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Some people make headlines while others make history.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt, in Time Magazine

Dateline Charlottesville, VA

In This Issue

Print magazines are having a moment, but who’s buying them?

Amy Scott and Sofia Terenzio

https://www.marketplace.org/

https://bit.ly/495r60V

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In October, The Atlantic, an American magazine publisher, announced plans to increase the number of print editions it publishes each year from 10 up to 12. And The Atlantic isn’t the only magazine investing back into print these days.

“Field & Stream, NYLON, Saveur, Sports Illustrated, and VICE, all of these companies are like, ‘Hold on a second. Why don’t we bring back a little bit of print magazine and see how it goes?'” said Amanda Mull, a reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek.

Mull joined “Marketplace” host Amy Scott to discuss her piece about the revival of the print magazine. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Amy Scott: Several magazines have actually restarted their print publications, and there are some newcomers. What is going on?

Amanda Mull: So we’re probably all pretty familiar with the decline of print over the past 10, 15, 20 years.

Over that period of time, a lot of long-standing publications that had started as print magazines decades or even a century prior had phased out their print editions and tried to funnel everybody online.

In the past couple of years, some of those publications have started to think twice about that decision. Recently, Field % Stream, NYLON, Saveur, Sports Illustrated, and VICE, all of these companies are like, ‘Hold on a second. Why don’t we bring back a little bit of print magazine and see how it goes?’

Scott: And why do you think that is? Were readers clamoring for a print copy to hold in their hands again?

Mull: Well, I think that fundamentally the issue is that people didn’t stop buying print magazines, and companies didn’t stop printing print magazines because consumers hated them.

They stopped printing them because the economics of printing physical editions of a magazine became sort of untenable. And I think that what we’re seeing is the realization among publishers of periodicals that they may have moved a little too swiftly to kill off this entire arm of their business. And it turns out that advertisers really like print magazines as well.

So, you might not be able to print a weekly magazine anymore, and some of these companies probably can’t print a monthly magazine anymore, but maybe, like a quarterly magazine. There’s demand for it among readers; there’s demand among advertisers. So, why not give it a try and see if it works?

Scott: You mentioned that advertisers like appearing in magazines. How are these ads different than what they might pay for online?

Mull: I remember when I was a kid reading magazines. There were lots of advertisements, especially in the sort of fashion realm, but also in consumer technology and beauty and lots of different industries that were downright artistic, that people would tear out of magazines and put on their walls.

These were advertisements for products, but people didn’t encounter them as an inconvenience or as something that was trying to get in their way. So that is still the case. In fact, it might be even more so the case. The bad technology in implementing online advertising can make people think worse of your publication, or of your product if you’re the advertiser, and you really don’t get that same capacity for blowback in a print publication because it is just a lot more standardized. It’s a different user experience, and there’s a lot more upsides. Especially for high end brands, and advertisers going that direction.

Print ads give you as an advertiser a lot more control over how your ad appears, over how obtrusive it is to people, and ultimately, more control over what they might think of you as a result. So, there’s a lot of upsides for advertisers.

Scott: Well, and it’s not just the advertisers who are high end, right? You mentioned that a lot of the readers are going to be higher income, more educated. It’s become kind of a luxury good.

Mull: Yes, I think that a really beautifully designed magazine full of interesting, freshly reported stories is something that a lot of these publications look at as particularly marketable toward a higher end subscriber, somebody who might pay $100 or $120 for an annual subscription. When you make a sophisticated, high-minded product that you can better sell to this cohort of the population, you then make a publication that can make a really great pitch toward advertisers who are looking for people with disposable income, and who are looking for that same cohort of the population, essentially.

Scott: Are you subscribing to anything in print that you might have read online previously?

Mull: Oh, I subscribe to tons of things. My mailman is extremely busy.

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