The second edition of Mag to Mag, the independent magazine festival organised by Frab’s Magazines & More, a portal specialised in the sale of niche magazines, took place on 14 and 15 September 2024. For two days, in the exhibition halls of LAMPO — born from a redevelopment project of Scalo Farini in Milan — were hosted workshops and masterclasses with a fee or limited number of participants where workers in this sector could obtain in-depth information on the magazine market and develop useful and heterogeneous skills, from methods for attracting sponsors to handmade printing techniques. Added to this was a series seven talks that covered the most varied aspects of the world of niche publishing, but not only, focusing, as reported in this summary, on the effects of the digital revolution. Very different personalities spoke, from professionals in the sector who explained how mass communications changed in the last decades, to new publishers who were given the opportunity to present their products and tell their experience, what it really means to launch an editorial project with the innovative tools available today. Then, an entire hall was dedicated to the market area of ​​the event, where 58 exhibitors from 12 different countries presented their magazines to publishers, retailers and a large audience of enthusiasts. Two demonstrations particularly showed the organisers’ interest in the academic world, namely those about the works of the students of the IED in Milan, and of Mag Jam, the magazine about magazines born from a collaboration between the RUFA in Rome and Frab’s Magazines & More.

The discussions also addressed the theme of artificial intelligence, to the extent that the talk that opened Saturday, entitled “Near future: AI and paper magazines” not by chance, examined this technology that is having a divisive impact on creative activities. The three speakers — Roberto Maria Clemente, designer and Naba teacher, Davide Mottes, art director of the magazine Maize, and Pietro Minto, journalist — immediately agreed that it is still difficult to define the effects that AI is having and will have on publishing, as it is a revolution that is still underway, if not yet in its early stages. However, the use of generative systems in the creation of editorial products is a well-known and widespread fact, both for artworks and audiovisual content and, to a lesser extent, in authorial activities. This can obviously have effects from an employment point of view, in a sector already marked by job insecurity. In this regard, Pietro Minto gives the example of the so-called “content farms”, those companies that publish large quantities of content with the sole aim of exploiting search engine algorithms to be recommended to users and earn from advertising. Since these texts will probably never be read, tools that can produce a lot of them quickly, even if of very low quality, can replace the work of freelance copywriters typically employed for these jobs. Large Language Models, even if trained on a wide variety of documents, remain generalist systems and therefore the results are often unsatisfactory or incorrect for specialised and technical knowledge fields. Concerning that point, Roberto Maria Clemente shares his concern about what could be a trend in the future, namely the normalization of vague and imprecise content, wondering how it could be prevented. As Pietro Minto explains, phenomena such as hallucinations are regular in these technologies, which for their functioning always tend to generate an output despite the lack of information to draw from. A solution could be to retrain pre-existing models using new specific data sets, a process called “fine-tuning” that can require very high investments. Davide Mottes adds that to obtain adequate results it is also essential to structure prompts in a precise and complete way, provide all the necessary context information and possibly examples to take as a model, i.e. by implementing prompt engineering strategies. Referring specifically to image generation, the quality of the result is often discrete, even if it must be contextualised. All technological graphics tools have always determined the affirmation, of variable duration, of an aesthetic deriving from the technical characteristics. This is also the case with images and videos created with AI, in which the “mathematical” precision and the total absence of originality and good taste are striking. Connecting to this discussion, Pietro Minto mentions the phenomenon of “AI slop”, the flooding of social media with poor quality images created with AI to increase post interaction, sometimes passed off as creations of real artists.

