Before there was a magazine, there was a show. In 2009, Douglas McGray — a freelance writer who had spent years contributing to The New Yorker, Wired and the New York Times Magazine — rented a 360-seat theatre in San Francisco's Mission District and staged something he called Pop-Up Magazine: a live performance where writers, photographers, filmmakers and musicians told stories on stage, in the format of a magazine, to a paying audience. No recordings. No livestreams. You had to be there.
The shows sold out almost immediately. Within two years the audience had grown to 2,600. By the time Pop-Up went on its first national tour in 2015, it was filling concert halls and symphony venues in six cities. The whole thing was absurd and wonderful — a live magazine in the age of infinite scrolling — and it made McGray think. If this many people were hungry for carefully crafted stories performed on stage, what might happen if you gave them the same thing on paper?
What happened was The California Sunday Magazine. Launched in October 2014 with co-founder Chas Edwards, a former Digg and Federated Media executive, it arrived as a Sunday insert tucked inside the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, The New York Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune. The first issue landed on 400,000 doorsteps. It was a bold distribution play — piggybacking on the Sunday papers to reach exactly the kind of reader who might never stumble across an indie title in a bookshop.
The magazine covered California, the American West, Asia and Latin America, and it did so with a focus on visual storytelling that set it apart from almost everything else on the newsstand. Photography was not decoration here; it was the architecture. The art department crafted layouts that made stories feel immersive before you had read a single word. In 2016, The California Sunday Magazine won the National Magazine Award for photography, beating National Geographic and Vanity Fair in the process. The Society of Publication Designers named it Magazine of the Year in both 2018 and 2019. Over its lifetime, it was a finalist for thirteen National Magazine Awards and won three.
McGray, who had freelanced for more than a decade before co-founding the magazine, was frank about what he was trying to build. "A lot of what we read right now feels disposable," he once said. "We set out to put a lot of time and care into stories and make something special and memorable." When journalists called it California's answer to The New Yorker, he pushed back with characteristic dry precision: "The New Yorker of the West Coast is the New Yorker." But the comparison was not absurd. The writing was that good, the ambition that serious.
What made the magazine genuinely distinctive, though, was not prestige but intimacy. McGray talked about aspiring to the closeness of radio — wanting readers to feel present in a story, not watching from a distance. "Sometimes magazine stories put subjects on a pedestal," he explained. "We want the people we write about to feel knowable and for the reader to feel present." That sensibility produced a particular kind of journalism: warm without being soft, rigorous without being cold, and always rooted in specific places and lives rather than abstract trends.
The California Sunday Magazine ceased publication in October 2020, after its primary funder, the Emerson Collective, withdrew support during the pandemic. It was six years old. The staff were laid off. The presses stopped. And then, eight months later, the magazine won a Pulitzer Prize — the first time, as far as anyone can tell, that a publication won the award after it had already closed. The prize went to Nadja Drost for her feature on migrants crossing the Darién Gap, a piece of reporting so vivid and humane that it outlasted the publication that commissioned it.
Pop-Up Magazine, the live show that started it all, held on a few years longer before shutting down in 2023. The whole ecosystem McGray built — live events, print magazine, digital platform — is gone now, which makes it easy to frame this as a tragedy. And in some ways it is. But the archive survives at californiasunday.com, and the stories in it have not aged a day. They are still the kind of journalism you clear an afternoon for.
There is something instructive in the arc of The California Sunday Magazine. It proved that a new, ambitious, beautifully made general-interest magazine could find an audience in the twenty-first century. It proved that visual storytelling and long-form reporting could coexist on the same page without either one suffering. It proved that people will pay attention if you give them something worth paying attention to. It just could not prove that any of this was financially sustainable — which, if you have spent any time in independent publishing, will sound less like a failure and more like the weather.
Explore the archive of The California Sunday Magazine at <a href="https://www.californiasunday.com" target="\_blank">californiasunday.com