Is Print Media A Dying Breed?

My ini­tial expo­sure to so-​​called lux­ury fash­ion was through a lit­tle mag­a­zine called Details. At the age of fif­teen, it was like my bible — a fash­ion bible that included clothes I could only imag­ine own­ing. In col­lege and earn­ing money, I began work­ing and had my own dis­pos­able income. My love for mag­a­zines grew and now my hunt expanded to include mag­a­zines like 10 Men, Dazed & Con­fused, Arena Homme, and INDIE. For me, these mag­a­zines put other pub­li­ca­tions like Details and GQ to shame. These were REAL fash­ion mag­a­zines. They were less celebrity dri­ven and included a vast amount of design­ers and beau­ti­ful edi­to­ri­als that were breath tak­ing. Just a cou­ple months ago, it was not out of the norm for me to buy at least eight fash­ion mag­a­zines in the course of one month. How­ever, most recently, the quan­tity has decreased to an aver­age of three or four.

Brows­ing the rack at Barnes and Noble this past Sat­ur­day night, there were only two mag­a­zines that caught my inter­est: WWD Men and the debut issue of Phe­nom­e­non. There was a lack of new infor­ma­tion, but I was cap­ti­vated by the pic­tures and the story angles. How­ever, while read­ing WWD Men, I became quite aware of why I feel print media is on its last leg. Story after story, the pic­tures were inter­est­ing, the con­tent ele­gantly phrased, but it was all infor­ma­tion, I had per­son­ally cov­ered myself or had read else­where. It was dated and weeks, even months old. I am sen­ti­men­tal and love hold­ing onto phys­i­cal pieces that cap­ture a sea­son or two, but at this rate, the num­ber of mag­a­zines I want to buy is dwin­dling at an alarm­ing rate. I can eas­ily cap­ture the sea­son in one mag­a­zine or two, ren­der­ing them unim­por­tant, insignif­i­cant. This leads me to pon­der the ques­tion, “Are blog­gers deal­ing print media the last blow?”