Last
week, Marco Arment announced that he has sold The Magazine to the minimalist iOS
publication’s executive editor, Glenn Fleishman. Arment said he had
accidentally built a business he was ill-suited to running. “Glenn’s doing
almost everything already, so I’m effectively a figurehead,” he said.
It
might also have been the case, however, that Arment saw that a wider trend was
on its way, one that would see The Magazine as just one among thousands of
titles available through the App Store.
When The Magazine launched just seven
months ago, it stood out as the first publication that traded on the principles
of “Subcompact Publishing,” a manifesto laid
out by designer and writer Craig Mod. (Update: Fleishman has
pointed out, however, that The Magazine pre-dated Mod’s essay.) The Magazine
was built for the age of smartphones and tablets from the ground up, free from
the legacy concerns of traditional magazines, which have been stuck adapting
their print products for digital consumption, usually with nothing more than
glorified PDFs. Arment’s product, on the other hand, was consistent with the
tenets of subcompact publishing: lightweight, easy to distribute, and easy to
use.
