For the past decade, the dominant narrative around magazines has been that print ​“died”. You’ve heard it so many times it feels like a settled fact: digital killed attention; social media gutted budgets; nobody wants to pay for paper anymore. But that story has always been too easy – too convenient. It lets an entire industry off the hook for decisions that had nothing to do with readers and everything to do with short-term thinking.

I say this as someone who’s spent years inside this world – building magazines, rebranding them, helping editors and creative teams hold onto the integrity of their work as the business structures around them fell apart. Before I founded In Real Life Media, I kept watching the same cycle repeat: print wasn’t failing, but it was being abandoned by people who no longer believed it could evolve.

The truth is simpler: print never died. Decision-makers just walked away from it before it ever had the chance to grow alongside digital.

And now, strangely, beautifully, against everything we were told would happen, print is not only back – it’s culturally ascendant again. The most recent readership data show that magazines of all kinds (print + digital) reached 223.6 million Americans in 2023, with 87% of US adults having read one in the past six months. 

Globally, more than 3 billion print magazine copies were sold in 2023 – and print still makes up around 55% of magazine circulation worldwide. The people who supposedly ​“don’t read” somehow have stacks of magazines by their bed. Teenagers who grew up swiping screens are buying zines as if they just discovered oxygen. Brands are quietly rediscovering that a physical object builds loyalty in a way no impression metric ever could. And every creative discipline – music, fashion, food, politics, identity – is re-anchoring itself in long-form editorial again. Something is happening. And it deserves to be named.

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How print lost its way (and why it wasn’t print’s fault)

As digital advertising rose, budgets were pulled from print quietly at first, then aggressively. But the money didn’t go to publishers. It went to Google and Meta, who captured more than 60% percent of global digital advertising revenue at their peak. For nearly a decade, they took almost all the growth in the market, leaving publishers fighting over whatever crumbs remained.

To survive, print was cheapened. Page counts shrank, paper quality dropped, editorial teams were gutted, and covers were redesigned to chase short-term metrics. The result was a homogenised landscape of thinner, glossier, more cautious magazines.

Readers understood immediately. The magazine was no longer being made with them in mind.

But what happened next was misdiagnosed. When audiences drifted, the industry blamed ​“changing consumer behaviour”. They claimed nobody wanted print. That smartphones rewired our brains. That attention spans had collapsed. That magazines were simply incompatible with a modern world.

This was never true. Readers didn’t turn away from print. Publishers abandoned the very things that made print valuable. They stopped treating magazines as cultural objects – artefacts of care, curation, and community. They watered down the thing that once built trust, and then were surprised when trust eroded. If you reduce any medium to the least expensive version of itself, of course it fails. That’s not a prophecy; that’s a business decision.

Watching this unfold in real time is one of the reasons I stopped waiting for legacy publishers to fix themselves. They weren’t going to. So I began working directly with independent magazine founders – the ones who still believed in craft but were drowning in the operational and commercial gaps left behind by the old system. That work eventually became In Real Life Media.

Then the world broke open

And then: a pandemic. A global collapse of routine, structure, and proximity to each other. Overnight, people became confronted with something they hadn’t felt in decades: the limit of their own digital tolerance. Every demographic experienced screen fatigue. Every age bracket. Every geography. Every socio-economic group. People began to pull away. A study by the Pew Research Center found that one-third of adults tried to cut back on smartphone or internet time during the pandemic. We suddenly had to name what we always privately sensed but didn’t fully articulate: all-day digital immersion is corrosive. To attention, to mood, to memory, to creativity.

We started craving friction – the good kind. Slowness. Texture. A single narrative that wasn’t competing with 12 others. Pages instead of feeds. Time uninterrupted rather than time constantly divided. This wasn’t a trend or a ​“return to analog” moment recycled from 2014 think pieces. This was a physiological shift. A mental-health shift. A deep reorientation of value. Time off screens became a luxury. Time off screens became wellness. Time off screens became aspiration.

Nowadays, you can build a $5,000 retreat around ​“off screens.”. You can build a billion-dollar startup around ​“digital minimalism.” Or, you can spend £20 on a magazine. That’s the opening for print-first businesses right now: they offer the one commodity nobody can manufacture digitally: presence.

The scepticism era

If screen fatigue cracked the door open, digital scepticism blew it off the hinges. We’ve reached a point where every piece of online content is subconsciously interrogated before it’s even read: Is this paid for? Is this SEO content wearing human clothes? Is this writer actually informed or just filling a quota? Does this even matter? Was this generated by AI? This isn’t paranoia. It’s pattern recognition.

The average reader now has the media literacy of a seasoned editor. They can spot a sponsored piece from a mile away. They know when something is surface-level. They can feel when a publication is pandering to algorithms rather than serving a community. And because digital content is infinite, we treat it as disposable. We skim it. We distrust it. We forget it.

