I came to this thread to mention the Economist. I’ve subscribed most years since 1994, and it’s as good as ever, I think.
I don’t know exactly when it became popular, but there was certainly a large decline in quality some time between the 80s and 90s. By the turn of the millennium, they didn’t seem to have any filters left at all on what they’d publish.
Obviously not her more fictional and popular cousin Teela. 
More on point, TV guide still has a paper magazine? I haven’t seen one of those in a while.
ok, I confess, I just wanted to make the Teela Brown comment
As Kenobi noted above, I think Newsweek going online-only happened during her tenure as well. I know that she was in charge when I finally let my subscription lapse, about 10 years ago, after being a nearly life long subscriber. She pretty much gutted the print version. I remember noticing one day that the entire magazine was about 40 pages, about half of it ads, and deciding “I’m not paying for this anymore.”
The same thing is happening with newspapers too. Our local paper used to be four sections daily, then three, now two. I can go through the Sunday paper in about 15 minutes these days, and about half of that is trying to figure out where they hid the comics (which used to have their own section, now are down to about two and a half pages and tucked into the back of some other section).
I used to love Newsweek. I thought it was better than Time. Haven’t subscribed since it turned to crap. Is it still being published?
I used to read Entertainment Weekly cover to cover. Learned a lot. Now I skip at least half - it’s of no interest. I’m not sure if they actually print useless crap, or whether I’m just not the target audience any more.
Special interest mags are still mostly good. I read Scale Auto Enthusiast (for plastic car models), Model Railroader, and Hot Rod Delux, which is sort of a retro version of Hot Rod (which continues the tradition of being the crappiest general interest car magazine, forever).
OTOH, other car magazines such as Car Craft, Muscle Car Review, et al, seemed to have undertaken cost cutting moves that really make the mags seem cheap. They’ve quietly gone to a smaller size (something like 8x10 rather than 8.5 x 11) and the content seems blatantly more driven by product placement than actual car building. Plus, someone needs to tell the art staff that Photoshop shadows/highlights needs to be used sparingly! And not cranked to 11.
eta: mostly, I read vintage magazines. 1970s Popular Hot Rodding issues are not only the best car magazine, but some cars don’t go out of style.
Definitely as good as ever. I get 90% of my news from the Economist and NPR. But we don’t get the print edition. It’s easier (and cheaper) to subscribe to the digital-only edition.
I used to subscribe to Scientific American and New Scientist. The quality gradually decreased while the price gradually increased and eventually both reached the point of “not worth subscribing to”.
You might want to turn to specialist magazines like the Spectator, the Economist, and the New Statesman.
*Newsweek *died during the recession of 2008, although it kept being published. Sidney Harmon bought the corpse for a dollar and resold it to Brown. She tried to revive it by linking it to the Daily Beast but it was rotting before she got there. The print edition was revived by IBT Media in 2014. It appears monthly and has decent stuff, but a monthly news magazine is an impossible niche in today’s world.
A magazine well worth reading for news and culture is Vanity Fair. If you think it’s only a fashion magazine you’ve been missing out. The 500 pages of ads is the equivalent of floating a boat in dollar bills. It’s probably the highest-paying market for articles in the business. Michael Lewis, the *Moneyball *guy, just had a long article in it about the Department of Energy, what it really does, and how the neglect of the Trump administration is putting everyone’s lives at risk. No news outlet has covered the subject in that detail.
There’s a certain irony to a magazine with “week” in its name only being published monthly. 
Years ago I subscribed to Cycle World. Now, as the title would lead you to believe, they would include a “world of cycles” perhaps.
I kept track over a 6 issue period, and they featured exactly two off-road bikes, for a total of just a couple pages.
In contrast, there were many times more pages dedicated to nicotine delivery products.
(I forget the actual numbers, but I was deadly accurate in my letter to the editor as I cancelled my subscription)
Please. I refuse to utter her name. Her reign was the only time I let my subscription lapse in the past 35 years.
*Wired *is still beautiful. I have been subscribing for about 20 years now (I just realized!) I started when I was a magazine major in college and we had to go to the library to check out some magazines and critique them. I stumbled upon Wired and was like “WHAT IS THIS MASTERPIECE?!?!” They have a tablet version with extra tablet content that they’re always pushing, but I don’t have a tablet. I like to read it on paper.
