In some ways, it’s quite remarkable that this weekend celebration of the print magazines of Wales is taking place. The fact that Wales has a thriving – and even expanding – print magazine industry, in 2021, is way out of line with the sort of predictions that I encountered five, ten, even fifteen years ago.
The accepted wisdom was that print was dead, or at least dying. First came in the internet: with everything available on websites, who would buy a book or a magazine in the future? Later our nemesis was to be digital magazines, podcasts and so on, all easier and cheaper to produce and without the lead-time that print requires. Plenty of times it was implied, if not said outright, that we were trying, Canute-like, to resist an unstoppable tide.
But it didn’t play out like that at all. The demand for print – especially at the higher quality end of the market – is stronger than ever.
Of course, print publications have needed to adapt. After all, there are some things that undeniably belong in the immediate, real-time online world. We’ve ceded that content to the online providers, bloggers and tweeters and concentrated on considered, researched, quality content. Not all print has survived – newspapers are far more vulnerable than magazines, for instance, and many of the rough and ready print fanzines have found a better home online.
I think the success of modern print magazines is down to two things we didn’t quite expect: firstly, and most importantly, there’s still nothing quite like the feel of a physical book or magazine in your hands. It’s easier to appreciate both the design, and the content, in print than on a screen.
And secondly, maybe even more unexpectedly, the technology has been more our saviour than our enemy. Compared with the early days of Welsh Football, the research, writing, editing, design and production processes are all enhanced – and speeded up – by the march of technology.
So, here we are in 2021, and the death of printed magazines proved to be greatly exaggerated. They still have their place, alongside all the other channels and platforms, and there’s no sign of that changing. That’s what we’re celebrating this weekend.