Print – ironically, the ​“old” thing – has become the most future-proof antidote to that distrust. A printed magazine is a commitment. A finite space. An object that costs something to make, and cost signals care. I see this every week in my work with publishers: readers reward depth, intentionality, and lived expertise. They know when a magazine is made with real stakes and when it’s been assembled to feed a content calendar.

You can’t churn out a magazine overnight. You can’t fake expertise in 5,000 words. You can’t A/B test print into oblivion. Print is expensive and that’s exactly why people trust it.

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The radicality of magazines

To understand the revival of print, you have to understand what magazines actually are – and what they’ve always been. Magazines are not just ​“media products”. They’re alternative archives of lived human experience. They document subcultures long before institutions notice them. They capture the nuances of communities ignored by mainstream narratives. They treat marginal voices as central, not peripheral. They keep memories alive that dominant culture tries to sanitise or erase. A magazine issue doesn’t update itself. It doesn’t disappear behind a paywall or get rewritten by corporate legal. It holds a moment exactly as it was lived, felt, argued, loved.

Print is the closest thing we have to an uncorrupted version of history. Long before academia canonises something, magazines have already recorded it – raw, messy, premature, necessary. Every magazine I’ve ever worked with holds a worldview inside it. You’re not just printing pages; you’re building a cultural record that will outlast you. This is why magazines have always been radical. Not because they’re contrarian, but because they’re immediate. Because they’re first. Because they observe culture at the level where it actually happens – person to person, street to street, kitchen to kitchen. Print’s permanence gives weight to lives that are otherwise overlooked.

Why Brands Have Finally Started to Notice

For years, brands chased one thing: measurability. Clicks, impressions, conversions, CPM efficiencies. Print didn’t fit neatly into any of those frameworks, so it was written off as ​“not performance-driven.” But here’s the irony: when you measure what actually correlates with long-term revenue – brand trust, brand affinity, brand loyalty – print outperforms digital by miles. That’s not opinion. That’s not nostalgia. That’s reality. You remember the magazine ad you saw last week. You don’t remember the 4,000 digital ads you were served in the same period.

When I present this to brands, the reaction is always the same: a quiet shock that print delivers the one thing they’ve been trying to engineer through digital funnels – genuine loyalty. Cultural capital isn’t a metric; it’s a relationship.

The Future of Print Is Bigger Than Its Past

If you think print is ​“coming back”, you’re missing the point. It’s not returning to what it was. It’s becoming what it always should have been. The next generation of magazines won’t be copycat versions of the legacy publishers that cheapened their own products. They’ll be built by founders who respect editorial craft, who understand audience connection, who design for attention rather than algorithms. These magazines won’t apologise for being slow. They’ll treat slowness as a competitive advantage. They won’t dilute their point of view to chase mass reach. They’ll build smaller, deeper, more loyal communities. And they’ll integrate print with digital, not by mimicking it, but by extending it. Print as the anchor. Digital as the amplifier. Print as the source of truth. Digital as the avenue for discovery.

Part of why I founded In Real Life Media was because so many gifted editors were being forced to do everything except the thing they were brilliant at. They were drowning in logistics, revenue puzzles, distribution headaches – all the parts of publishing that legacy media once handled before it abandoned its responsibility to the ecosystem. The future of print depends on rebuilding that infrastructure, not romanticising the old version of it. The magazines that succeed will be the ones that understand their role not as content distributors but as cultural engines.

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Why the Revival Is Happening Now

Because people are tired. Because people are bored of being optimised. Because they want to feel something real. Because scrolling makes us anxious. Because finishing a magazine makes us proud. Because we’re desperate for meaning, not just information. Because print gives us belonging, not just content. Because magazines help us see ourselves and each other more clearly. Because print is human.

You can’t swipe a magazine away. You can’t ignore its weight in your hands. You can’t skim it without noticing what you’re missing.

Print brings us back into our bodies. Back into attention. Back into the world. That’s radical.

Print isn’t reviving – we are

The revival of print isn’t really about magazines. It’s about us and what we’re choosing to value again. Our hunger for something grounded, intentional, unmediated, trustworthy. Our desire for culture that isn’t flattened into trends or algorithmic sludge. Print didn’t die. We just forgot why it mattered. And now, collectively, we’re remembering.

This is the beginning of a new era for magazines, one built on craft, trust, and cultural relevance rather than scale, speed, and digital dependency. It’s why I’ve dedicated my work to this space: not to save print, but to strengthen the ecosystem around it so it can thrive in the world we actually live in.

The future of print isn’t nostalgic. It’s visionary. It’s expansive. It’s deeply alive. And if you pay attention – really pay attention – you’ll see that the most exciting media being made right now isn’t happening on screens. It’s happening on paper.

Megan Wray Schertler is the Co-founder and Managing Director of In Real Life Media, an agency that connects the dots between brands and independent magazines. Follow her on Instagram.

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