I still read Rolling Stone too. I used to get *RS *and *SPIN *when I was a kiddo, and of course they were huge, thick books. Now RS is bi-weekly and quite thin but there’s usually an excellent national or world story in there, and still good music bits. I got a free subscription a few years ago and enjoyed it so I kept it going.
I accidentally got *Vogue *for a year, from some online catalog that I bought from and it signed me up. I never got around to opening any issue but they were THICK. About the size of 6 Rolling Stones. I suspect they are like the aforementioned Vanity Fair. More ads than content.
I see it in the supermarket, but Og knows what is inside the thing. It looks like a TV- centric version of a celebrity rag. TV Guide bought the once interesting “Jump the Shark” website and destroyed it.
Same here for me (with RS) – I got a free subscription for it, about 10 years ago, and I discovered that I enjoyed it, so I kept renewing it.
Their long-form journalism (usually on topics not directly related to music) is often very good, and I enjoy their political commentary. I’ve also discovered a number of newer musical acts through them, which I would have never learned about otherwise.
Yeah me too! I discovered Courtney Barnett through them and I am in looooove.
Now with my Echo I can sit at the table and read their top song picks and ask Alexa to play me a snippet or even the whole thing. The future is now.
True enough, but most print magazines had journalistic standards and you knew you weren’t intentionally being fed bullshit. Now we have the wild west in the information marketplace, and the lies and distortions outnumber legitimate news about 1000 to 1.
And you’re right. It’s still weekly. Sorry.
Several years back when Scientific American went down the tubes, I switched over to NewScientist. It’s still good, and it’s the only paper magazine I still subscribe to. I do occasionally buy various special interest crafter’s magazines (knitting, sewing, weaving, upcycling clothing, etc) off the stands.
I subscribe to quite a few magazines, although many are from redeeming air miles from airlines that I don’t fly often enough to warrant needing the frequent flier miles. Right now I subscribe to:
Foreign Affairs
GQ
The Atlantic
The New Yorker
Sports Illustrated
Barron’s
The Economist
The Atlantic and The New Yorker are both still high quality. Sure, they occasionally have weak issues, but they did back in 1994 as well. Sports Illustrated is a shell of its former self, but there’s enough there to read on the train to work. The Economist and Foreign Affairs are both consistently strong and I usually read 90% of each issue. GQ has always been a flip through magazine with occasional good long form articles. It’s a lot thinner than it was 20 years ago, but most of the lost bulk is from ads.
I wasn’t too crazy how about 10? 12? years ago The Atlantic’s lay-out and graphics tried to get “splashier”, trying to look less “staid”. I found the gigantic fonts and colourizing gratuitous and distracting. I also thought, around that time, that it was starting to veer slightly more right of centre.
Pissed that the Columbia Journalism Review has shrunk from six to two issues a year. :mad: Great smallish articles as well as nifty sections like Darts and Laurels, which critiques recent journalists’ work, and the Lower Case, which features the latest newspaper headline typos.
Surprised I never got around to checking out either the Nation or Mother Jones - curious what people here think of them, and if they’re still any good.
The same with the New Republic, which I understand is right leaning, and a good read.
The two beefs I had with Harper’s is that whenever I mentioned it to someone they’d be like - oh, I’m not into fashion stuff, and I’d have to clue them in that it’s not the “-Bazaar” thingie. (A gripe that I shouldn’t hold against the mag, obviously, but still rankles the ole drankle). The other beef was former editor-in-chief Lewis Lapham’s grandiloquent op-eds. Sure, he head great insights and his heart was in the right place, but damn he could be one pretentious bloody nurl, spewing out Greek and Shakespearean references all over the fuckin place.
I cheaped-out and stopped subscribing to Washington Monthly. I can’t imagine it dipping in quality, but who knows - it’s been ten years since I read it. Always enjoyed founder Charles Peters’s “Tilting at Windmills” section - a way more enjoyable op-ed to read, with direct language that wasn’t all shmantzy-pantzy, like with Lapham.