Is it time to decouple print from digital?

Plus, the print marketplace, new magazines, no magazines and anti-social media

Apr 27, 2025

Hello magazine makers,

With just over six weeks to go, The Media Voices team is excitedly pulling together the threads of our two-day Publishing Summit extravaganza. Even the sideswipe of a last minute venue change couldn’t dampen the organisational enthusiasm of our OG organiser Esther.

Hopefully Magazine Diaries readers in the UK will be equally excited to know that we have added a print track to the first day of this year’s summit.

Our expert speakers will be talking about:

The shift from newsstand to subscriptions
Reimagining the magazine retail experience (we’re looking at you W.H. Smith)
How magazine formats are the future for newspapers in print
Print as a subscriber perk

We’ll also have a forum discussion on how to convince your boss that print can be profitable where audience participation is actively encouraged. You can even bring your boss.

Use MAGAZINEDIARIES at checkout to get 20% off our advance ticket price of £259.

Slàinte Mhath

Peter

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‘It’s time to decouple print from the digital newsroom’

If I’m absolutely honest, this headline really bugged me when I first read it. ‘Oh, here we go again, another ‘do-digital, ditch-print’ diatribe.

I was wrong. Trying to pretend that digital publishing and print publishing are the same is a mistake.

“For the last two decades, newsrooms have navigated the complex transition from print to digital, attempting to integrate both operations under one roof… It’s time for the next step: fully separating print from digital, allowing both to succeed on their own terms.”

Author Dr. Dietmar Schantin traces the key steps of the digital transformation, from print replicas online to today’s subscription-driven models. His main argument is that the presence of print in daily operations creates constraints that limit digital growth.

Combining print and digital decision making risks:

Competing priorities and text-focused storytelling
Misalignment with readers
Resource allocation and the loss of local coverage

Dietmar’s is talking about news, but much of what he says is relevant to magazine makers, especially his ideas on creating small, focused print teams responsible for serving print audiences.

Even if you don’t have a team, the focus to serve print audiences well is essential.

“This is not about shutting down print. Print will remain profitable in many markets for the next five to 10 years, with subscribers continuing to pay for a premium product. But if print is to survive, it must be treated as its own business unit, not as an obstacle to digital growth.”

‘Online journalism is different from offline journalism’

This is a really interesting piece from Enders Analysis CEO Douglas McCabe, writing for InPublishing. Its main focus is how digital media can regain the ‘special marketplace’ journalism had pre-digital:

“This is an argument for journalism to think about how it invented, designed and fine-tuned marketplaces in the offline world.”

I recognise this so clearly from the work I do in digital media, where publishers are desperate to wean themselves off platform scale, crack the difficult nut of discovery and rebuild their own reader relationships.

From a print perspective, one of the most interesting parts of the argument Douglas makes is the need for publishers to work together.

“By operating in silos, publishers are each minnows competing against everyone.”

I’d argue that this is even more relevant in niche print, where discovery is probably the biggest block to growth. I’m not 100% sure what collaboration in the magazine market looks like, but print-positive messaging is the perfect starting point.

Publishing is not a zero-sum game; the bigger the overall demand for print the more individual publishers will benefit. From MagCulture to Magazeum, Monocle’s The Stack to Stack Magazines, we are already blessed with enthusiastic promoters of a strong print marketplace.

Imagine what we could achieve if every magazine maker worked together to invent, design and fine-tune the modern magazine marketplace.

Is your Grub Street collection complete?

We’ve published four editions of The Grub Street Journal.

The Don Quixote issue: What kind of idiots still make magazines?
The Jerry Maguire issue: Show me the money in magazines
The Walking Dead issue: Why won’t print just lie down and die?
The Next Generation issue: Finding the future’s readers and leaders

Complete your collection

Magazine NIBs

Digital Spy has launched a print magazine after delivering entertainment news and comment online for 25 years…
…but it looks like Grand Designs and Good Homes magazines have retreated online, with the last print editions going out in December last year.
The billionaire Zuck has admitted the social bit of social media is over. Content from friends and family has been replaced by shouty celebs and influencers.

Magazine Songs

I have a Spotify playlist of songs that reference magazines… What? Music and magazines are two of my favourite things.

This week, ‘The Songs that we Sing’ by Charlotte Gainsbourg. The most bonkers thing about this song is not that it’s sung by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s daughter, but that it was written by Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon!