Making the Media Great Again
Arena Magazine and the future of American media
Dear Readers,
The most basic instinct of an American entrepreneur is that when something is broken, rather than complaining, you need to build something new. And there is a lot that is broken, like our media. In early 2024, I started talking with a younger colleague, Max Meyer, about some ideas to fight back…
Out of those discussions, Arena Magazine was born: a bold voice for American technologists, capitalists, and patriots in the form of a high-end print magazine. Yesterday, Arena announced its seventh issue. It now has thousands of subscribers and is sold in Barnes & Noble throughout the US. Max told me that the latest print run of magazines used over 10,000 pounds of paper.
I’m very proud to be a supporter of Arena, and I encourage you to be, as well. You can subscribe for your home or your office.
At a time when the legacy media is full of negativity and ugliness, Arena is daring to be both optimistic and beautiful at the same time. Technology and entrepreneurship are so important to the success of the USA in the 21st century, and our mainstream media is totally poisoned against them.
If you’re anything like me, you remember the great magazines we had a generation ago in the technology space. Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, and even Wired used to be awesome. They used to celebrate Americans who were trying to do hard things. To say that they have gone in another direction would be a serious understatement.
Restoring that legacy — bold optimism, celebrating the builders — is the mission of Arena. It’s why I and so many other leaders in the innovation world are proud supporters. We need great media institutions again.
If you want to check out Arena, start with some of the recent articles. Here are two that I enjoyed recently, including from my friend Judge Glock on the wild history of Wall Street in the 1980s, or another about the last 250 years of American technological history. Arena has a new free Substack newsletter (link below). And if you want to get the print magazines, subscribe here.
The progress has been inspiring over the last two years, and as more people wake up to the need for optimistic, beautiful media, Arena is going to continue to grow and inspire patriotic Americans.
Joe