The Death of the Magazine

Marty Peretz, the former owner of The New Republic, has just come out with a memoir, and it prompts some nostalgia, and some melancholy thoughts about the death of magazines.

For more than a quarter-century now, the media landscape has been evolving at breakneck speed, and in unpredictable directions. Back when the internet destroyed the classified advertising revenue on which most American newspapers depended, the death of the newspaper was widely foretold. But that didn’t happen, at least not in the way most observers expected. On one end of the spectrum, a few elite publications—notably The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—figured out new business models and flourished. Since the internet removes the cost of physical distribution, it hugely encourages the centralization of information and knowledge, with the result that a handful of sites—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, the pre-Musk Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.—utterly dominate. The Times and Journal managed to take advantage of this shift, largely through their digital operations. At the other end of the spectrum, there are a flurry of small, local websites (true, many of them part of the “Patch” network) that have sprung up to provide neighborhood news. It is in the middle of the spectrum that the great regional and local newspapers have been hollowed out, their newsrooms a shadow of their former selves.

Many other changes are afoot. The golden age of the amateur blog is past, but the electronic newsletter seems to have taken the form in a new direction (hello…). We now seem to be in the golden age of podcasting, but on the internet time scale, golden ages are short-lived. We do not yet know what changes AI will bring to journalism. Bots are already quite capable of writing at the level of a mediocre undergraduate paper or a corporate press release, but will they ever be able to compete with the best human writers?

But amidst all this turmoil, the death of the magazine has gone largely unnoticed. Yes, sure, I am exaggerating. Go to any news kiosk and there are still racks after racks of paper magazines. My wife and I still subscribe to a dozen paper titles, although we definitely belong to a niche demographic (aging academics…). But more and more, titles that became famous long before the internet depend on digital revenues to stay afloat. Condé Nast, the parent corporation of The New Yorker, Vogue, and many other marquee magazines, lost $120 million in 2017, and only struggled back to profitability in 2021 by doubling down on its digital operations. New York magazine, which several years ago cut back paper publishing to once every two weeks, is less a magazine than a digital media operation with newsletters, podcasts, videos, and a vibrant politics website.

And ask yourself this. How often do you see anyone—especially anyone under forty—reading a paper magazine on public transportation or in a cafe?

Of course, the transition to digital has not spelled the end of great titles like The New Yorker. But it has done something else. Increasingly, readers come to a magazine’s content—its stories—electronically, and they do so through social media, links, or electronic notifications of one sort or another, rather than through a magazine’s own website. As a result, they may not even notice what magazine the story appeared in, or see other stories in the same issue, if the word “issue” even has any meaning any longer. Everything floats in cloudspace, and appears in roughly the same format on your phone, whether it was originally “published” by The New Yorker, or by a random Substacker.

This is what I mean by the death of magazines. Even if publications survive, and continue to have their own distinct personalities and styles, their own stable of writers, and their own political positions, many—perhaps most—readers won’t notice, because they will rarely if ever see a whole issue.  With an old-fashioned paper magazine, the selection, organization and presentation of stories was done by editors. They would think about what their readers wanted to read, what their readers should read, and what their readers might be tempted to read. It was an exquisitely intelligent process, and great editors, from Joseph Addison and Richard Steele on down, became legends for doing it intelligently. But in our new, fragmented media universe, where we see only the disjecta membra of publications, the selection, organization and presentation of stories is mostly done by algorithms designed to feed us stories that resemble ones we’ve already read, and, especially, stories that resemble one we’ve already read where we’ve also clicked on an advertisement. We’re much the poorer for the change.

The New Republic, for a forty-year period mostly under Marty Peretz’s ownership—from 1974 to 2014—was a singularly great magazine. It certainly had its serious faults, and after it collapsed in 2014, following new owner Chris Hughes’s disastrous attempt to turn it into a “vertically-integrated digital media company,” the new management published a lengthy investigation into its history of racism. Much of this was connected to Peretz himself, and vitriolic, hateful statements he made about Muslims. The critics also singled out former editor Andrew Sullivan’s hugely controversial decision in 1994 to publish extracts from Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s book The Bell Curve, which argued for difference in IQ between races. These things were inexcusable, but at the same time, they provoked loud protests at the magazine itself—which the magazine itself published, to its credit. And if we cancel every periodical that has at some point published offensive content, we won’t have a lot left to read.

After TNR’s 2014 collapse, I wrote about the magazine for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I won’t repeat here the points that I made then. But let me add a few things about Peretz himself. He is an outsize figure with some outsize flaws, but he was a great owner and editor-in-chief. This was not because of his own editing. He did relatively little actual commissioning, line-editing or arranging of stories. But he had a provocative vision for a sober, realistic liberalism, which, even when it veered too close to neo-conservatism, challenged the lazy pieties of the 1960’s and forced liberals to define what they stood for far more rigorously than before. And he had a brilliant eye for talent (present company excepted). Michael Kinsley, who twice served as editor of the magazine under Peretz, was, in his heyday, the sharpest, most readable, most consistently interesting opinion journalist on the planet. Charles Krauthammer, Andrew Sullivan and Leon Wieseltier, in their very different ways, all did brilliant, addictively readable work for Peretz, and Wieseltier went on to transform the “back of the book” into a truly great literary and intellectual review, for which I was honored to write. The list of “TNR alumni” from the Peretz period still reads like a Who’s Who of elite American print journalism (if, admittedly, mostly male and Ivy-educated): Jacob Weisberg, Jonathan Chait, Jonathan Cohn, Michelle Cottle, Jeffrey Rosen, Barton Gellman, Ryan Lizza, Franklin Foer, Dana Milbank, David Shipley, Charles Lane, Timothy Noah, etc. etc. etc. Their writing today still bears the mark of the old TNR—but there is no place to read them all together.

The New Republic has resurrected itself, by the way, under editor Michael Tomasky, and is very much worth reading—both the political coverage, and the terrific “back of the book” edited by Laura Marsh. I still get the paper magazine. But it only comes ten times a year (Peretz’s TNR appeared weekly), and by the time it arrives in my mailbox, I have usually read all the articles that interest me, on my phone.