All the magazines I've loved are now rubbish!

[Nomorecountingbeans]

Ive been a big magazine lover and suscriber for many years!
This is the first year I've cancelled all my subscriptions. I find the articles increasingly short and basic and the magazines have increasingly more adverts and less content.

If you read a good mag let me know what it is!

YABU - There are good mags out there
YANBU - All mags have declined in value

i miss magazines, prefer them to social media stuff. Occasionally buy Hello Fashion & interior ones.

I used to like Marie Claire in the early 00s, mainly for the freebies. Always used to take one on holiday with me. Still have a cloth tote bag from one of them. They did become increasingly samey and full of adverts and never really relevant to my life. I've yet to need a day to night skirt or an office to bar blouse.

They used to nice if you wanted to be distracted but but invested. But that's what we use the Internet for now.

They are all crap. If you read them for more than a year, the same topics/rehashed articles appear on a cycle. Learned this through gift subscription… fitness, psychologies, Elle/vogue/Harpers etc.

Used to buy loads - I loved ID and The Face, then Elle & Grazia, and for years I collected Elle Deco (until a new editor took over and the content became samey and just not my thing).

Up until a few years ago I’d still buy the odd Living etc or Enki (Wanki as it’s known here 😂), but as everyone else has said, the print industry is sadly in freefall, the prices are now outrageous and the content so thin and repetitive that it doesn’t even feel like a treat to buy them - it just feels like a stupid waste of money. Enki is basically a low-effort collection of near identical promo puffs and blurb put out by developers and architects. Which isn’t worth 8 quid of anyone’s money, even if it is printed on naice paper.

The decline is so sad - magazines were once such hubs of creativity that supported writers, artists & photographers, and it was really exciting to pick up the newest edition. Now they’re just disappointing, and the declining quality and increasing price will inevitably see them become totally unsustainable.

I think it’s very difficult for magazines to make the same online transition that a lot of the newspapers have just about managed, because half the joy is in the production values and the experience of physically holding the thing and turning the pages. Scrolling a screen really isn’t the same.

I really like Take a Break Fate & Fortune.

I think it’s very difficult for magazines to make the same online transition that a lot of the newspapers have just about managed, because half the joy is in the production values and the experience of physically holding the thing and turning the pages. Scrolling a screen really isn’t the same.

Agree & for me the quality of styling (be it interiors or fashion) in magazines vs instagram doesn't compare.

I can remember schools banning More because of ‘position of the fortnight’ probably looks innocent now!

I buy HF now and again it’s quite good value.

Haven't read one in years. By the time I was 20 (in 1995) I had already worked out by then that they were trying to make me feel insecure and sell me stuff.

The Land Magazine

https://thelandmagazine.org.uk/

The drawings alone are a delight

I wrote an article for the SS Freshspring Society magazine which I subsequently shared on the Internet, its buried in a RMweb thread somewhere.

One reader blamed me for nearly ruining his laptop, he laughed so much he spat his coffee all over the keyboard

If I can dig it out you can have a look

It was banned at my school. That made it more enticing and we used to huddle in the loos at lunchtime to read it. The youth of today don't know what they're missing!

I only ever read them at other people's houses, in waiting rooms, or when I'm at the hairdressers (and even she's starting to move towards a bookshelf of different types of reading material).

Yep so expensive too

I still enjoy BBC Good Food occasionally but it's very expensive.

Coronation Street got it right this week. They have a gossip mag that Bethenie writes for. It's called Chit Chat. Carla was reading it behind her duvet and you could just see the top of the C looking like the top of an S with the rest 'hit Chat'. Perfect cammera angel to read 'Shit Chat' They did the angel twice in the scene so definitely done on purpose😂

I used to be a complete magazine junkie .I loved nothing better than after a long stint of work (as a nurse ) to buy a magazine or magazines on the way home from work and curl up on the sofa and read them .I loved interior magazine especially Living etc .Only buy it occasionally now if I am on a flight but it has changed so much from normal but fun interiors to downright expensive and a lot of ads .Such a pity .

I've never been a big consumer of magazines, and don't buy women's magazines, but on a train or plane trip I would often get New Scientist or National Geographic. Recently I tried to buy a magazine for the first time in a good while - no Nat Geo and New Scientist seemed very thin for the price. I ended up with New Statesman, which I've never bought before and was a very good read.

I loved the freebies! They were always decent too; nail varnishes and books etc.
I happened to watch a YouTube video the other day of someone looking through a 90s magazine and it was so good. Great articles (and lots of them), stories, pages and pages of fashion and beauty (not ads, actual advice). Yes, some of the content/advice was a bit iffy, but the value you got was brilliant. I could genuinely spend an afternoon sitting on my bed reading a magazine in the 90s. Now it's flipping through ad after ad, a few articles of mainly sponsored rubbish and then more ads to the end. I'm finished in 15 minutes. The local shop has just taken out their magazine stand and just offer a few newspapers. Magazines have had their day unfortunately.

Fortean Times is my regular magazine fix, but I'm also a sucker for interiors magazines. Only at the cheaper and more accessible end of the market though - I'd far rather read about how a single mum in a two bed terrace in Solihull has decorated and furnished her house than how an Influencer and her banker husband have done up their Cornish weekend place, although these seem to be in the majority.

I love grazia and I subscribe

but they changed the regularity it from weekly to fortnightly in Covid and never went back

Another thing that's more shit since Covid !

I used to buy quite a few magazines and had a lot on subscription. Was lovely when one came through the door. Then I discovered the Readly app which was great. Sadly don't have it now as twatty ex h cancelled it.

I adored all magazines as a teenager and read so many avidly, Honey and Just 17 were my favourites. I had a job in the industry for ten months after graduating and walked away, have barely read a glossy since though I read Private Eye. I just found it so offputting as an industry.

The new yorker
the blizzard

Both excellent but “women’s”/“fashion” mags are largely shite now. The wafer thin boundary between advertorial and content has totally gone over to the former in most cases. It was always close but now so transparent as to be depressing rather than inspiration!

The last magazine I read was spare rib.

I work in magazine publishing (niche hobbyist stuff, not glossies). We are lucky that we have a pretty loyal reader base but it's extremely challenging and has been for quite a few years now. Declining print sales have coincided with skyrocketing costs for print, paper, postage and so on, to the point where it's very hard to make money on cover sales, and you become ever more dependent on advertising to pay the bills. And that has its own set of pressures because it's hard to demonstrate a direct link between print advertising and sales, whereas things like online affiliate marketing produce reams of data.