Forecasts of print’s demise have been around for as long as press barons have been buying ink by the barrel. We asked a panel of print icons how the medium has fared in the first quarter-century of this millennium.
In 1989, Smash Hits was selling over a million copies per month. By 1991, Viz was shifting 1.2 million, making it the fourth most popular mag in the country, after the Radio Times, TV Times and Reader’s Digest. It’s been 35 years since 4% of Britain’s adults were paying a monthly fee to keep up with Biffa Bacon, 8 Ace and Tin Ribs and, despite the fact that 13 million more people have been added to the national census, only one magazine in the country now boasts a print circulation higher than one million: Tesco, the free glossy handed out in the UK’s ubiquitous supermarket chain, which we are duty-bound by our style guide to italicise.
British magazine circulation began declining after the year 2000, following steady growth in internet adoption, declining ad revenues and increased printing costs. Then came an event which may have quietly proved the most decisive in the recent history of ink, namely the 2007 unveiling of a spangly new invention from Messrs Jobs and Ive of Cupertino, California. For all the clamour and alarm that met the iPhone on launch, its loudest noise may have been inaudible at the time: the death knell of print itself, and with it, the supremacy of screens that came to follow.
But print didn’t die, did it? Magazines still clutter shelves, lounge on coffee tables and splat unruly insects against window ledges. Not to get all metatextual, but you’re reading one right now.
So how did this terminally doomed medium survive the great extinction event? We panelled a crew of print veterans to tell us about when the going got bad, to help us write an oral history of the magazine since the turn of the 2000s. But in order to tell that story, we have to begin some years before that.
ian hislop (editor of Private Eye)
When I started, print was the mainstream, and nearly everyone read newspapers. If it wasn’t on the BBC News or in the Times, most people hadn’t seen it.
chris floyd (veteran photographer)
Even by the time I started in the 1990s, the British mags were already tightening up – didn’t really have the budgets. I’d meet people then – I was in my 20s – and they’d be in their 50s or 60s, and they’d moan about how it was in their day. They’d say things like, ‘Oh, back in the 1960s, it took six months to do a story, you had unlimited expenses…’
kate spicer (freelance journalist)
Back in the 1990s, nobody really spoke about the internet, certainly not in the circles that I moved in. We used computers for typing and laying things out. And I can remember when I got my first Mac computer in 1995. As I recall, most people used computers for looking at porn. And then everything on the internet just looked shit. Nothing was glossy, nothing was sleek, nothing was quick.
Miranda Sawyer (broadcaster and author)
I don’t think I got an email address till 1997. Or was it 1998?
Richard Benson (former editor of The Face)
There were rumblings of something, though. You could see how the internet was changing things in society already, you could see that with the hacking community.
alex bilmes (former editor-in-chief of Esquire UK)
When I was at GQ in the 2000s, I could go anywhere in the world and say ‘I’m from GQ’ and everyone knew what it was. People would buy you a drink.
chris floyd
My first job for a British Sunday supplement was in 1998. I got £200 to do the job, and then £200 per page published. So if you had six or seven pages, that was £1,400 plus the fee, plus expenses – film, printing, travel, an assistant, everything. You could even mark up your expenses by 20%. So you’d come away with about £1,800, easy.
The going was good for publishers on account of their symbiotic, hand-in-glove relationship with advertisers; it was not uncommon for many major titles to earn two-thirds of their annual revenue from the ever-flowing spigot of ad money, and all the compromises that came with it. But internet usage was increasing, giving advertisers the chance to go directly to the consumer.
richard benson
The digital side was totally siloed, it was for the work experience kids, the juniors. If you had built up a successful career in print, you wanted to stay in print, because there was more money and prestige there.
jo ellison (editor of the FT’s HTSI)
There were too many executives in the early 2000s who were too in love with print to make the necessary evolutions.
kate spicer
Generation X were not digital natives, and at this stage, they were starting to own all of this stuff. They were the editors, they were becoming the decision-makers, and the people above them – the Boomers in the C-suite – certainly didn’t have a fucking clue what was going on.
jeremy leslie (owner of magCulture)
I was art director at Time Out when they were toying with the internet. It was so obvious they needed to get online, but they couldn’t make it work. Magazines struggled with that moment where they could have owned spaces.
jo ellison
I think too many companies tried to keep the digital space separate, and a whole generation of voices leapt in to become the style arbiters of the future. They lost space, rather than authority.
andrew neil (former chairman of The Spectator)
Hearst, I had some dealings with, and they were useless, particularly on the digital side.
