Magazines, zines, journals, blogs, newsletters, newspapers, and everything in between. These media have each had their major shift, and yet again witness another such agonizing change.
Paths to truth and beauty in the digital age are being dominated, if not suffocated, by sloppy artificial content in the form of personalized, algorithmically fed bots, which lack any understanding of real meaning. This leads to a distorted perception of both literacy and reality, in which the average person does not fully grasp the mirror held up before them.
Internet media was once a different type of mirror, one that allowed a series of giving and receiving, allowing users to reach out to place items in, returning with untold treasures. Now, we see a different story unfolding where meaingness is thrown out altogether.
However, these media forms will likely not remain so fractured or polarized forever; all things change. We exist in a critical time of shifting priorities and worldviews, one in which awareness and agency over consumption are more important than ever.
As our media formats become further mutated with each passing day, there are certainly ways the modern magazine can wriggle and writhe into the next 10 years to help society find its way, its purpose beyond the screen, beyond the impersonal and individualistic.
Here, we examine the areas that have the most impact, how independent journalists can foster more ethical hyper-local relationships, and how to move forward in cultivating literacy in all its forms.
This is the story of how media can create a new tide shift beyond the algorithm.
Media is built on a foundation of enthusiasm. Whether that foundation is in the form of enthusiastic truth, justice, entertainment, distraction, lust, greed, desire, or any of the other seven deadly sins is up to editors, curators, and favored gatekeepers.
In a time of rapid collapse and rebirth, for many, trust in media is shaky at best; for others, trust in AI models has become a default assumption, leading to a belief in conspiracy, entrenched biases, and even psychosis, as reported by Futurism.
However, it’s the magazine that specifically incorporates and contracts all parts of the media diet into one diverse set. The following ingredients form a hybrid platform capable of adapting to a new, faster, more intelligent, spatially aware, and agentic age.
Do you remember when reading a magazine was a communal experience? The act of taking quizzes with friends, reading the classified ads in the back for all the silly ones, cutting out headlines and photos to be pasted on vision boards? If so, you’ll be familiar with where this evolution takes us.
Two new media outlets (platforms, ecosystems, however you want to describe them, is up to you) point to the modern magazine are:
User Mag by Taylor Lorenz
User Mag
Newsletter: hard-hitting deep dives on tech, culture, and politics
Power User Podcast: interviews and video essays covering tech and culture
Instagram accounts
Dirt by Daisy Alioto & team
Has four newsletters following a similar tone, voice, brand, and style
Clone, a collaboration between Dirt and Boys Club, a news link aggregation site
Merch: high quality, brand recognition
What do they have in common? Beyond being entertaining, truth-seeking, and highly relevant, they each inherently converge on enthusiasm in their unique ways. This specific flavor of enthusiasm leads to fans, who in turn become community members, and these community members lead to higher, more loyal views, which in turn lead to deeper partnership opportunities. Simple, right?
That’s the playbook of today’s magazine. Build a brand (through book sales, high-profile social accounts, etc.), build enthusiasm through memes and highly-engaging media (not just “content”), and turn enthusiasm or fandom into care for the community created in the process.
Tomorrow’s media landscape is more dynamic, prioritizing truth, ethics, and privacy, while also being mysterious, creating imaginative interfaces for interaction, and more intentionality, with a hyperlocal-first focus.
Consider for a moment the media ↔️ community spectrum in Figure 1:
On one end, you have legacy and independent media that began and ended with content to expand inward through community arms that focus on specific aspects of culture. It’s very insular and keeps the flywheel safe, but limited. This is emblematic of a society that prioritizes individualism, even through a lens of taste. It’s a culture that screams “me, me, me!!, this brand must look and feel like me!”
On the other hand, where media and content previously held their own on both ends of the spectrum, they now converge, and a new localized enthusiasm forms on the outer edge. This symbiotic nature creates an existence of 'we,' rather than 'me,' which fosters unity and extends outward.
Why, outside of my everlasting belief in community-first everything, does it evolve this way?
This facilitates conversations beyond endless consumption by starting with enthusiasm for wherever a reader is at the moment, allowing them to be part of multiple communities, leaders of, participants of, and owners of others, while cohering to the realities converging around them.
The reader feels part of the action through shared, engaged curiosity and context, rather than being distanced by algorithmic curation, reshares, and quote responses that undermine agency.
The subscription model has worked for a long time and still serves a purpose, but it is being challenged. For one, readers don’t have the mental space to manage them all, let alone their prices. And secondly, why subscribe to many websites when 90% of one’s time is spent between just 5-10 platforms?
Native experiences built for context interfaces are the solution to subscription fatigue.
