I feel like it’s hard to pick something today that has a lot of same cache as zines because many of those qualities largely don’t exist for media as a whole. They were local, but because of the internet persisted media doesn’t have a ton of locality anymore. They reflected their low budgets, but because of how production tools have been democratized the lower bound of quality is still pretty high regardless of budget. They were small batch, but again because of the internet, having one copy of a piece of media usually is the same as having almost infinite numbers of it. They sometimes discussed topics that were taboo and hard to find in mainstream print, but because of online anonymity, shifting social acceptance, and plenty of other factors it’s hard to think of topics that aren’t openly discussed somewhere online. The list goes on. My point is mostly that I think what makes a zine a zine are a bunch of qualities and constraints that largely don’t reflect our current media landscape at all, so it’s hard to draw the comparison.
That said, I do think it’s interesting to look at it from the lens of what zines were in comparison to mainstream print at their peak. They were usually self/community funded vs ad supported. They were usually supported by folks who were passionate about their niche. They usually had a more esoteric and DIY design sense than the mass appealing mainstream print magazines. There’s more I’m sure.
Taken from that perspective, it’s hard to find one “new zine,” but relatively straightforward to ask “what’s the zine version of ”. For instance, forums such as this fine space feel a bit like the “zine version” of mainstream social media. Indie web projects like Faircamp feel like a zine version of streaming platforms (not the cleanest comparison I admit). There’s a bunch of projects in the small web/tiny web/indie web space, and a lot of them feel like they’re shooting to be the zine version of something larger that’s become enshittified.
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