Thoughts On The Future Of Print Magazines

Lately @designmilk via Twitter sent out the question whether printed magazines or printed media in general actually have a future. Without a doubt this is a question designers as well as media critics and researchers are very interested in. It's about the assumption that the rapid developments of the digital age were causing a fundamental overthrow of media landscape which probably could gradually supersede print media. But this also would mean that a culture which has been – at least partly – based on paper for thousands of years was saying goodbye to an important element of its own origin.

Actually one could interpret the serial pass away of magazines and newspapers all around the globe as an evidence for a scenario of such a kind of a farewell. Firmly established periodicals collapse back onto themselves, are shut down or transformed into purely web-based media. No suprise that @designmilk's question resulted in a lot of feedback via Twitter.

What's my opinion? I tweeted back that I thought it was the wrong question. In my opinion the magazine - exemplary for any kind of printed matter – won't disappear because this development isn't a bit about an exclusive decision for either print or digital. As I feel confident that in the field of visual communication the medium will always be a part of the message, I assume that there always be messages which require paper as their medium. It's about messages which avail theirselves of the concrete properties, phyical presence and aspects of haptics to emphasize their contents and communicate them more precisely. As man is a being through his senses the real and tangible will seduce him as long as in virtuality the difference from the real isn't vanquished.

David Renard, author of The Last Magazine, once stated that the market for periodicals will rapidly decrease in the next few years. He talks about a change in dimensions like:

Within twenty-five years only 10% of the paper-based magazine industry will remain, sustained by the so-called stylepress: physically and aesthetically engaging creative chroniclers of trends. These will be the last printed magazines.

I think that his forecast isn't that far from the future truth. Printed matter was and still is mostly used because it was the most optimal of the available carriers for the most kinds of content. And this exactly is my point: The new digital media extend the pool of possibilities and doesn't replace it. Through their permanent availability and realtime updatability at relatively low expense these media offer concrete properties which offer undeniable advantages for contents like news.

But an image affine magazine in the field of culture, fashion, art or design – catchword «style press» – has entirely different requirements concerning differentiation and positioning on the market. There are things that claim for themselves to endure, to be really and sensuously present in time and space. And there is an additional aspect: If you had invested a significant amount of money in impressive photographs or illustrations, would you expose them to the arbitrariness of factors like display resolutions, color modes or browser interpretations?

Any printed work present in my very own hands is added a quality through materiality, the smell of paper, the unchangeability of the written and the illustrated that no today's digital medium is able to imitate up to now. Everyone who has ever tried to sort out old magazines cumulated over the years knows how hard it actually is to bin them. The digital is missing – so far – the possibility to make stories of life – historical as well as personal ones – become manifest in itself, to snatch these stories away from the flow of time and to enclose them physically inside of itself.

From my point of view the current developments are no displacement process through the digital but a diversification of the media landscape. Who responds early enough to these changes and decides for a medial channel that fits the own intentions and contents most, perhaps might change but possibly persist.

Looked at in that light a medial optimization seems to be taking place that sorts out the market's change averse protagonists and leads to thematic concentrations. The media landscape in future will be a more differentiated and specialized one. And one insight will emerge much more clearly than today: A magazine is a magazine because it has to be one.