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: