I miss magazines - Rewan Tremethick

I miss magazines.

“But Rewan, magazines still exist; you could read one today,” you may reply.

You’re right. And I do. But what I miss is the magazine as a paradigm. The format still exists, but the world has moved on, and I’m not sure that today’s content economy is better for it.

Exponential growth

A couple of years ago I spent a few months writing on Medium. I quickly ended up getting recommendations for articles on how to succeed on the platform. The content of them was not inspiring.

The people who seemed to be succeeding despite having only been writing for 6 months were the ones who had published an article every other day, or even daily, during that period.

There were others bragging about having published 1,000 articles in the past year. That’s almost three articles a day.

And Medium is just one platform, but the advice is the same across all of them. If you want to be visible, if you want to appeal to the algorithm, you want to be publishing something at least once a day.

Inverse relationship

What about quality? Ah, well, current theory is that success in writing is a statistics game. Only a small fraction of your audience is going to see your content anyway. So it’s better to throw as much content out as possible in order to appear before more readers. Sure, most of it won’t be great, but maybe it’ll be good enough to entertain those who do see it.

There is, of course, some truth in that argument. Even the best writers have manuscripts, or half-finished manuscripts, articles and who knows what else tucked away in a drawer or buried deep in their hard drives.

Beethoven composed over 700 pieces during his lifetime – are all of them bangers? (The use of the word ‘bangers’ to describe Beethoven’s most famous compositions gives you a hint as to the depth of my relationship with classical music).

But overall it seems that the internet has done two things; drastically increase the amount of content being created, while simultaneously massively lowering the quality bar, assuming there still is one.

You don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone

Which is why the humble magazine was such a great thing. We didn’t know what we had when we had it.

Think about it. The magazine is a finite, well-defined product. You know what you’re getting and when you’re getting it. If you subscribe to the magazine, there’s no risk of the postal worker hiding an issue in your compost bin because they’ve been paid to deliver leaflets for pizza or political party messages thinly disguised as a local newspaper.

You want it, you subscribe to it, you get it. That’s how it works.

Timebound

The regular, fixed format makes it easier to make time for it as well. You know roughly what time of the month it’s going to arrive, how long it’s going to be, and how long it’ll take you to read it.

Focussed

And then there’s the content itself. First of all, it’s all on the same theme, but there’s a huge amount of variety within that theme. It’s the perfect balance of variety and focus. This is something I think a lot of online writers struggle to achieve, which is why they go for the ‘spray-and-pray’ approach to content in the hope that if they publish enough articles on enough topics, eventually they’ll collect a following of people who like some of their stuff.

Of course, not everyone reads a magazine cover to cover, even the subscribers. But there’s still a difference.

Up to standards

And what about quality? I’ll be honest, I’ve read some truly awful magazines. Let no one accuse me of claiming the magazine is the perfect format and every single example represents the peak of writing. But still, magazines have an editor, or several. They have proofreaders (although, again, based on some I’ve read, I’m not so sure…). They have a pool of writers, all guided and kept within a single editorial style. There is a quality bar.

Relevance

Instead of the ‘publish it, you never know what will be successful’ mentality of a lot of content creators, magazines work on a ‘this isn’t up to our standards’ or ‘this isn’t a good fit for our readership’ basis. This means that readers know roughly what they’re getting. I find it particularly annoying to follow a creator where only 10% of their output, if that, is something that interests me.

Singular

Then there’s the fact all this content is collated and curated for you. Today things have become so spread out. Instead of getting one single thing that contains the wit, wisdom and insights of dozens of writers, we now have to subscribe to dozens of writers individually across a lot of platforms.

It’s all too much. Our social channels and our inboxes are full of notifications, full of content that lots of people are pushing out at increasingly high volumes in order to stay visible and relevant. Yet the spray-and-pray method means a lot of this may not interest you.

A respite for writers

In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the magazine sees a massive resurgence in popularity. The content creation economy is on a path to self-destruction. The amount of content available is growing exponentially, and yet the amount of readers isn’t growing that fast, and the amount of time available for consuming content probably isn’t changing much at all.

That’s not to blame content creators: they’re trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma.

Imagine a platform with 100 content creators, each publishing one article per week. Each creator has a share of 1% of the content on the platform.

But then another 100 creators join, each also putting out one article per week. Suddenly everyone’s share is 0.5%. If those creators start publishing another article every week, the newcomers are quickly going to respond, otherwise their ‘share of voice’ goes down, too. So readers are already up to 400 articles a week to sift through, and that’s just a relatively small example involving bi-weekly publishing.

Reversion isn’t always bad

Sometimes with technology, we’re so excited by the fact it’s new and shiny that we wholeheartedly jump aboard without stopping to think about what we’re leaving behind. Compared to the internet, the magazine seems outdated. It’s physical (OMG), monthly (soooo long to wait), finite (these page thingies don’t have infinite scroll) and it costs money.

But as the internet gets increasingly bloated with content, much of it soon to be generated by AI, it turns out that many of what we viewed as a magazine’s weaknesses are actually its greatest strengths. Rather like how we’re shifting back to paper bags, refill stores and vinyl records, maybe we’ll see a shift in interest back to magazines.

It’d do both readers and writers a massive favour.