams to absorb, along with occasionally stunning pictures (sometimes harrowing).
They changed the binding from staple to PUR binding (glued flattened spine) a few years ago so the magazine doesn't lie flat, which is now a disappointment when there are double page spread features / pictures as the bit going into the glued spine is not visible.
I do read the digital for the daily snippets, but for the long features i don't find the digital experience works for me.
Anyway, i already have enough screen time elsewhere, so some "real world" reading is a nice antidote. I do have a kindle for books though. The convenience there when travelling is well worth it.
In Britain, the weeklies are doing better than ok - The Economist, Spectator, Private Eye - all venerable in their own ways. There seems to be an appetite for what I’d call explainer media - a chance to stand back and make sense of the hurly burly. That’s why weekend editions are sustaining newspapers- just. It’s why blogs and podcasts thrive. And this is long-form.
Very true, alongside monthly print incomer Byline Times which is very much in the explainer media mode. Mainly online with the monthly print round-up, and a most satisfying read.
"Even in my working class neighborhood, I saw copies displayed on home bookshelves as some kind of iconic repository of the world’s riches." Grew up dirt poor single mom with four kids and in the country, but my late-grandmother gifted me a subscription of National Geographic each year as a child. Reading this made me realize what a gift they were indeed. Curiosity has always fueled me. I saved them all for years. The bright canary yellow spine proudly on display :) This observation hit home. My siblings and I held them sacred. We would cut through all the other magazines for school projects, collages, etc, but NOT The National Geo mags. We'd hang up the maps, innocently gawk at nudes, and even put tracing paper over dinosaurs or other cool animals. Thoughts of gratitude before they crossover...
That's the only magazine I can remember religiously reading. My late-grandfather loved Time, Newsweek, and Consumers Digest. He was a very quiet man, but if you mentioned an appliance or electronic that got a bad review in Consumers Digest, he'd interject! LOL.
"The National Geographic TV specials—which started in 1964—proved especially lucrative, and Elmer Bernstein’s theme song music was almost a clarion call to adventure."
Note that National Geographic went out and hired Elmer Bernstein, not some hack or generative AI widget. The "Little Golden Encyclopedia" volumes that I devoured when I was a kitten were written by the finest academic and professional historians, scientists, theologians, musicians, educational experts, psychologists, artists, doctors, etc. that money could buy back in 1948. Even today, I recognize many of the names. They even got Walt Disney to sit on their board, and I don't think he really needed the dough so badly by that point.
Anyway, the publishers pay peanuts these days because they can, these days.
Newsstand? Here in Atlanta the only place to find new magazines is Barnes & Noble and the public library, neither of which are places I visit weekly. For magazines to thrive, there really need to be more actual newsstands.
I do worry that we're living in a dark age, because digital media will cease to exist in a way that print media does not. Posterity will find it harder to know what we were up to in 2024 than in 1924.
Often, I think about the collapse of the fiction market -- and I wonder how that relates. A very good author could make a living writing short stories in the 1920s through the 1960s, and a hack could pay the rent sometimes too. And the pulp magazines that published so much genre stuff (much of it now deemed classic) used the star athlete model -- splashing authors' names across the cover in letters nearly as big as the logotype. "In this issue: Robert E. Howard!" Yet those magazines declined too. And there was no substack siphoning off the writers -- they just saw their livelihoods thin, instead.
But I can walk into a used bookstore right now, buy a 1958 copy of "Galaxy," and read half a dozen stories that no one has made a conscious effort to preserve, but that still exist because they were printed on paper. Fast-forward to 2100 -- how will anyone access today's Ted Goia column?
Eventually I will have so many paid substack subscriptions that the writers will get together and charge one flat fee for all their writing in one place and thereby reinvent the magazine.
Yup, exactly. I want a magazine frankly! I don't want to have to subscribe individually to a bunch of different writers then do the work of trying to find new quality writing as well.... this is what I used to pay for a magazine for!
