Magazines are dead. Long live magazines.

Compartment C by Edward Hopper, 1938

I recently returned from a beach trip.

Beach on one side, pool on the other.

And you know what’s awesome when relaxing by the water?

A magazine.

They are totally disposable. Throw it away when you’re done!

It doesn’t matter if they get wet.

There’s lots of good, substantive content to read for an hour or 2.

No glare when you’re outside, like with a phone or tablet.

Dear reader, here’s the bad news…

I didn’t bring my magazines to the beach.

I was out.

I subscribe to 3 print magazines and I’d already consumed them before I left, and I was gone for 2 weeks and 3 were waiting for me on my return.

Not having them at the water made me want them even more.

But they were bigger than you remember and now totally dead

We all know this. Ted Gioia in a recent Substack showed the contrast very well.

Even though I’m fond of magazines, my interest came way after their peak.

For instance, I never read any of these, though all of them were household names:

The Death of the Magazine

Quoting from Ted’s piece:

Now let’s look at the five most popular print magazines in 1960. How do you think they did?

In 1960 the magazines with the most circulation in the US were:

1. Reader’s Digest (filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and 2013)

2. Life (regular print editions ended in 2000)

3. Ladies Home Journal (last print issue in 2016)

4. Saturday Evening Post (still publishes 6 issues per year, but print circulation is down 95% from its peak)

5. McCall’s (last print issue in 2002)

This tweet is from last summer, on an exploratory trip before moving to New York:

Please allow a moment to let my elder millennial show…

One year when I was at college in the 00s, I was the of our college magazine.

It came out once a month.

But really, the nice thing was that the journalism advisor let me subscribe to magazines.

So I had ESPN the Magazine, Interview, and Rolling Stone delivered to the office.

It was great inspiration, and a nice perk at the office.

I learned too much about InDesign and Photoshop, whereas learning HTML and Javascript woud have been better career moves.

And part of my research while in college required me to find old TIME and LIFE magazines in the library archives.

These were yearly bound issues with a big black spine and I would crack them open at these huge old-time wooden tables in the Vanderbilt Library.

I loved looking at the articles, but also the ads. Totally captures a time and place.

It’s not necessarily harder to capture those things digitally today, there is just more of it.

Tools like the Wayback Machine are helpful, but they still lack that element of randomness that comes up when flipping through something.

I like magazines better than newspapers for this reason.

Print newspapers made sense for the time, but there’s nothing substantial to them.

The fish wrapper for tomorrow, the cat’s litter bed, all of that makes sense for a newspaper.

Magazines you could hold onto for just an extra minute.

At the dentist’s office, you would flip through an old one.

It felt like 3 months was the limit.

Most bookstores in New York…

…don’t have magazines.

Barnes and Noble does.

The Strand doesn’t. Maybe they used to.

There’s that one store that everyone talks about on Instagram, Casa Magazines.

As a recent New Yorker, I don’t really like it. It’s very hard to navigate.

It’s classically confined.

Waves of Japanese fashion magazines rolling on top of each other.

I went once and probably would go again if I went by. It has more of a “you had to be there” vibe, which is basically what this newsletter is banking on as well.

The lack of print in this city was odd, because my previous experience was that it overflowed with print.

The AM News, the Village Voice, the Post.

I switched buildings a few months ago, but in the old building someone received the New York Post every day.

He was an older man. And I would talk to his home nursing assistants in the elevator.

I get New York Magazine in print.

I subscribed for 15 or 17 years(?) maybe longer before ever moving here.

Now that I live in the city, someone brings it to my door. Rolled up and rubber-banded.

Service.

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My favorite tweet by me about a magazine

A search through my old tweets and I found at least 10 that mentioned “The New Yorker.”

Here’s a favorite from 2019:

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Magazines in my house, currently

I don’t keep magazines around as much as I used to.

I never liked the idea of them piling high.

I currently subscribe to The New Yorker, New York, Christianity Today, and Highlights magazine (for kids).

I won’t include catalogues. Other recent subs include The Atlantic.

In the way distant past, I remember my wife getting Domino and Lucky and Real Living.

Gone.

Before moving to New York, I read magazines at lunch.

Now, I like taking them on the bus or subway. Makes me feel old fashioned.

My time in New York didn’t overlap with the prime magazine-time, the people perusing Time in between lunch appointments.

I’m usually the only one reading a magazine. Maybe 2 or 3 other people are reading a book.

Like I’m reciting an old liturgy I wasn’t originally privvy to.

But am still fascinated by all the same.

Keep going-

Josh Spilker