Magazine unveiled a new print design this week and introduced a modernized digital experience online, its first redesign in a decade. The changes give the 130-year-old magazine a more readable print product and a digital presentation built to feel more immediate across platforms.
Editor Jake Silverstein said the magazine is redesigning itself to be “a more dynamic digital and print product” and to adjust its editorial strategy as the world of publishing keeps changing. The magazine now reaches a larger audience than ever before across print and digital, even as it keeps hold of the longform reporting that made it a prizewinner, including seven Pulitzer Prizes in the past nine years.
The overhaul is meant to push the magazine further into formats that feel native online. It has created new columns and story forms for digital platforms, introduced two new typefaces in print and online, and said it will be more responsive to news while also featuring more visual journalism. It is also forming its first dedicated video unit, a notable shift for a publication long identified with text-heavy journalism.
At the same time, the magazine is keeping some of its best-known fixtures in place. The Ethicist remains, as does The Interview, signaling that the redesign is being built around expansion rather than replacement. A new column, The Context, debuted last weekend with a piece by David Wallace-Wells, who used it to examine how the green energy transition has made the world’s fossil fuel infrastructure more vulnerable.
That balance is the point of the redesign. The magazine is betting that it can move faster, work across more media and still preserve the deep narrative and investigative features that have defined it for generations. The question now is not whether the publication can survive another shift in the news business; it is whether this new shape lets Magazine remain essential while it tries to do more at once.
