Print is not dead. Serious digital media ups its image and is taken more seriously (please don’t call them blogs) when it also comes in a glossy (or matte) physical form you can hold in your hands. Hodinkee does it, Gear Patrol does it…What more evidence do you need that a print magazine is a natural outgrowth of growing online publications. Now one of our favorite watch enthusiast websites, Watchonista, is announcing the first volume of its new biannual magazine.
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Watchonista: Volume 1, as its first issue is named, comes 11 years after the company’s founding in 2009 in Switzerland and is a milestone in its growth. It’s 120 pages, filled mostly with the type of excellent watch content Watchonista is known for, with “ninety-nine percent of the images and one hundred percent of the text” produced by Watchonista itself. It also includes a new type of content in a section called “The Lounge by Watchonista” on “watch-adjacent” interests of the staff such as cigars, spirits, books and more.
The challenge of producing print media feels like a whole other can of worms for those who grew up in digital media, but it often becomes the place for big-idea stories, collaborative efforts and higher levels of design and production. Further, it gives a publication the chance to show its best work and for fans to interact with it in a new way. Such enthusiast-specific magazines, oriented toward those with a collector mentality anyway, can themselves become collectible items.
Just as Watchonista doesn’t sell watches or anything else, the magazine will not be for sale, and can’t even be ordered from the site. You’ll have to locate it in person at certain partners’ locations, which include all US Omega boutiques, Wempe Fifth Avenue, Watches of Switzerland, Mayors, Topper Jewelers, and others. To find out where you can get your hands on a copy, go to the “Find the Magazine” button on the Watchonista.com website.