Astute point. This is exactly what’s happening with streaming. We went through the whole rigmarole to get a new cable TV.
Reinvent it by going back to its original form. Many of the journals that defined the Republic of Letters were, in essence, writers' collectives.
I concur with the entirety of your observations. And I'd like to add another:
The New Yorker and The Atlantic are held up as survivors and paragons. But while I subscribe to both, I am flummoxed by their daily/newsletter offerings. I wish to support thoughtful and observant editorial content - which just doesn't happen when such material is microwaved and not lovingly (and leisurely) prepared. I have the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer to allegedly provide me with "news" - although they seem to be following each other down the "lifestyle" rabbit hole. What I crave is a curated menu of well-prepared entrees that I can mull over and roll over my intellectual tongue - savoring every morsel. Fat chance.
The world is awash in cleverness; I seek wisdom from people much smarter and more accomplished than myself, who can weave their thoughts into a tapestry of provocative (and well-supported) clarion calls to my noggin. Knee-jerk responses from Remnick, et al really don't pass muster.
Long-form journalism may have left the building (I can recall when The New Yorker regularly had articles that spanned two or three issues). But I'm afraid the headlong rush to "punchy" content has led to a punch-drunk audience. And the cycle will continue to keep on unabated until...well, I'm not sure what turns it around. But the debasement and decline of intellectual property in all of its guises is but a tocsin of the death of a society.
I’ve been a subscriber to The New Yorker for years but mostly these days I read stuff related to culture. There are often issues in which I skip the entire body of “main” articles…because no, I don’t need to read a long thing about Tucker Carlson or whoever is the awful figure of the month.
My intellectual tongue is satiated by the London Review of Books. It is revelatory.
It really is. Especially if you've been out of school awhile, a periodical that publishes and expects you to engage with challenging and enlightening essays rocks the system.
Could not agree with this more: "The world is awash in cleverness; I seek wisdom from people much smarter and more accomplished than myself, who can weave their thoughts into a tapestry of provocative (and well-supported) clarion calls to my noggin. Knee-jerk responses from Remnick, et al really don't pass muster."
Wisdom and compassionate mercy always place cleverness where it belongs.
Over half the value of the New Yorker to me is in the cover and the cartoons.
Amen from the long-form readers club.
Amen.
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the magazine The Economist (I'm aware that it styles itself a newspaper, but in most people's minds, it is a magazine). I read it quite regularly and find that the quality has maintained consistency over time. It's managed to do quite well for itself: it reached over 1.2 million subscribers this March. Its 11 newsletters on LinkedIn have 2.7 million subscribers combined (I believe a few of the newsletters are free).
Nonetheless, it sticks very much to brand name—there are no bylines beneath any of the articles, in both the print and online versions, and finding its writers can be difficult at times. Why do you think it's managed to stay successful? You might chalk it up to financiers wanting to get an in-depth scoop on the economic landscape, but I think there must be something else at work.
There's an old saying about the news business. Everything you read in the newspaper is unreliable except the business and sports pages because people bet money on them. (e.g. It was in the Pecora Report back in the 1930s, but is probably much older.) One would expect publications like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and the Economist to stick around. You'll also find trade journals like Freightwaves, Foreign Affairs, Science, Onion World, HPAC Engineering and probably a host of others out there. I don't know where people who follow sports get their commentary, but I gather the New York Times has been successful with its The Athletic.
Excellent point - also, the New York Times has to play into this somehow. The NYT publishes a good deal of longform 'magazine-style' writing, not limited to its 'official' magazine (as if anyone could tell the difference on the website). Sometimes it seems that the chattering class basically reads the NYT, Twitter and that's it.
I had the same question! Also Consumer Reports came to mind.
