Life After Media Death
How AI startups and some Gen Z companies are resurrecting print magazine culture
Something weird is happening in media: dead trees are making a comeback, thanks in part to some of the most innovative companies in tech. But first, allow me to unpack why what’s happening is so unusual.
Long ago, I started my career in media first as a radio sound board engineer and on-air host, and soon after as a print journalist in New York City. Back then, web-based media was still getting its initial footing, and physical newsstands were where fashion, music, politics, and financial nerds got their information fix.
But I saw the digital wave coming and forced myself to shift my focus to online media, which proved to be the right move, as scores of print newspapers and magazines have died over the years, giving way to far more widely read online media vehicles spanning nearly every topic.
As recently as 2019, I can remember passing by the famed Casa Magazines shop in the West Village of New York City, where the fashion elite still go to peruse the pages of obscure and mainstream magazines alike to see the top-tier tastemakers and up-and-comers in all their glory. Glancing at the physical media on offer, I shook my head as I wondered how long the last vestiges of a bygone era had left to live on via these relics known as newsstands.
In 2024, it appears the obituary for magazines I was writing in my mind was a bit premature.
Everything Ancient Is New Again
Around this time last year, I was walking the streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, wearing what I thought was an obscure Air Mail baseball cap (now made famous by Larry David), when a woman suddenly asked me, “How do you like your cap?” Perplexed, I told her that I liked it quite a bit, thank you, at which point she revealed that she was Alessandra Stanley, the co-founder of Air Mail, the newsletter and lifestyle brand launched by Stanley (an award-winning journalist and a veteran of The New York Times) and Graydon Carter, the former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair magazine. We had a fun little New York sidewalk chat and then we went off on our separate cosmopolitan missions.
That encounter reminded me of the power of physical “things” in the real world that connect people to a similar experience and perspective. Along those lines, in early April, Air Mail announced the launch of a physical Air Mail newsstand in the West Village, a kind of waystation to allow fans of the brand to connect even more to the brand and its aesthetic. The company will also begin producing print versions of Air Mail.
This latest development appears to be part of a trend. In the first quarter of 2024, 31-year-old supermodel Karlie Kloss and her husband, billionaire investor Joshua Kushner, purchased general interest title LIFE Magazine and fashion tome I-D Magazine, both of which will be distributed in print magazine form, as well as online. And in 2020, the team purchased W Magazine, with plans to continue at least some version of its print version.
Even Cash App, the best-known product from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square), has gotten into the print magazine game with a new free magazine called Bread, which can be found in select retail locations throughout the United States. Likewise, film studio A24 (Civil War, Ex Machina, The Witch, Room, Hereditary, Midsommar, The Lighthouse) has launched a print magazine, which regularly features celebrated artists, actors, and directors as guest editors such as Greta Gerwig (Barbie, Lady Bird), Jonah Hill, James Franco and many others.
It seems there’s still a longing among some for the old-school print magazine counterculture that unplugs the reader from the always-on ever-shifting internet and gives them an etched-in-stone (well, paper) version of the current history of pop culture. The difference this time is that instead of a group of unknown artists in some East Village tenement squat cobbling together a print version of their reality, it’s the companies on the bleeding edge that have decided to take up the mantle in an era where print products have become more luxury than necessity.
Offline Artificial Intelligence
It may seem counterintuitive that an AI startup dedicated to helping the world make digital art and video would launch a print magazine, but that’s exactly what two of the most popular AI companies have done.
About a year ago, Midjourney launched Midjourney Magazine, a print-based collection of art created by its users, along with in-depth interviews with a wide range of people involved in creating and curating AI imagery. In January, New York-based AI video startup Runway launched its own Telescope magazine, a thick (and expensive) glossy magazine that embodies the tradition of art-meets-style-meets-intellectual-discourse publications the city has churned out for decades.
Back in December, when Thomas “TK” Kim (co-founder of the Asimov Collective, the production company responsible for producing Midjourney Magazine), spoke to me on the Hundred Year Podcast from his Brooklyn studio, it was clear that the avant-garde spirit of art magazines of old was being renewed via the engines of AI.
What this resurgence of print magazines and their curatorial culture has taught me about AI is that no matter how deep into weeds we humans get with our technology, we still need some “things” to hold onto. The first tremors of this return to loving old and technically obsolete “things” came in the form of the recent popularization of vinyl records among Gen Z music fans. There’s no logical reason or need for these physical things, but our social and tactile brains still want them on some level.
That some AI companies—the unlikeliest purveyors of offline “things”—understand this about their innovation-focused users is also what’s driving the growing list of in-person AI film festivals and meet-ups happening around the globe. The lesson: We can have our digital future, even the AI-powered version, but we don’t have to lose our connection to the real world and non-ephemeral objects of expression, we can have both, and it somehow still works.