Missing printed magazines.
My son is taking an art appreciation class in college and one of his latest assignments was to make a collage. We used to make collages all the time in school. All we had to do was grab some old magazines or newspapers and cut out pictures and bust out the glue sticks.
Yall. I didn't have any old magazines. I have magazines but they are expensive/vintage/collector publications that nobody is looking through much less cutting up. We managed to find some old Time and Wired magazines from the Obama administration in a closet. He got his project done, but afterwards I was really bothered by the sudden lack of "disposable" magazines.
In high school my entire bedroom walls were papered with cutouts and magazine pages. Stuff from Animerica and Gameinformer. Anything I found that I liked in a magazine got cut out and thumb tacked to my wall or stuffed into the front clear pocket of a 3 ring binder.
When I worked at Gamestop in 2003 we had a whole corner section of just gaming magazines and strategy guides. Fry's used to have a massive wall of magazines for every silly niche you could think of. All monthly. All about $5.99 - $10. I would buy copies of W magazine for a whopping ten bucks because I used the supermodels as drawing references. Big cities like Austin and Dallas would put out free magazines in every coffee shop and bar that were filled with local events and ads.
Your parents would have stacks of old Southern Living and Better Homes and Gardens. A whole page would have a recipe or craft instructions and all you had to do was yank it out and put it away. Imagine a recipe blog post where you can just rip out the recipe part and stick it to the fridge! No story no affiliate links no ads or anything. Maybe it was sponsored by Jello but it would be for a pudding recipe. Common sense useful things. Even earlier we had TV guides that basically became fire starting material in the winter.
I had a copy of some random Playstation magazine in 2001 that had a 4 page spread on how to do the Sphere puzzles in Final Fantasy X. I would have no real way of looking that up otherwise. It even had photos of where the spheres were and what the rooms looked like. You would pass it along to a friend when you were done so they could do them too.
The magazines weren't designed to be kept forever, they were consumables. You were going to get another one in a few weeks.
During the holidays was the best. Around November you would get an inch and a half thick full color catalog from Sears and JCPenny's. Me and my sisters would circle all the toys and things we wanted for Christmas. Imagine scrolling through stuff with real names and photos of the actual items. No knock off items from companies called CXIBIKL or UXPEYIC. Now they are sad pamphlets and your kids just want robux and Steam credits.
I know websites basically nuked all this. You can just search for what you want and it's there. Subscribe to a newsletter and get bad recipes every other day. But lately I've had a terrible time keeping up with email. I might check it if I know someone sent me something important or I am trying to log into something. Me subscribing to your newsletter looks good on your metrics but I am not opening that thing. If it's national news it will be on twitter or facebook in five minutes.
I think there is still a place for printed magazines though. Last month my husband was in Dallas for work and stopped in a coffee shop that had some "Free take these plz" art magazines from New York. I take it since they are so big and connected that it's easier to be offline in a public space. The magazines were full of interviews and critique on the current art and media scene. It was interesting to see. They could have just made a blog post about it but who would really read that? To read a blog post you have to be shown the link from somewhere or already follow the site. A magazine can be literally placed anywhere and easily picked up. "Here, this stuff is cool you should see it."
We have a local Facebook group for our whole town where people post events and upcoming things. There are always people who bounce in and go "Hey what's happening this weekend?" right above like 9 full page AI flyers about the literal weekend events going on. People want a quick way to see what is happening without having to scroll through junk.
There is something to having curated collections of stuff presented this way. Covering stuff in print that is not quickly digestible online has its place. In elementary school I had a subscription to Disney Adventure magazine which was a very small digest for kids that had comics and news about videogames and movies. I made so many DIY Pogs out of the pages of those things. I think it's because magazines can display large full color images so much easier than a website. If my site has giant images it makes it slow and hard to read. A magazine with a full page photo of a stop light is cool. Don't have content for that page? Giant random image works wonders. Maybe put some tiny white text in a dark area to say who took it and where it was from.
I can see offline media making a comeback in the next few years. Especially with the government getting closer and closer to imposing rules about requiring ID to visit sites and track exactly who is viewing what to sell to data brokers. We used to make websites to freely distribute information and ideas, and we still can, but the second the internet becomes a public utility that is going to be much more difficult.
ANYWAY lol, I miss magazines is all. I know they still make some. They are too expensive to be cutting shit out of. I'm not printing things out from my computer. Screenshotting recipes to my iCloud for now.