In 1989, Smash Hits was selling over a million copies per month. By 1991, Viz was shifting 1.2 million, making it the fourth most popular mag in the country, after the Radio Times, TV Times and Reader’s Digest. It’s been 35 years since 4% of Britain’s adults were paying a monthly fee to keep up with Biffa Bacon, 8 Ace and Tin Ribs and, despite the fact that 13 million more people have been added to the national census, only one magazine in the country now boasts a print circulation higher than one million: Tesco, the free glossy handed out in the UK’s ubiquitous supermarket chain, which we are duty-bound by our style guide to italicise.
British magazine circulation began declining after the year 2000, following steady growth in internet adoption, declining ad revenues and increased printing costs. Then came an event which may have quietly proved the most decisive in the recent history of ink, namely the 2007 unveiling of a spangly new invention from Messrs Jobs and Ive of Cupertino, California. For all the clamour and alarm that met the iPhone on launch, its loudest noise may have been inaudible at the time: the death knell of print itself, and with it, the supremacy of screens that came to follow.
But print didn’t die, did it? Magazines still clutter shelves, lounge on coffee tables and splat unruly insects against window ledges. Not to get all metatextual, but you’re reading one right now.
So how did this terminally doomed medium survive the great extinction event? We panelled a crew of print veterans to tell us about when the going got bad, to help us write an oral history of the magazine since the turn of the 2000s. But in order to tell that story, we have to begin some years before that.
ian hislop
(editor of Private Eye)
When I started, print was the mainstream, and nearly everyone read newspapers. If it wasn’t on the BBC News or in the Times, most people hadn’t seen it.
chris floyd
(veteran photographer)
Even by the time I started in the 1990s, the British mags were already tightening up – didn’t really have the budgets. I’d meet people then – I was in my 20s – and they’d be in their 50s or 60s, and they’d moan about how it was in their day. They’d say things like, ‘Oh, back in the 1960s, it took six months to do a story, you had unlimited expenses…’
kate spicer
(freelance journalist)
Back in the 1990s, nobody really spoke about the internet, certainly not in the circles that I moved in. We used computers for typing and laying things out. And I can remember when I got my first Mac computer in 1995. As I recall, most people used computers for looking at porn. And then everything on the internet just looked shit. Nothing was glossy, nothing was sleek, nothing was quick.
Miranda Sawyer
(broadcaster and author)
I don’t think I got an email address till 1997. Or was it 1998?
