What the death of print magazines means to millennials

According to Women’s Wear Daily, Condé Nast announced it will discontinue Teen Vogue’s print edition, which had only been publishing quarterly since fall 2016. Additionally, print editions of GQ, Glamour, Allure, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, W, and Condé Nast Traveler will be published less.

Condé Nast isn’t alone, either. Other prominent media networks are also experiencing similar cutbacks in print magazines. In August, New York City’s alternative weekly, the Village Voice, announced it will cease its print edition after six decades of distributing free papers, NPR explained. Additionally, a month later, Nylon announced they will no longer publish a print edition, WWD reported.

Although I’d been using the Internet since I was seven years old, I often read printed issues of Teen Vogue, and even had a print subscription for a few years.

It all started when I was 11 years old. My mom came home from the drugstore with mascara and the latest copy of the magazine in hopes of luring me away from my baseball card collection and Eagles jersey. It was clear her intent was to further feminize me, but it failed. I rejected the beauty conventions on the glossy pages, but their single multi-page feature always caught my attention, because it discussed societal problems like eating disorders, drug addictions, and domestic violence.

Flash forward to earlier this month, when the most recent edition of Teen Vogue was delivered in my mailbox. I dropped my work responsibilities that morning to skip through it, reading it page-by-page without skipping a line. I swooned over the feature interview of Amandla Stenberg by Janelle Monae, a photo spread of different social demonstrations over the past year, a reflective essay on vogueing and LGBTQ youth, and a wellness piece about menstrual health.