As the piece notes, Harper's, though it has struggled editorially since Lewis Lapham retired (not a surprise given that Lapham as an editor was the master), is still maintaining itself. The New York Review of Books and London Review of Books are still about the same. Those are the major examples I'd give instead of the Atlantic, which has taken more of the online clickbait model, and the New Yorker, which changed so much in the Eighties that it's hard to compare to its earlier, legendary version even if it's still a fine magazine.
That said, without more data I'm not sure what's the point of these ruminations. Indeed a piece like this shows the drawbacks of the Substack model: is it not just more and more opinion pieces, ad nauseam, lacking research and field work? When I say more data is needed, I'm thinking: at the turn of the century, say, were there not more magazines than ever? I haven't seen mentioned newer periodicals that seem to be stable: n + 1, the Baffler, the Walrus, and, after a brief stop, the Believer. Of course there were also more people than ever, and most important, more highly-(over-)educated people than ever. But there were also more specialized magazines to match the interests of a wealthier readership with all their diverse, if not refined, interests. When you get to publications like those appealing more to the literary world (n+ 1, etc.) or specialized interests, sometimes the devotion of those making the magazines keep them alive. I know Rock-oriented popular music in the UK and US very well, and despite the decline or disappearance of the likes of NME, Rolling Stone, Spin, etc., there are possibly as many print publications as ever. This is also true in the realm of genealogy and local history, which I happen to know about because of my job as a librarian. But they are undoubtedly dying off, just at a excruciatingly slow pace. So, given (1) the specialization of the readership, is it in fact perfectly normal that their interests would be met by (2) online publications that require less brunt work? In other words, is the bigger issue that many of our highly-educated citizens have no interest in supporting general-interest publications like National Geographic, Scientific American, the Smithsonian--or the journal published by their local historical society--or their university's alumni magazine, etc.?
Meanwhile, those who used to subscribe to Newsweek, Time, Life, Reader's Digest, are addicted to their mobile devices and don't seem to pay much attention to who's providing what content.
Those advocating for some kind of Substack print periodical... sorry, I don't see that. It goes against what Substack mostly offers: highly specialized editorial stances appealing to people willing to pay 8 dollars per month to read a single person's work. If you choose to subscribe to 3 or 4 Substack blogs with the money that could have gone to a Harper's subscription, you're making a clear choice: that you want print periodicals to die.
One of my prized possessions that I somehow luckily obtained around the year 2001, possibly in a Costco, was the complete set of National Geographic Magazine from its inception to the year 2000. An additional add on to this was a complete set of their glorious maps from inception to the year 2000. All on CDs if I recall. All before the whole thing went woke and crapified by Disney. Over the decades, they published at least 3-4 pieces on pretty much every locale in the world. My kids use them all the time for school, and when I help them search, it brings back all kinds of nostalgia. When I have glanced at a National Geographic magazine in the bookstore in the modern era, it is easy to tell it is a complete sham and a shadow of its former self. By they way - I have a similar set for The New Yorker. I do wonder at times what The New Yorker writers of old would think about things now - when the readers have to put on their waders and read through all the fiction featuring "pronouns". It is completely unreadable - and I do wonder at times if it will survive its current decline - and if it does survive say 20 years from now, will readers be holding this current New Yorker junk up to the derision it deserves?
One caveat: National Geographic did not go 'woke' it went digital, or mainstream or corporate. Referring to a change one doesn't like as woke is a dog whistle, blaming the social justice for something it had nothing to do with. The change was to the business model and the marketing, not the content.
Well except they did make a big todo about dropping and apologizing for their deriguer monthly depictions of topless natives .. you know, the very reason for the mass subscriptions.
I have kept a stack from my father’s collection from the 40’s to 60’s. He passed away when i had no room in my first apartment and consumed with making a living, not storing ild NG magazines. Luckily, a handful survived.
Sounds about right. Curious about Vanity Fair which your didn’t mention. That said… Perhaps there’s something here for Substack to capitalise on.