In November 2006, the Audit Bureau of Circulations warns of a sluggish market, pointing to declining readership, especially in daily papers, though there are strong circulation boosts for some titles: the New York Post, The Economist, People and Grazia. The mixed messages coming from these reports fail to galvanise a unified response from publishers. Six weeks later, the iPhone is unveiled.
jo ellison
The tragedy for a lot of legacy print organisations was that they still clung to this belief that the print product was a superior offering, and so forced all digital content onto secondary platforms that didn’t have the brand reach, were completely free, and forced to be more mass market. They treated the digital team like an annoying younger cousin that should be occupied but not allowed to sit at the grown-up table.
geordie greig (former editor of Tatler)
My first iPhone was pleasure and pain. Pleasure at its possibilities and gleaming design, but pain at leaving behind my BlackBerry, to which I had become addicted – and even wrote my book about Lucian Freud on.
graydon carter (former editor of Vanity Fair)
I missed the significance of it completely. I’m not sure I even had a cell phone then. I might have been one of the last holdouts. It would take a greater visionary than me to have thought back then that in no time you’d be watching films on your phone and asking it to direct you the best way home.
kate spicer
Did you know the year the iPhone was released was also the year Baudrillard died? Simulacra and Simulation. It’s also the year that the Kardashians’ TV programme started. I kept my BlackBerry for so long because it was a writer’s phone, a serious phone. The iPhone is not serious… I mean, it’s incredible, absolutely incredible, but it just whisks you off into a world of sparkly, spirally doom-scrolling.
The world economy crashes in 2008. Condé Nast cuts Men’s Vogue frequency to just two issues a year from ten. FACT, Arena and Maxim go out of print. Emap collapses. In 2009, Condé Nast closes Portfolio in the US and Vanity Fair in Germany as Wired loses roughly 60% of its US advertising pages in a year.
jo ellison
Most of the big legacy publications made an absolute fist of it by thinking they were too big to fail. I went to British Vogue in 2008, and I couldn’t believe how segregated the digital and print editorial teams were.
chris floyd
I think they threw all their eggs into the advertiser basket. They forgot the reader. They saw their future in brand partnerships – with cars, watches, luggage – and they forgot to serve the reader. They started serving the advertiser instead. They only existed to make advertisers happy.
jeremy leslie
They gave up on their readers. They weren’t interested in relationships; they were interested in shifting copies. Success blinded them. Publishers had launched new magazines not because readers wanted them, but because they had too much advertising to fit into existing titles.
In 2010, Instagram launches, the iPad is released and Facebook announces 500 million users. Loaded is sold by IPC Media.
alex bilmes
Maybe the most indelible cover of a British style magazine is the Third Summer of Love cover of The Face from July 1990, Kate Moss photographed by Corinne Day and styled by Melanie Ward. That cover was commissioned by Phil Bicker, the art director, who helped develop the aesthetic of that decade in fashion and advertising and went on to an amazing career at Time magazine, Magnum photos, creating campaigns for brands, and so on. Where’s Phil Bicker been working for the past decade? Instagram. Not at a print magazine. If I had to point at a single moment where glossy magazines lost their primacy for people interested in style and fashion and celebrity and glamour and all of that, I’d say the launch of Instagram.
chris floyd
I’d probably say Instagram had the biggest impact, because it provides a sort of… bed, a platform, for all the things you used to read or consume in magazines. What Instagram really is, is the front section of a magazine. You know, the front-of-book – the little quarter-page bits, half-page bits – before you got to the main meal of the features. Instagram is just that front-of-book now.
