The Print Magazine Revival Of 2024

The old model of print is certainly gone, along with the massive circulation numbers and cultural ubiquity that the format enjoyed before the internet upended media and left us with supermarket-checkout-line gossip rags and “bookazines” of low-carb recipes. But an opportunity remains for magazines, business models be damned, and some publishers and brands seem to be figuring it out. Several titles across genres, including Field & Stream, Nylon, Saveur, Sports Illustrated and Vice, have committed to restarting their previously abandoned physical products in 2024. Small, print-forward indie publications, such as Apartamento, Bitter Southerner, the Drift and HommeGirls, continue to eke out space in their respective niches, and they’ve been joined by dozens of print upstarts every year since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

All of this may seem counterintuitive, but it makes more sense if you remember that people never stopped enjoying magazines, even as the economics of producing them got more tenuous. My—full disclosure!—old boss, Editor-in-Chief Jeff Goldberg at the Atlantic, said as much in an interview with CNN this month; he was explaining why the publication would expand its print output, which almost half of its more than 1 million subscribers opt to receive, from 10 back to 12 editions per year.

Print magazines are leisure products, controlled wholly by the people who make them and given directly to readers, no tech middlemen required—attributes beloved by readers, sure, but arguably even more beloved by high-end advertisers, who still see big, glossy ads as an effective way to grab the attention of a largely affluent audience in particular. And many of the people now asked to pay for digital publications might be even more willing to subscribe if you offered them an occasional (good—it has to be good!) print edition to go along with their online access. That means print is still valuable to some advertisers and publishers, even if that value has changed. Magazines aren’t dead, but they are, as Interview Editor-in-Chief Mel Ottenberg recently termed them in New York, “a luxury item.”

When you think about the new role of print magazines, it’s useful to consider which publications never abandoned them in the first place: Architectural Digest, the Atlantic, Bon Appétit, GQ, New York, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue, among others. The readership of these magazines isn’t exactly a cross section of America; they’re disproportionately affluent and well-educated people who are generally willing to pay up for things they think are fancy or high quality or sophisticated. That’s why they still subscribe to magazines, and to these magazines in particular. They’re high-end products, most with glossy pages full of lengthy, deeply reported stories, high style or original photography that take a long time and a lot of expense to produce. As we do at Businessweek, they make a pitch to readers about the necessity of paying for that kind of work and the pleasure of sitting down with it. A similar pitch has fueled nostalgic revivals of all kinds of physical media, from film cameras to vinyl records. It has also managed to stabilize the business of books and bookstores, both of which e-books were supposed to kill years ago.

The people who pay for these magazines are largely the same people who buy expensive clothing and book luxury hotel stays and might be interested in hearing about BMW’s latest electric car. Condé Nast says as much in its pitch to advertisers, promising that its print audience is both richer and younger than the median consumer—exactly the people that high-end brands with big ad budgets always try to ferret out. Finding those people online isn’t impossible for advertisers, but it does present certain challenges—people mostly avoid or ignore digital ads, and the ones they can’t avoid or ignore are annoying. And even if everything works on the technical side, advertisers have grown more wary of “brand safety” concerns, which come to bear if one of their ads should appear alongside a topic they find distasteful.

Print advertising, by comparison, exists outside the blast zone of screenshot hate-read virality, and consumer surveys consistently find that print ads are regarded as more trustworthy and effective than their digital counterparts. When Nylon reintroduced its print edition in April, Bryan Goldberg, the chief executive officer of its parent company, BDG Media, said advertising sales for the first issue “greatly exceeded our goals.” As long as advertisers design something that looks pretty good, readers are unlikely to regard their advertisements with the kind of scorn they reserve for auto-play videos or pop-ups. They might even enjoy them.

In this way, print magazines free all sides of the media economy from some of the things people commonly dislike most about reading online. There’s no algorithmic intervention serving things up to readers, no paywalls that refuse to remember your password, no constant bids for your attention crowding the edges of your screen. They allow both publishers and advertisers the opportunity to show the public the best, most put-together versions of themselves, and they offer readers an opportunity to spend an hour or two reading and looking at things they know were made by people who actually care about the finished product. You might be sick of buying access to websites, but what if we throw in a beautiful book of interesting writing that’s sent to your home a few times a year? (On an entirely unrelated note, did I mention that Businessweek puts out a lovely print edition?)

Magazines, of course, then have to make good on the promise to deliver something that will make you put down your phone, and they have to build up businesses around their print editions—events, merch, whatever—that justify the expense of producing them. Print publications can perhaps not be standalone businesses anymore, but they can be very effective marketing tools for the array of products and services a modern media company offers, especially if the goal is to reach people who place real value on the sense of sophistication or prestige or even romance that a really, really good magazine can still provoke.

“Romantic” was also the term that Maria Dimitrova, co-editor of the new sex-and-culture magazine AFM, used to describe magazines during our interview about her publication, which is published by the dating app company Feeld Ltd. Its inaugural issue features contributions from literary heavyweights including Hanif Abdurraqib and Tony Tulathimutte—people known for their sensitive, careful, profoundly human work. In reading AFM, it felt cool and artistic and not straightforwardly commercial and also like a bit of a rebuke to the popular backlash against dating apps and their role in making dating an impersonal, algorithmically mediated, sometimes-inhuman experience. And if media companies can use magazines as effective marketing tools, why can’t other businesses?

Plenty of companies have tried the magazines-as-marketing gambit before, of course—Costco Connection, with a circulation of more than 15 million, is one of the most successful magazines in the country. But most of the publications—Casper’s, Away’s, even United Airlines Holdings Inc.’s mighty Hemispheres—eventually ceased production, with those companies learning the same truth that media companies have learned over the years: that publishing a good magazine is hard, expensive work. AFM is no exception; it took 18 months for Dimitrova and her co-editor, Haley Mlotek, to bring the first issue to fruition, and it will proceed semiannually. Feeld, she says, doesn’t look at the magazine as a revenue driver. That might be enough for us all to assume it will eventually meet the same fate as those other branded publications, but it’s also probably how most media companies should look at their print magazines, even if the ad revenue is nice to have. There’s always an upside to figuring out how to make things that people actually like when you’re asking them for their money and attention, even if what you’re selling them is something else entirely.