Substack Writers could “opt in” for their articles to be considered to be included in thematic “Substack magazines” - these could be curated by Substack themselves, or other writers who are willing and able to do so.
When a writer’s work is included in a magazine edition, they would share in the revenue from said magazine - the details of this revenue sharing need not be debated or discussed here - but the opportunity lies in Substack being able to build the backend to allow for this to happen.
It also helps to counteract “subscription fatigue” - people may not have the budget (or time) to subscribe to 30 Substacks for 6 bucks apiece per month… but with a “magazine” approach, they could read selected works from 30 writers for 20-30 bucks per month, and while the writers would get “less per article” on one article, they’d be compensated for this by the increased reach which might lead to more direct subs.
Or… does this devalue writers’ work? I don’t think it does, but given this is wading into the territory of subscription models which you’ve previously criticised, perhaps I’ve missed something.
Substack definitely needs some sort of consolidation and discovery method.
I pay for about 4 or 5 substacks. I don't know how to find others I'm interested in. But I don't really want to spend more money on them and I'd like to have more variety. I also think some authors sometimes publish weak articles just to have content. If they were able to earn more per article they probably wouldn't do that.
You’re right about the drive to focus on quantity over quality - this is because very few have reached a critical mass of relevance which would allow them to remain silent for longer periods and still keep the audience engagement high. It’s like social media; People are rewarded for daily posting and engagement, over high quality content which may be more infrequent. In theory Substack should be that place - but as a writer it takes a lot of self awareness and discipline to avoid that dopamine-seeking and limit oneself from rushing to put out content. This perhaps comes down to writers’ “why” - if people write because they love to do so, that’s usually a good outcome. When the writing becomes a source of income and they depend on it, the pressure to perform can be a poison pill. Every writer knows they have peaks and troughs, and people (readers) have become more accustomed to shorter cycles and more instant gratification, to the point where they might just unsubscribe and stop paying if they are getting less - unless of course, the content remains so good that they are happy to wait. Therein lies the rub!
Fantastic article. I'm not old enough to remember the early days of NatGeo, but I have been re-reading old issues with my kids, and I can see the change over time. The older articles were reports written by the actual explorers in the field, and later articles become thinkpieces written by professional writers visiting the explorers. By one definition, the professional writers should have been able to bring more "quality writing," and they generally have more literary style. However, I prefer the raw substance of the articles written by the true adventurers, and that feel of being a part of a scientific. journal of explorers comes through even today.
Good riddance I say. Magazines and newspapers sold their collective soul and began publishing narratives instead of facts. Why should I pay money to be inundated by propaganda? Pissing off 1/2 of your customer base is a lousy business strategy/
What did The National Lampoon ever do to you?
Magazines run off of advertising. The social media, google, and the rest grabbed most of the advertising dollars and this is a big reason the mags couldn't afford to hire the good or great writers from what I have been reading and seeing over the years. Plus, they are monopolies so they dominate the spaces where you can read good writing.
Anyway, go to Substack. Go right to your writers is what I do. Cut to the chase. And nobody usually owns these writers they are free to write the truth MOST of the time it looks like to me. With the mags money influenced a lot of writing. Substack seems to be a good platform that lets them write. Probably better this way.
I don’t yet believe it: that there are truckloads of readers out there who want quality, long-form writing and that magazines are dying because they refuse to offer the kind of produce these readers demand. This is what good writers and those of us who love culture WANT to believe, but where is the evidence? You demonstrate the fact of magazine decline but not the cause for the decline.
The multiplication of convenient and inexpensive entertainment choices attendant on the rise of the home computer, internet, and smart phone—including video gaming, tv and movie streaming, and social media socializing; the consequent shift of ad dollars from print to electronic media; the expansion of work hours and the diminishment of leisure time; the slow but general decline in educational standards—all these seem more likely as causes for the decline of magazines.
Quick mention for Scientific American, going for over 150 years. I get a paper copy delivered each month, over here in Europe.