By 2012, Facebook announces it’s reached 1 billion monthly active users. Twitter passes 100 million users, producing an average of 340 million tweets a day. MailOnline becomes the world’s biggest newspaper website with over 45 million unique users.
graydon carter
There was also the decline of actual newsstands. There used to be one and sometimes two on every major street corner in New York and in the lobby of every office building. By 2015 they were all but gone. When you see a proper newsstand on a street corner now, it’s most often part of a film set.
geordie greig
The death knell for print was pretty clear when supermarkets gave less and less shelf space to newspapers and magazines. Their executives follow data closely, and they saw customers were giving up on purchasing print – except for older readers. It was what happened in music with vinyl. It was clear that the rising costs of printing, paper and transport were going to end up being crippling as sales and profits fell.
NME’s circulation declines to 14,000 in 2014. Nuts folds, as does teen mag Bliss while Company shutters to digital-only format. FHM and Zoo join the pile of dead magazines in 2015.
andrew neil
Magazines dealing with the mass market have had a tougher time, because what they’re offering is not particularly distinctive. The men’s magazines – the magazines that depended on women in various states of undress – they have had a tough time of it. There is a lot more of that material on the internet. The internet has culled mass market magazines. The internet has eaten their lunch.
Legends of the game were moved to reflect on what had been lost in the great transformation in media consumption, while reckoning with the bleak realities of this strange new world.
alex bilmes
Back then we weren’t supplicants. We had some power. Magazines in the early 2000s had enormous influence. They just aren’t central to the culture now in the way they were then.
chris floyd
The last time I worked for that Sunday supplement was in 2017. I did a cover shoot, which was £400 all-in. Cost me £1,200 to do it. So I was effectively subsidising an ageing Australian-American media mogul’s business to the tune of £800. When the deckhands are paying for the lifeboats, you know the ship is sinking.
kate spicer
I once wrote a piece for the Sunday Times that so offended someone at LVMH that they pulled all their advertising from the Sunday Times and the Times, which was worth a million quid, and this was 20 years ago. And they still stood behind me. They still stood behind me, a little freelance journalist writing about dresses.
alex bilmes
What did magazines stand for? Discernment and taste. If it’s just ‘10 white trainers for under £500’ or ‘look at this red carpet picture of some star you’ve never heard of’ then it loses appeal for readers, consumers and also for advertisers.
In 2018, Time Inc., the rebranded name of IPC Media, is bought by Meredith Corporation who quickly lay off around 1,200 employees and start efforts to sell Time, Fortune, Money and Sports Illustrated. NME and ShortList (then the largest men’s mag by circulation) close. TikTok launches.
geordie greig
Mass print is never again going to be profitable. It leaves a legacy of extraordinary quality and influence, from a golden time when it was the gatekeeper to news, views, trends and fashions.
But the new digital beasts that once looked to surpass the legacy titles soon ran aground, as public tastes shifted away from written content altogether. Vice Media files for bankruptcy in 2023 as BuzzFeed closes its news desk. Overall, some 20,000 jobs are lost from the digital media sector that year as TikTok becomes the main source of news for 1 in ten UK adults, surpassing BBC Radio 1 and Channel 5 and drawing level with the Guardian. Meanwhile, print limps on.
ian hislop
I often feel like I’m one of Joe Biden’s doctors, saying, ‘No, print’s really alive – it’s really great.’ But no, I love print. I’ve been editing a print magazine for 40 years and, at every point, people have told me that print is dying.
andrew neil
Magazines have weathered the digital revolution better than newspapers. For those who get the business model, the digital revolution has been hugely beneficial. That’s the reality of the market economy, you have to move around.
