Why I Founded a Print Magazine At the Peak of Digital Media Mania 

Here in New Orleans, if you want to go out and buy a print magazine, good luck. Newsstands are essentially a thing of the past, and few bookstores still stock periodicals. The situation is the same across the country. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance, the beloved newsstand that anchored Harvard Square for decades closed in 2019. The nearby Harvard Coop bookstore also got rid of its magazine section to make room for more university-branded sweatshirts and other souvenirs. 

The less I see of newsstands, the more I worry for the country, because magazines are vital for the health of democracy. 

I’m not alone in that opinion. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” may be the single most consequential political tract in history, credited as the intellectual spark for the American revolution. But while writing his pamphlet, Paine’s day job was working as a magazine editor, producing what was then the only magazine in the American colonies. In “The Magazine in America,” his inaugural essay, Paine made the case that “a magazine, when properly conducted, is the nursery of genius,” and 

There is nothing which obtains so general an influence over the manners and moral of a people as the Press; from that, as from a fountain, the streams of vice or virtue are poured forth over a country: And of all publications, none are more calculated to improve or infect than a periodical one. 

Since Paine’s time, the independent print magazine has been a platform for voices that challenge orthodoxy. Many leading American figures of dissent had stints as magazine editors. W.E.B. DuBois edited The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine, which he vowed would not only function as “a record of the darker races” but would “stand for the rights of men, irrespective of color or race, for the highest ideals of American democracy.” Emma Goldman had Mother Earth and H.L. Mencken The American Mercury. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller each edited The Dial, the house journal of the Transcendentalist movement. Whenever vibrant new cultural and intellectual currents have emerged, they have had their little magazines. The function of periodicals as hubs for dissent has sometimes put them at the center of some of the most important free speech battles, like the suppression of the Masses magazine during World War I, or the OZ trial in Britain. 

It is tricky to quantify the influence of magazines on popular thought or public policy. There are some clear cases, such as a New Yorker review that triggered the War on Poverty, or the Atlantic article on “broken windows policing” that sparked a highly controversial crackdown on minor crimes. In his prospectus for the new National Review, William F. Buckley lamented that “the New Deal revolution… could hardly have happened save for the cumulative impact of The Nation and The New Republic, and a few other publications, on several American college generations.” Buckley thought a small magazine could contribute to the revival of the right wing. It did. National Review’s influence outstripped its low subscriber numbers and it arguably “midwifed and nurtured the modern conservative movement into being.” 

Whatever one may think of Buckley’s political project, he was right about the role of magazines in the public discourse. That’s part of why, after graduating law school, I decided to found a small nonprofit print magazine, Current Affairs. It seemed a quixotic venture at the time. When I went to see Graydon Carter, then editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, for advice, he told me that print had no future and we would fail. (I remain grateful for his discouragement, because it gave me the determination to press on.) 

Our magazine has now hit 10 years and 55 print issues, and we’re holding on, thanks to a dedicated community of subscribers. The key to sustaining a print magazine in a digital era is to offer something that contains more than just information. People can get information by the gigabyte for free online. Print’s advantage, like vinyl records, is that it offers something tactile and beautiful. That’s why our magazine includes art, comics, puzzles, and carefully-designed type. Print’s advantage isn’t that it is the most efficient delivery mechanism for knowledge, but that it provides a rich and satisfying reading experience.

We’re not alone. Jacobin, Lux, Protean, The Drift, Hammer & Hope: a number of independent political and cultural magazines are flourishing in our time. Many have print editions, too, and there has been something of a renaissance for small print publications. 

Happily, there are signs that donors and funders are beginning to recognize how bleak a world without magazines would be. The Open Society Foundations (OSF) now contributes to sustaining a number of independent periodicals, including ours, because, as a democracy-promotion organization, OSF grasps how magazines enrich our democratic discourse. Criticism, book reviews, and essays can seem trivial compared to investigative journalism. But they’re not. They are where we take a step back from the news cycle to reflect on and debate ideas and broader trends. Paine said that they were a venue for intelligent people to “communicate their studies, kindle up a spirit of invention and emulation.”

From the works of Orwell and Eliot to “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” some of the most enduring cultural works and pieces of social criticism have originally appeared in independent magazines. Today some of the best reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict has been done by small magazines like Jewish Currents and Israel’s +972. Magazines can inject a bold new idea into public circulation. David Graeber’s “On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” published in the small STRIKE! Magazine in 2013, became so popular that it crashed the magazine’s site, and created an instantly recognizable term. 

Yet the picture is mixed. Book reviews, for instance, are “on the verge of extinction.” Newsstands, once “mini -community centers,” are gone. It’s a constant struggle for independent magazines to survive, now that we have to compete for public attention with Instagram Reels, TikTok videos, and Twitch streams. But even though there is always barely enough money to keep the lights on, there is something romantic and infinitely satisfying about being a magazine editor, carrying on a democratic tradition that has spanned from Thomas Paine to Partisan Review. Whatever happens to American democracy, our little magazines will always have done their best to keep it alive.