I recently started up digital. Paper is just too bulky.
It's my weekend read over breakfast, with the diagrams to absorb, along with occasionally stunning pictures (sometimes harrowing).
They changed the binding from staple to PUR binding (glued flattened spine) a few years ago so the magazine doesn't lie flat, which is now a disappointment when there are double page spread features / pictures as the bit going into the glued spine is not visible.
I do read the digital for the daily snippets, but for the long features i don't find the digital experience works for me.
Anyway, i already have enough screen time elsewhere, so some "real world" reading is a nice antidote. I do have a kindle for books though. The convenience there when travelling is well worth it.
In Britain, the weeklies are doing better than ok - The Economist, Spectator, Private Eye - all venerable in their own ways. There seems to be an appetite for what I’d call explainer media - a chance to stand back and make sense of the hurly burly. That’s why weekend editions are sustaining newspapers- just. It’s why blogs and podcasts thrive. And this is long-form.
Very true, alongside monthly print incomer Byline Times which is very much in the explainer media mode. Mainly online with the monthly print round-up, and a most satisfying read.
"Even in my working class neighborhood, I saw copies displayed on home bookshelves as some kind of iconic repository of the world’s riches." Grew up dirt poor single mom with four kids and in the country, but my late-grandmother gifted me a subscription of National Geographic each year as a child. Reading this made me realize what a gift they were indeed. Curiosity has always fueled me. I saved them all for years. The bright canary yellow spine proudly on display :) This observation hit home. My siblings and I held them sacred. We would cut through all the other magazines for school projects, collages, etc, but NOT The National Geo mags. We'd hang up the maps, innocently gawk at nudes, and even put tracing paper over dinosaurs or other cool animals. Thoughts of gratitude before they crossover...
That's the only magazine I can remember religiously reading. My late-grandfather loved Time, Newsweek, and Consumers Digest. He was a very quiet man, but if you mentioned an appliance or electronic that got a bad review in Consumers Digest, he'd interject! LOL.
"The National Geographic TV specials—which started in 1964—proved especially lucrative, and Elmer Bernstein’s theme song music was almost a clarion call to adventure."
Note that National Geographic went out and hired Elmer Bernstein, not some hack or generative AI widget. The "Little Golden Encyclopedia" volumes that I devoured when I was a kitten were written by the finest academic and professional historians, scientists, theologians, musicians, educational experts, psychologists, artists, doctors, etc. that money could buy back in 1948. Even today, I recognize many of the names. They even got Walt Disney to sit on their board, and I don't think he really needed the dough so badly by that point.
Anyway, the publishers pay peanuts these days because they can, these days.
Newsstand? Here in Atlanta the only place to find new magazines is Barnes & Noble and the public library, neither of which are places I visit weekly. For magazines to thrive, there really need to be more actual newsstands.
As far as I can tell there simply are no humor magazines anymore. We could really use a National Lampoon right now, or a new Mad.
Mike, you might enjoy us—The American Bystander (www.americanbystander.org)
I do worry that we're living in a dark age, because digital media will cease to exist in a way that print media does not. Posterity will find it harder to know what we were up to in 2024 than in 1924.
Often, I think about the collapse of the fiction market -- and I wonder how that relates. A very good author could make a living writing short stories in the 1920s through the 1960s, and a hack could pay the rent sometimes too. And the pulp magazines that published so much genre stuff (much of it now deemed classic) used the star athlete model -- splashing authors' names across the cover in letters nearly as big as the logotype. "In this issue: Robert E. Howard!" Yet those magazines declined too. And there was no substack siphoning off the writers -- they just saw their livelihoods thin, instead.
But I can walk into a used bookstore right now, buy a 1958 copy of "Galaxy," and read half a dozen stories that no one has made a conscious effort to preserve, but that still exist because they were printed on paper. Fast-forward to 2100 -- how will anyone access today's Ted Goia column?