In 2025, total magazine sales in the UK are estimated at £647 million, a 46% drop from 2005 figures, but amounting to 243 million copies sold. Of the top ten UK magazines by circulation in 2005, seven see significant decline in circulation by 2022. Of this group, only Private Eye, The Economist and Slimming World Magazine see an increase in readership. For those that survived, a reckoning was due.
chris floyd
The way that Vogue has had politics thrust upon it has put it into a state of shock, in a way. I think the institution is like some grand dowager who went through the first half of the 20th century living a lovely life, then suddenly the Blitz starts, and she’s been bombed every night. As a platform and as a space in the culture, it’s not necessarily equipped to handle these changes, because fantasy and aspiration are not great bedfellows with politics.
alex bilmes
Private Eye works because you can only get it in print. Not giving it away for free online was a brilliant idea. Also, it’s incredibly funny. I still enjoy going to the shop and buying it.
ian hislop
I’d see people [pivot to digital] and then go bust. The really big magazines said, ‘We’re going digital; it won’t affect print; it’ll be a new version’ and then people subscribe to digital for a bit, don’t keep it up, and don’t go back to print either. It doesn’t work for anyone. So I thought, we’re not going to do this. But you’re right: every couple of years someone comes to us and says, ‘You’re a dinosaur, it’s all over, you’re finished, you’ve got to go digital.’ When I started, there were big developments; VHS was coming, CD-ROMs, all going to take over. But my strategy has always been to resist all developments and technological ‘improvements’ and just carry on with print, because it’s a better vehicle for conveying ideas – and certainly a really good platform for cartoons. They just don’t work as well online; you don’t get the text or the drawings right.
Earlier this year, the outgoing British Vogue editor-in-chief, Edward Enninful, launches a new magazine, titled 72. Much like the vinyl revival of the previous decade, print’s tangibility and collectability is seen as attractive to younger consumers.
andrew neil
There are many, many success stories – The Spectator is more influential than ever. It has never employed more people. It has never employed more journalists. The subscription model is key: 80% of revenue there now comes from subscription, when I took over in 2005, about 65% of the revenue came from advertising. And elsewhere, The Atlantic is doing brilliantly. The New Statesman is showing new signs of life, mainly by copying The Spectator.
ian hislop
Delayed Gratification is a fantastic magazine, and a great print success. People are missing a big market. If I want to know what happened one second ago, I’ll look at my phone. If I want something well-written and interesting, I’ll put my phone down.
jeremy leslie
We work a lot with students in design, photography, journalism, fashion, marketing. All of them are studying for the creative industries around publishing. All of them want to work in print. Some of them will likely end up working in digital and then, perhaps, launching their own magazines. There’s a pressure building up, an energy waiting to be released.
alex bilmes
The reason I fell in love with magazines as a kid is because they made mischief, they had wit, they were irreverent. I still believe a print magazine can deliver that. The Fence is a great example. Maybe now kids get the same kick from TikTok. But that’s different. It’s not really analogous. The magic of ink and paper, words and pictures working together, offers something different to videos. They can coexist.
jo ellison
What’s the secret? Paid subscriptions: paywalls. Charge people for your product. Make sure you’re the authority. Have a clear vision. Be excellent at what you do. Don’t be afraid to be niche. The big successes at the moment are the publications that speak to a very specific reader, but that are also galvanizing the influence to bring in new readers, too. Print media is far from dead.
ian hislop
Maybe print’s salvation is being an escape from screens. You’ve spent too much time online; then you sit in a chair or a garden with a copy of your magazine – that’s different. That’s downtime. That’s for you.
Let us end on this note: in our neighbourhood of Soho, people used to queue to get into nightclubs. Now they’re lining up for an hour for cheeseburgers, nylon hoodies and baked potatoes. There is a palpable desire, in this digital world, for physical goods, especially among the younger generations. It seems self-evident that print magazines can still retain a sense of glamour and fantasy without being sold at a luxury price point.
We will also add that for a wily entrepreneur, there is a gaping space for a revolution in the way in which magazines are distributed in Britain. Might this be you? There is, we can assure you, a fortune to be made…
