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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2304 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 6, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is the magazine business viable in 2026? On one hand, obviously no. Subscriptions to magazines have been falling continuously since like 1980 or something.

But on the other hand, maybe yes? Magazines used to be insanely profitable. There is an anecdote about Conde Nast employees in the 1990s getting mad because they were forced to fly first class to their Christmas party in London instead of taking the Concorde that they were used to. There's still some magazines like Architectural Digest which must be absolute cash cows if they can keep their costs under control.

In the modern era, it would be trivially easy to produce a decent magazine with a couple of full time staff. Get a few thousand subscribers and it might be viable. Would people buy a non-shitty version of Wired?

This article (originally written in year 2014, but revised since then) lists a zillion possible reasons for the death of fan magazines ("zines").

One active magazine pays five cents per word to authors. I don't know whether that's low or high.

I do still see a little “zine” publication in the OSR RPG space. It’s more than a couple steps removed from its predecessors.

One more recent matter that's killed them off, and not listed on the FanLore, is the pivot to ISBN'd book and anthology sales on a less formal schedule. Between the Kindle market, print-on-demand services, convention sales venues, and increased shipping costs, the conventional business model stopped looking anywhere near as compelling.

Which is a pity, because what's left did lose something from it.

Yeah, it's clear the magazine industry as we know it is dead. And fiction magazines are the deadest of the dead. I'd propose that instead of paying authors, magazines charge them to appear. No doubt many do.

But dead things can have a second life. Kind of like how people might churn butter as a hobby or something.

I'm envisioning a magazine with lots of pictures and low information density that you can just casually thumb through. You can put it on your coffee table, and its a more genteel alternative to scrolling. People might want that sort of experience and it feels high status. Obviously you'll never get the subscription numbers that magazines used to get. Instead you keep costs low and hope for 10,000.

I'm envisioning a magazine with lots of pictures and low information density that you can just casually thumb through. You can put it on your coffee table, and its a more genteel alternative to scrolling. People might want that sort of experience and it feels high status.

So National Geographic, but with fewer words?

Sounds like a good idea. But instead of hiring rugged, good looking photojournalists to travel around with an expense account, seducing lonely housewives, we are just going to buy amateur photographs for like $100 a pop, maybe less.

I wonder if you could bulk license IG photos for less than that?

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