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Print magazines weren’t expected to survive the digital age, yet they’re still holding on, if not always thriving. In 2024, several news stories highlighted a small but notable resurgence. Publications like Vice, Nylon, and Playboy, which had previously abandoned their print editions, began reviving them, albeit in limited runs. Print shifted from the default medium to a luxury item—a premium add-on for those willing to pay extra. And now, as Axios reported recently, even corporate storytelling is going analog, including among companies driving the digital revolution. Last week, Microsoft launched Signal, a hundred-and-twenty-page magazine targeting business leaders. The first issue includes an essay by Bill Gates; a Q&A with Satya Nadella, the CEO; and a lifestyle section at the back.

Steve Clayton, the vice president of Microsoft’s communications strategy, told me that he was inspired to launch Signal after reading an October 2024 New York Times story about the success of Costco Connection, a magazine that the retail chain launched in 1987 and is now the third-largest magazine in the country, with a circulation of over fifteen million copies each month. Signal doesn’t have quite the same ambitions in terms of reach, Clayton said, but it encouraged him to experiment with the print format. “We’re in this world where everything seems so ephemeral,” he said this week, while showing me the magazine on a Zoom call. “It was time to do something that was almost the opposite of that.” The magazine’s name is a nod to cutting through the noise.

The comeback of print—both in traditional media and corporate storytelling—seems driven partly by nostalgia and a craving for the tangible. In the words of Belle Cushing, who wrote about the resurgence of high school newspapers for CJR last year, print is “cool again”; one student said that newspapers have a throwback appeal, kind of like Polaroid cameras. Others said that they offer a break from the constant online news cycle and all-consuming apps like TikTok. (In an interview for yesterday’s edition of this newsletter, Kelsey Russell, an influencer who talks about the news on TikTok, described getting a print subscription to the Times as a revelation. “Our algorithms are aggregated to show us things that will make us pay attention, and many times those things are negative,” Russell told Yona TR Golding. “I realized when I read print, I would actually process what I was reading.”) Older people are feeling the pull toward print as well. Clayton said he deliberately chose not to publish Signal’s content online, as people tend to skim long PDF files. “We want this to be something people sit with, read, and cherish,” he said. If the first issue of Signal proves popular, the magazine will be published quarterly going forward. 

Signal’s articles are written by a mix of in-house staff, which includes former journalists, and contributors from Delayed Gratification, a UK-based magazine that operates under the slogan “last to breaking news.” Indeed, faced with newsroom layoffs, journalists are increasingly pivoting to careers in corporate storytelling. The Times article about Costco Connection described how a cartoonist from the Oakland Tribune joined the magazine after relocating to Washington State (home to Costco HQ). Other migration destinations have included the Red Bulletin, a lifestyle magazine published by Red Bull Media House, which has a monthly print run of 1.4 million copies. Even Hinge, the dating app, paired with literary writers to produce No Ordinary Love, an anthology of dating stories meant to connect with a Gen Z audience. 

Of course, the number of print magazines making a comeback remains limited. Airline magazines, for example, have mostly gone digital—a shift exacerbated by the growing availability of onboard Wi-Fi. The final edition of Hemispheres, United Airlines’ in-flight magazine, was published in September of last year. As Lucy Schiller wrote for CJR at the time, it marked the end of an era. But, while the evolution of print may have branched off in a slimmer, less traditional, and at times more corporate direction, it continues to move forward nonetheless.

Other notable stories:

• CJR’s Betsy Morais reports on allegations of sexual harassment and assault that four journalists have made against the star reporter Wesley Lowery. “At the time of these encounters—which spanned from 2018 to 2024, when he had reached the height of his media stardom—each of these women viewed Lowery as a professional contact, someone they knew socially and looked up to, not as a romantic partner with whom they were engaging in consensual sex,” Morais writes. “Until now, some had feared making noise about Lowery.” One of the women, Olivia Messer, said that his “inability to see the damage he’s caused—much less change his behavior—makes me gravely concerned for all young women around him.” Lowery said that CJR’s account is incomplete and includes “false insinuations,” but that he takes the women’s perspectives seriously.

• Yesterday, Cyril Ramaphosa, the president of South Africa, visited the Oval Office, where President Trump confronted him with a video and news clippings that supposedly supported Trump’s false claims that there is a genocide against the country’s white Afrikaner population. In an op-ed for the Times, the South African journalist Richard Poplak writes that “the Afrikaner right lobby has vaulted their cause to the top of the geopolitical discussion” by developing an intimate understanding of US culture wars and appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show. “This is an effort to flip the narrative of apartheid, and cast former oppressors as victims,” Poplak writes. By “claiming the mantle of exceptional victimhood, right-wing Afrikaners have become bit players in MAGA’s noisy but empty scam.”

• The Wall Street Journal’s Michelle Hackman and Tarini Parti report that Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security is routinely turning to polygraph tests in a bid to root out leaks to the media, even when the information shared wasn’t classified. “Current and former DHS employees, who have worked under administrations for both parties, say they haven’t seen polygraphing used at nearly the scale Noem has directed,” Hackman and Parti report. The practice is “the centerpiece of Noem’s efforts to root out disloyalty among the 250,000-person agency she oversees, and which she has grown to distrust.”

• Earlier this week, a guide to summer activities produced for a division of Hearst and syndicated in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Chicago Sun-Times went viral after readers noticed that it attributed books to authors who hadn’t written them, among other mistakes—telltale signs that it was composed using AI. “This turned out to be true,” The Atlantic’s Damon Beres and Charlie Warzel write. “Slop has come for the regional newspapers.” The Inquirer said that it is investigating; the Sun-Times has said that the controversy should be considered “a learning moment for all of journalism.”

• And Philip B. Corbett—who is retiring from the Times this month after thirty-five years at the paper, including fourteen as its Standards editor, with oversight of ethical quandaries and journalistic best practices—reflects on how the role’s demands have, and haven’t, evolved in the digital era. Readers and even Times journalists sometimes “think there’s a hard-and-fast rule for everything,” Corbett writes, but “Standards editors spend a lot of time helping colleagues navigate the gray areas, the competing goals, the close calls.”

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