Cooks Illustrated and Saveur are the only ones I could think of that I subscribed to for multiple years. CI I’ve done for maybe ten or fifteen years now. Saveur I subscribed for maybe ten years until they stopped last year. Both I started print then moved to digital, though I find I simply do not read digital magazines from cover to cover like I do print.
Stock Car Racing magazine, from 1974 till it ceased publication in 2008 except for a 2 year period when their subscription price almost doubled around 2005. I renewed in late 2007 when the magazine went bi-monthly and the price dropped. Got 3 issues then the publisher quit printing the magazine. Instead of getting a refund, they sent me all the missing issues I needed. Sold the whole lot on Ebay a few years later, the buyer drove from Kentucky to Washington state to pick then up instead of paying almost $200 to ship them.
I was a MAD magazine subscriber from 1970 through 1997. I stopped because I didn’t think color was needed and I finally aged out of the magazine’s demographic.
I cancelled by sending a letter to then-editor Nick Meglin. He responded by thanking me for my many years as a subscriber. That’s class!
Newsweek for a long time, gave up when the internet became a thing and its contents no longer constituted “news”.
The Economist: subscribed about 13 of the last 26 years (i.e., some years a subscriber, other years not)
Harper’s: about 10 of the last 20 years
Atlantic: about 9 of the last 18 years
Smithsonian: about 8 of the last 16 years
National Geographic: about 7 of the last 14
New Yorker: all the last 6 years
The Sun: for about 5 years, about 20 years ago
Slam: for about 4 years, same
Nobody mentioned libraries. Depending on the cost of a subscription and the availability at a library I switch back and forth, but I seldom miss an issue. Probably the one I’ve been faithfully reading the longest is Scientific American, since college around 1970. I have a sub now, but I do so to give me access to the online archives. Between libraries and subs, my wife and I probably read 20 magazines regularly.
One off-beat name most people never see is Funny Times. It’s a 32-page monthly tabloid that reprints cartoons and humor columns. Not in libraries that I know of, so I’ve been subscribing for several decades. A couple of hippies launched it in 1985 and I always fear they’re going to keel over and die any day now, but it keeps going.
AOPA Pilot.
We had a subscription for years and years of Entertainment Weekly, right from the very beginning. Gave it up sometime after the ‘Twilight’ people were on the cover every other issue. All of a sudden they began putting celebrities on the cover we had no idea in the world who they were. But it was, indeed, entertaining for decades…I can’t look at National Geographic any more, it’s all melting glaciers and climate change and any number of horrific doomsday-for-the-planet stories. We had a subscription to that for a long time, too.
Newsweek here too. My parents had a subscription when I was growing up, I got one of my own when I went off to college, and kept it through most of my adult life. Finally gave up on it about the time Tina Brown took over and basically turned it into a weekly tabloid.
I no longer subscribe to any magazine or even newspaper and I tossed/donated all that remained in the house, though I’m pretty sure somewhere there a few RS I reserved of John and Oko on the cover.
My dad had copies of the Miami Herald on the moon walk, JFK assassination, and a few other major headlines, none of us wanted them so they went in the estate sale.
After helping clean out my parents house, I am on a brutal decluttering kick in mine. If I don’t take care of some of this stuff now someone else will have to later. It’s not all that interesting, cool or valuable. I’ve seen the light.
To be fair, Newsweek was already a rotting corpse by the time The Daily Beast took it over. The Washington Post dumped it in 2010 and the new owner dumped it again a few months later.
Newsweek was another legacy from college. They had always been a weak second to Time and needed a boost. Time was more conservative and the last years of Henry Luce weren’t good for them. Newsweek saw an opportunity to move left during Vietnam. It did massive promotional campaigns on college campuses with super-cheap sub rates and built itself up into a true competitor.
Time today is a corpse that keeps twitching. Even so, it’s slightly more respectable than the print version of Newsweek I find in libraries.
Fine Homebuilding from #1 [1980?] and ongoing
Yeah I was already toying with the idea of dumping Newsweek a year or two before the Daily Beast took over. I had noticed at some point that it was about half the number of pages it used to be, and about two thirds of those pages were ads. News stories were mostly pictures. Most of the columnists I used to enjoy were gone. Daily Beast was the final nail in the coffin.
Anyone here remember Time and Newsweek competitor-- U.S. News & World Report?
It was a distant third behind those other two.
I think US News still exists, mostly for the college rankings.
New Yorker since 1980’s. As much as I loved the magazine, I cancelled my subscription a couple of years ago when the price suddenly increased by a percentage I considered outrageous. Called to inquire and was (politely) told a) yes, it is a huge increase, and b) take it or leave it. I left it.
Beat you all. F&SF since 1967, Analog since 1968.
The New Yorker since 1981, except for a short stretch where That Woman was editor.
Kiddies. I started reading F&SF in 1962 or 1963, but I didn’t subscribe until a few years later.
For some reason I stopped reading fiction about 20 years ago. It’s all nonfiction today - except for golden age mysteries, because they’re the intellectual equivalent of popcorn.
I used to subscribe to that one back in the day! Friends who were going to Humboldt State (as it was) hooked me on it.
Asimov’s Science Fiction
Subscribed some time in the 1980s and still get it