Navigating Tradition and Innovation: Why Paper Magazines Endure Amidst Digital Dominance

Key Takeaways

• Magazines are carefully edited as a whole, featuring cohesive planning and themed content for readers’ enjoyment.
• Print layouts surpass website design in beauty, offering an artistic coherence that digital formats lack.
• Magazines provide snapshots of time, reflecting the era’s values and ideas, while being easily collectible and preserving details better than websites.

The best time of the month as a kid was when I could buy my favorite magazines. Long before I could whip out a gadget from my pocket, and read the latest news and views, this was the way. Now, in spite of the internet in my pocket, I’m still buying physical and digital magazines, but why?

Magazines Are Carefully Edited as a Whole

As someone who has spent more than a decade working in the online publication business, I can tell you that we’re constantly holding a tiger by its tail. Things are always in flux, and even if you’re not strictly dealing with news, the window for topical articles is often quite narrow.

Magazines are the product of significant planning, and since they only come out once every few weeks, or sometimes every few months, the editorial team have the luxury of planning out the entire publication as a whole, rather than a stream of individual articles. Sometimes this means that a magazine as a whole has a theme, or that the variety of articles are carefully balanced to make the entire book interesting in unique ways.

Print Layouts Will Always Beat Websites for Beauty

Website design has surely come a long way from the 90s, and there are many online publications that have quite attractive looks. However, thanks to the variety of screens on all the different devices we use, we will never see the artistic coherence of proper print desktop publishing design in website form.

There’s more to the meaning and vibe of an article than just the words on the page. The layout can speak volumes, and a gorgeous page layout is an important part of the artistry of publishing that we’re slowly losing.

It’s a Good Snapshot of a Period of Time

My humble collection of digital magazine back issues,

I have a significant collection of digital magazines via Zinio, and one of the best things about these is how they act as little snippets of time. You can get a good sense of the things that mattered at that time. It’s also interesting to read what people thought without the benefit if our hindsight. I always learn or remember something interesting when I page through back issues of my magazines.

Collecting Magazines Is Simple, Not So for Websites

It’s no secret that the internet is not forever . Websites disappear, despite admirable efforts like the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine , and even these archives are still a web-based resource.

Magazines are cohesive, independent things. You can preserve them in print or as a PDF file. You don’t need any cloud infrastructure to maintain them, and the nature of the file formats used to store these magazines means that the precise details and layout are all preserved. You can even easily digitize print magazines using equipment you probably already have.

Even better, some of my favorite magazines that have made the leap online, have decided to put their old magazines up on their websites for everyone to download and keep. Which means I’ve managed to recover magazines from when I was a teenager, which I stupidly threw away before I knew any better.

Thanks to gadgets like tablets and eReaders , we can enjoy these digitized magazines much as they would have been in their paper form, though I still like to keep a few special issues of paper magazines on my shelf.

If it’s been a while since you’ve bothered looking at a magazine, why not pick one up the next time you’re in line at the convenience store? If you don’t care much about paper, you can use services like Zinio to buy quality magazines in digital form. Though that has all the pitfalls of any digital media purchase. Perhaps even best of all, you can head over to sites like the Internet Archive’s Magazine Rack and find thousands of classic magazines from years gone by right now.

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