Four personalities with very different backgrounds participated to the last talk of the first day, “When an Independent Magazine Goes Digital”: Diego Valisi, CEO of Milano Fashion Library and for years director of the advertising sector of Uomo Vogue, who therefore trained professionally before the digital revolution; Andrea Rasoli, co-founder of Vice Italia and currently of The Vision, who fully experienced the transition from paper to digital; Maria Stanchieri and Walter D’Aprile, respectively managing editor and editor-in-chief of nss magazine, a magazine published exclusively on digital channels. It is Maria Stanchieri who opened the discussion with a very fitting question, what characteristics must a product have today to be defined as a magazine. Diego Valisi responds by saying that until a few years ago people were more cautious in calling magazine products that were not born in physical form, while today the editorial worth of digital content is widely recognised, obviously taking into account the obvious differences; he specifies that the most important is the speed of circulation of news, and for this reason traditional printing can no longer aim to be the main channel of daily information. Andrea Rasoli talks about his experience and how he decided to focus solely on the digital with his latest project The Vision, fresh from the parabola of Vice Italia which dramatically increased its audience thanks to the opening of the website in 2014. In the last three years, the rise of social media has forced him to conform to their rules, choosing to publish many short contents each day. Walter D’Aprile adds that independent magazines, often dealing with strongly aesthetic subjects such as fashion and art, must emphasise the graphic design dimension and for this reason they cannot abstain from using these channels, which in turn are mainly oriented to images. According to all the speakers, the advent of social media had major economic consequences on the publishing industry, radically changing its nature. First, the general decrease in profit from magazine sales pushed many  publishing houses to transform into media companies, agencies operating mainly with communication. The publication of editorial content, on paper or digital channels, becomes a facade activity aimed at increasing followers and attracting brands to collaborate for the creation of advertising campaigns or promotional events. In addition to all this, the competition has increased due to the emergence of jobs such as content creator and influencer, who can easily reach and surpass the social numbers of established newspapers with lower quality content, which is cheaper and easier to create. Another theme analysed concerns the main cultural effect resulting from the fragmentation of social media. In the past, traditional media targeted specific groups of individuals, aesthetic-cultural clusters, today replaced by an environment characterised by an extreme specialization of interests and therefore by a “multitude of uniqueness”, which only algorithms can identify and reach. This does have an economic effect, because it is difficult to convert social media numbers into physical participation — for example at paid events — but above all it prevents editorial projects from having media resonance and becoming culturally relevant.

The last talk about these topics took place on Sunday afternoon. Titled “Designing the Newspapers of Tomorrow”, it discussed many of the topics already mentioned, and very different personalities took part to it too: Luca Sofri, journalist and director of il Post, Francesco Franchi, art director of Repubblica, and Valentina Ardia, head of content of Linkiesta Etc, replacing director Christian Rocca. First of all, this last debate signalled a change of course in the projects on which two of the speakers, Luca Sofri and Valentina Ardia, are working. In fact, il Post is published online because initially it was the most convenient way to launch an editorial project, while in 2021 they decided to collaborate with the publishing house Iperborea and the graphic studio Tomo Tomo to publish Cose spiegate bene on paper. Similarly, the online newspaper Linkiesta also had a print version, with no fixed periodicity, with the aim of investing in the creation of a high-quality product, both from a material and content point of view. Regarding more technical and economic aspects, Luca Sofri explains that digital publishing has also been affected by the decline of the advertising market — in the past the main form of revenue for online magazines — which began between 2015 and 2016 in the USA. Many online newspapers reacted by adopting the paywall system, that is, making content available under fee, for single articles or in the form of subscriptions. These IT mechanisms are complex and difficult to implement, and at that time they required significant investments. What is clear is that today the publishing industry is characterised by a strong multi-channel nature, precisely because it is necessary to differentiate one’s communication channels to reach a larger audience. There are also more and more projects that experiment with different languages, and in addition to purely textual content, they embark on producing videos and podcasts. Independent magazines may be advantaged in this by the fact that their editorial and entrepreneurial choices are not controlled by the large investments that established publications generally receive. Nonetheless, even large publishers had to reorganise their staff by integrating professionals specialised in the algorithmic functioning of social media and search engines, putting authorship aside. According to Francesco Franchi, this is one of the causes that have led to a general impoverishment of editorial content.

In the conclusion of this report, I would like to mention three magazines presented during the fair that may also be of interest to the reader. The first is Nodes, published by Numero Cromatico, a collective formed by artists and researchers from various fields. This group has been studying the connection between art and neuroscience since 2011, promoting the debate through the magazine and other publications, as well as with artistic installations. ARCHIVIO is instead the magazine produced by Promemoria Group, a company that operates in the sector of digital valorisation of corporate and institutional archive funds. Their interest is to support the diffusion of archival culture with a contemporary approach, and since 2017 they have described more than 200 unpublished archives. Finally, MAIZE, by the homonymous strategic design company born from the innovation center H-Farm, deals with technology, focusing on the relationship that people have with it. Technological development and its effects are consciously interpreted with the aim of creating a sense of responsibility in the population.