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Notes -
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?
Part of the issue with magazine economics is that subscriptions did not used to cover all of their costs, advertising did. But targeted advertising prices have plummeted due to google and meta, so magazines lost a major revenue driver.
Newspapers stay in business because they can target eg couponers for advertising based on geography, consumer habits(old housewives change their habits less than young people), and daily circulation, and thats still dicey.
Some do, anyway, with increasing difficulty. Circulation peaked in around 1990 and the decline still hasn't slowed. The one I interned for as a kid was shut down ... nearly 20 years ago now.
It's generally not a great idea to try to enter, or even to be among the last to leave, a shrinking industry. Status quo bias and loss aversion are serious things, so most of the people you'll be playing musical chairs against will be playing harder than you'll want to.
As I understand it there are really only four English-language newspapers that have ‘thrived’ since the big collapse.
The first is the New York Times, which built a very successful online subscription business on a highly diversified model, almost the newspaper equivalent to a full service MMO that has PvE, PvP, housing, crafting, LARPing, whatever. So the NYT signs people up for puzzles and games, for the weddings and modern love sections, for the book reviews, for the extensive cooking section, for the boomer liberal commentary, and for regional and national news, all of which are well staffed, and then that all feeds into the same pot, they cross-sell you on everything even for the things they let you subscribe to separately, and then they upsell you to the $400/year ‘All Access’ subscription.
The second and third are the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, which superceded all the regional and local business papers and became de facto central reporting for financial markets where information is key to arbitrage, any client conversation, etc. They sell subscriptions directly and through third-party platforms like Refinitiv and Bloomberg, have lucrative events businesses, and go niche enough in terms of reporting that there aren’t free alternatives online if you want to read specific reporting on sub-niches in like investment grade credit funds or competition in the custodian business etc, it’s not something that CNN or the BBC news website can replace. They also still have a very large highly-paid audience which means both digital and print advertising continues to generate some income because luxury brands like to advertise with them.
The last is the Daily Mail which replaced a lot of the tabloid / gossip mag business not just in the UK but across the US and the rest of the Anglo countries and works on an extreme economy of scale with digital ads and an optional extra gossip premium subscription and a very large social media presence. The globalization of celebrity culture and media was helpful here, as is Page Six and the National Enquirer making some strategic mistakes that allowed the DM to take marketshare.
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Beyond them you have legacy big regional papers like the Chicago Tribune, WaPost, LA Times, SF Chronicle that mainly survive as passion projects of rich men willing to lose money for long periods of time, I don’t think any are consistently profitable.
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