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Vogue just hired Chloe Malle as its new “head of editorial content”, and the title says it all. She’s not editing a magazine – Anna Wintour still presides over that empire – but managing a stream of “content”.

Content is what Condé Nast concentrates on now: optimised, distributed and monetised. Malle has already suggested cutting print frequency while upgrading paper stock, reframing Vogue as a collectible artefact rather than a living, breathing publication. It’s a shift that feels less about making culture than packaging it. 

And yet, if Vogue signals the death spiral of the legacy magazine, this weekend’s Case Sensitive fair in New York points to the opposite. Organised by In Real Life Media, the event celebrates the surge of independent titles thriving by rejecting the content model. As founder Megan Wray Schertler told the Financial Times:

“The magazines that are thriving today… build trust by being culturally fluent and editorially uncompromising. And that trust is gold.” 

Trust, not scale, is what makes them valuable. Thom Bettridge, editor-in-chief of i-D, nails a similar distinction in his Substack, Content:

“Making real Content is a process of World-Building. Everything else is just Info-Sharing. CNN Shares Info. Business Insider shares that same Info, so do a tonne of other places. Info is a commodity. You’ll accept Info from whoever gets it to you the fastest with the least amount of friction. The connection ends there.”

Look at another Condé Nast title, GQ – it mainly just churns the same info everyone else does, with affiliate links as the business model. Ditto Vogue, and almost every other Condé Nast title – except, notably, The New Yorker, the one title still beyond Wintour’s control. Vogue and GQ push information. The New Yorker still builds a world.

The crucial thing about the new print wave is that its success has nothing to do with nostalgia, as it’s often miscast. Indie magazines aren’t longing for the pre-digital past. They’re pushing design, format and editorial experiments further than mainstream publishers could ever get away with.

Print is being reinvented as avant-garde, not retro fetish.

Richard Turley’s Civilization is about to drop another issue – a broadsheet zine that feels more like a chaotic group chat than a traditional magazine, splicing memes, visual overload and cultural critique into a format that rejects hierarchy and coherence, which is exactly what makes it one of the most singular experiments in print today.

This hunger is visible far beyond the page. It’s not nostalgia driving that conversation – it’s a recognition that tactile, intentional publishing feels urgent in a world drowning in disposable content. In SEED CLUB, the thread “Return to tactile media” has already pulled in 114 messages and counting. It’s not just a vibe – it’s a signal.

Meanwhile, the economics are stark. The Guardian is a trust-funded anomaly. The FT is thriving thanks to decades of subscription-building. But try to launch a mass-market magazine in 2025 and you’d be finished before you start. Indie publishers, on the other hand, are flourishing precisely because they’re lean, obsessive and uncompromising. Jeremy Leslie, the founder of MagCulture, calls it a “new golden age”. 

For brands, the lesson couldn’t be clearer. Treat content as information and it evaporates. Treat it as world-building and it becomes sticky, valuable, trusted.

That’s why Bottega brought back Butt, and why even high-street names are experimenting with zines. As a recent Wired headline stated, “Social Media Replaced Zines. Now Zines Are Taking the Power Back.” In 2025, the divide isn’t between digital and print – it’s between info and worlds. Only one of those lasts.