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Why is the print revival happening now?

Print is definitely not dead – in fact it’s in the rudest health it’s enjoyed in a very long time. But why is this happening? Peter Houston explores the recent history and forces shaping the print revival in this feature from our latest report.

I wouldn’t blame you if you’re confused about the state of print magazine publishing. The narrative that has surrounded the industry for more than two decades – maybe longer – has focused on print’s imminent demise and yet, it’s still here. Still alive, still kicking.

The earliest example of a ‘Print is dead’ proclamation that I can find is from the 1984 movie hit ‘Ghostbusters’, but I’m sure it was a thing before that.

As the internet went mainstream, publishing companies all over the world enthusiastically adopted the print pessimism expressed by a man that made his living chasing ghosts, excited as much by the excuse to cut costs as any opportunities digital publishing offered.

And yet, here we are. More than 40 years after Ghostbusters was released, a quarter of a century into the new millennium and the advent of the commercial web, the global print magazine market is worth $60 billion – according to PwC’s Global Entertainment and Media Outlook, 2022-2026.

Print is not dead

In 2025, print is definitely not dead. And if a slew of articles published over the last couple of years are to be believed, it is in the rudest health it’s enjoyed in a very long time.

The BBC has covered NME and other high-end magazines making a vinyl-style comeback; Nieman Lab wrote about The Guardian bringing its Long Read franchise back to actual paper; The New York Times ran a piece about the revenge of the niche fashion magazine; FastCompany showcased that magazines aren’t dying from the perspective of indie publishers; and Digiday had a recent feature on how Time’s collectible covers make the case for a print comeback.

Print comebacks… Print revenge… Print is back, at least in the magazine market. But is it? Is it really? And if it is, why now?

The truth – as always in publishing – is a bit more complicated than what gets squeezed into a headline exquisitely optimised for search-engine success. But there’s no doubt that the conversation around print publishing has flipped from negative to positive. What other reason could there be for those print positive headlines? And yes, as a result there are more publishers eyeing print as an opportunity than there have been in decades.

However, for all the popular press, print publishing now is a very different proposition than it was back in the day. The mass market has more or less collapsed, with very few publications posting print runs in the tens of thousands, never mind the 30 or 40 million enjoyed by People magazine at its peak. Shorter runs, lower frequencies and narrower niches are the order of the day. And with the total value of the magazine publishing sector – print plus digital – forecast to pass $120 billion in 2033, print is literally only half the story.

These days, the smart money is on premium print publications that squeeze more from less, with a strong, complementary digital presence.

What changed?

For a long time, print felt like it was the publishing industry’s poisoned chalice, and in so many ways, the negative sentiment that dogged ink on paper is understandable.

Although an entirely different beast, the newspaper market set the scene, with a decades-long decline in newspaper sales creating the pervading sense that print publishing was a busted flush.

US newspaper circulation has been dropping more or less consistently since Ghostbuster Egon declared print dead, with weekday circulation falling to less than 21 million in 2022, compared with 63 million in 1984, according to the Pew Research Center.

In the UK, leading nationals at either end of the market have seen similar falls. Press Gazette has reported a 20-year drop in circulation of 65% for The Sun and 67% for The Guardian.

The contraction in newspaper circulations is matched by the rise in the availability of news online, and the switch to digital for up-to-the-minute news is understandable.

Rob Orchard, co-founder of the slow news quarterly Delayed Gratification (DG) told me in an interview for The Grub Street Journal in 2023, “It’s far more convenient for me to read The FT, The Guardian or The Times on my phone”.

Hard copy simply can’t keep up with the rapid-fire nature of digital publishing, the lag becoming even more acute with the advent of real-time social feeds.

Beyond timeliness, the costs associated with print production and distribution are very real. Even without considering recent price hikes, the more pages you print, the more it costs. In a world obsessed by internet scale, the negligible incremental cost of digital distribution makes real-world publishing look decidedly unaffordable.

Add print’s revenue flatline with digital’s early hockey-stick growth and it’s easy to see why the media’s money men pushed the ‘print is dead’ narrative hard. Any kind of print output came to be seen as an albatross around the publishing industry’s neck, and a philosophy of managed decline became ubiquitous.

Print newspaper circulations continue to fall more or less across the board. The relaunch of The Observer notwithstanding, no one is talking about a newsprint revival.

However, the story in the magazine market is different.

Overnight success?

Seen through the lens of the perpetually shrinking newspaper market, recent talk of a resurgence in print magazine publishing could seem like a rapid reversal of fortunes, but the story of a print revival in the magazine market is not a story of overnight success. The indie magazine scene has been pushing back against digital dominance since digital began to dominate.

Independence is a collection of 12 interviews with independent magazine makers published in 2015 by Magculture’s Jeremy Leslie. Read any of the interviews in the book and you will find all the omens you could want for a print magazine revival. There’s even mention of an ‘independent magazine spot’ on UK TV’s current affairs show Newsnight.

However it wasn’t until the Coronavirus pandemic forced everyone to stay home in 2020 that a more mainstream appreciation of print’s unique qualities began to reassert itself. As I wrote in that year’s Media Voices Media Moments report, “The big plot twist in the 2020 subscriptions blockbuster is that print has done way better than anyone could have expected.”

The pandemic moved the goalposts, closing shops and newsstands and pushing publishers to chase any kind of remote reader revenue they could get. Digital subscriptions rose significantly as a result of the need for information that could be trusted. But so did print subscriptions.

In the first couple of months of the crisis, Condé Nast reported that subscriptions had hit record levels, with new US subscribers in March and April 2020 twice what they had been for the same period in 2019. New subscription orders for Condé Nast’s UK titles were up 420% year-on-year.

Magnetic, the UK marketing agency for consumer magazine media, reported a slew of pandemic success stories. The Week Junior then published by Dennis posted 7,250 new subs in April; Hearst’s new subscriber acquisitions doubled year-on-year; and TI Media and Immediate Media both reported subscription increases of between 200% and 300%. In one week at the end of April, Bauer saw the number of new subscriptions purchased online up over 160% compared with the same period in 2019.

Magnetic cites market research that showed 66% of people claimed their ‘passions help them through difficult times’ to explain the rise in magazine subs. That certainly ties in with the reported interest in specialist hobby content during lockdowns, and may be a sign that future magazine marketing efforts need to hit the passion play hard.

Another aspect of the difficult times suffered throughout lockdowns was enforced time online. Besides having more time on our hands, many of us quickly became tired of spending all day online. “People need less screen time,” Katina Toumba, operations director at the Mark Allen Group, told Press Gazette following the launch of two print B2B titles in 2021.

…This is a feature-length piece from our latest report, and it’s too long to drop the whole thing into your inbox! If you’ve read this far and want more on the difference between collecting and buying, indies seeing success, and digital disillusionment, read on here.

Inside the Print Revival is made possible with the support of our sponsors: Freeport Press, Warners Media Group, Atex, FIPP, Piano, and Manson Group.

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