I had one of my favourite conversations in a long time this week with writer and Full Bleed podcast host Arjun Basu.
We both came from the magazine world. We remember the days when magazines had millions of readers, editors could call a trend before it happened, and entire industries waited to see what would appear in next month’s issue.
Then the internet arrived.
Most people tell that story as if technology simply destroyed print. Arjun had a more interesting take.
He argues the first mistake wasn’t losing advertising. It was trying to make magazines behave like the internet.
“The internet spent all that time just being like magazines and newspapers,” he told me. “And then slowly the ad dollars started going away.”
That made me think.
Every new technology seems to convince the old one to abandon what made it valuable.
Magazines chased clicks.
Newspapers chased page views.
Television chased YouTube.
Now everyone is chasing TikTok.
Somewhere along the way we stopped asking whether we should.
One thing Arjun said really stuck with me.
“The publisher sort of forgot about the reader.”
When advertisers paid the bills, readers became a metric instead of the customer.
Today that’s changing again. The publications that are succeeding are asking readers to pay directly, which means they have to produce something worth paying for.
The audience is back in charge.
There’s another twist I didn’t expect.
Many of the people buying independent magazines today aren’t Gen X nostalgics trying to relive the 1990s.
They’re Gen Z.
Magazine shop owners are finding their stores filling up with people in their twenties who are making zines, buying beautifully printed magazines and treating them as social spaces instead of relics.
Maybe that’s because they grew up surrounded by screens.
Maybe holding something real has become the novelty.
I don’t think print will ever return to what it was.
Neither does Arjun.
“The days are over,” he said. “You are paying your penance, and I’m trying to bring it back.”
He’s probably right.
But perhaps that’s the wrong goal.
The future isn’t recreating the old magazine industry.
It’s taking what magazines were always best at, thoughtful curation, strong voices and memorable design, and building businesses around communities instead of advertising.
That’s a much harder business.
It also might be a much better one.