Beyond less-than-sticky crypto experiments, we’re seeing more new opportunities, such as the Artist Corporation (A-Corp) presented by Yancey Strickler and Metalabel. An A-Corp enables individual artists, as well as magazines, zines, and independent media outlets, to pool resources, share upside, and truly own their work in ways that were previously unavailable. People yearn to move alongside their favorite creators, financially or otherwise!
While they are building trust, what current media companies lack is a shared stewardship of mystery. Shared questioning of the world around them that is reciprocal, not only of culture, but through a sense of communion as well.
What does this merging of mystery and community achieve? It halts homogeneous culture in its tracks and allows supporters to become more curious-minded amongst one another.
The grayness that haunts the shape of products starts to melt away, and technicolor wonder emerges through the vehicle of awe, driven by experience, experimentation, and imagination.
Now that we understand what’s in a magazine (3.0), we can examine best practices for building mystery, community stewardship, and shared liberation.
To recap: traditional magazine sections become standalone Substacks, launch separate-but-connected X, IG, Farcaster, and/or Telegram/WhatsApp accounts, commit to partnerships or collaborations with adjacent communities, agencies, or brands in exchange for free access. Department heads become community architects and event designers.
As an added extension, Magazines 3.5 offer the option to launch mesh or LoRa networks, further decentralizing readership, ownership, and experience by utilizing agents to translate, transcribe, and transfix new audiences locally and globally. See Fig. 2
In early June 2025, Wired published an article about Meshtastic, focusing on what happens when natural disasters strike and an entire area becomes a cell phone dead zone.
For the uninitiated, mesh networks like Meshtastic use LoRa (Long Range) radio networking technologies to deliver low-cost, low-powered signals to sensors and IoT devices. Open-source network software offered by Meshtastic creates a local network of nodes that communicate with one another without requiring an internet connection.
By the way, Jack Dorsey recently weekend-coded an app for Bluetooth mesh networks called bitchat. It’s not such a far-fetched idea after all! Download bitchat testflight.
What we propose here is a hyperlocal network of media publishers, decentralized and distributed throughout local communities, which contribute via physical devices for transmitting information between nodes but also utilize future AI agents for various valuable tasks.
When disaster strikes, whether it is weather-related, regulatory, or due to war conflict, we need a way to connect to our peers and loved ones. Outside of disasters, having an offline, privacy-first solution for distributing media, as previously discussed, is a catalyst for both local and global change and entertainment. This is what drives the mission-driven Offline Protocol led by Satvik Sethi.
The foundation of a magazine 3.5 relies on first building out two technologies on top of already existing, largely unknown pieces of technology: payments and messaging. Offline Protocol addresses both of these challenges through a combination of Bluetooth Mesh and Wi-Fi Direct.
While slightly different from Meshtastic’s implementation, Bluetooth Mesh enables similar functionality by creating a network that connects smartphones with always-on Bluetooth to share data and more. This creates a more decentralized, many-to-many network.
Wi-Fi Direct nearly doubles the connection length of Bluetooth Mesh networks at almost 200m. One smartphone acts as the central hub, and multiple devices connect to the network, all under the stewardship of a single person.
Again, both types work completely offline, with no need for an internet connection. It sounds magical, but really, there’s so much more that the imagination can bring to future media with this tech.
The first product from Offline Protocol is called Fernweh, a messaging app that allows users to connect with anyone in their vicinity, including strangers or connected friends. Sounds like a great way to meet new people with similar interests!
The second is called OfflinePay, a system for onramping money and transacting fully offline.
Offline is also building an information-sharing app called Diffuse. This is the final piece of the puzzle, enabling connected users to share information within localized networks. Currently, Diffuse is geared towards an awareness model for sharing real-time news during disasters. Still, the next steps could involve sharing more social, media-rich content, which magazines are specifically designed for.
Offline Protocol is a fine example of what’s coming for media businesses that create local impact. Check out Satvik chatting about Offline in an episode of the Rehash Podcast and start your Offline journey today here.
Over the next decade, trust and resilience will matter more than gloss or reach.
Mesh and offline stacks cut distribution costs to pennies while giving readers connectivity insurance. Community-owned equity models (e.g., Metalabel’s Artist Corp) replace one-way subscriptions with shared upside. When you combine those rails with AI agents that verify sources and translate on-device, the modern magazine becomes a local utility: reliable, multilingual, and participatory.
Key takeaways
• Local first: build node-level trust, then syndicate outward.
• Own your rails: Bluetooth/LoRa keep stories moving when the internet can’t.
• Diversify revenue: merch, limited drops, cooperative equity > paywall monoculture.
When considering an upgrade to your magazine or choosing which to support, look first for hyperlocal platforms that focus on experiences beyond the page, beyond the screen, and further, beyond the algorithms and infinite scroll.
