In the same month the venerable journalism quarterly Nieman Reports released its final print edition, the three-year old press Staircase Books launched Duck, a biannual magazine deliberately meant to be in print.
Nieman Reports launched in 1946, and its quarterly circulation was about 1,100, mostly alumni of the fellowship program run by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Meanwhile, the website it launched in 2014, niemanreports.org, draws about 400,000 unique visitors a year. The Nieman Foundation publishes two other digital-only publications, Nieman Lab, which covers the future of journalism and Nieman Storyboard, a site dedicated to narrative journalism.
In the final print issue of Reports, Fall 2025/Winter 2026, Henry Chu, the Nieman Foundation’s interim curator and publisher of the magazine, wrote that “putting out a print magazine is costly and time- and labor-intensive.” He noted that it did not sell advertising or distribute copies on newsstands and was largely sent free to alumni. But, he said, “the switch also recognizes the reality that most of us read far more these days on high-resolution screens than on ink-filled pages,” and that the website already runs far more articles than appear in the magazine.
The editor of Nieman Reports, Samantha Henry, declined further comment.
Staircase is taking a different tack with Duck, which sells for $22 an issue and $40 for an annual subscription on their website. “We want the magazine not to be ephemeral … we strive to be something larger than just a magazine, really to be sort of its own book, like an anthology,” said James Fraser, who co-founded Staircase Books in 2022 with his wife, Bella Bennett. The two met as literature students at Emerson College.
Why name a literary magazine after an aquatic bird? “Ducks are so beautiful. They’re also quite playful. They’re both very dramatic yet very comical, and that’s sort of the embodiment of the best writing,” Fraser said. The magazine aims to publish enduring works of literature, primarily poetry, but branching out to fiction as well. Duck gives the publisher a way to work with a wider range of writers.
“There are a lot of people we wanted to publish,” Fraser said. “We thought the way that we could get to work with some people who we would dream to work with would be to solicit them for a magazine.”
Fraser seems to have been correct. Jonathan Franzen, Mary Ruefle and Sherman Alexie are among the well-known writers who contributed to the initial issue of Duck.
Franzen wrote a short essay about ducks, which was born out of a series of fan letters Fraser sent to the writer. After Franzen declined to contribute a new piece or agree to an interview for the magazine, Fraser suggested a one-question interview on why ducks matter. Franzen agreed and his response became the opening essay of the issue.
Duck also features writing by D.A. Powell, a short play by Sebastian Castillo, interviews with Ottessa Moshfegh and Garielle Lutz, and poems by Andrea Cohen, Christian Davis, Tawanda Mulalu and Bianca Stone.
While the writers come from everywhere, Fraser said it is no coincidence that the magazine is being published here. “Cambridge as a place was absolutely instrumental in the creation of Staircase and Duck magazine … I don’t know that either would have come about in somewhere that wasn’t Cambridge.”
Duckis first and foremost a literary magazine but aims to achieve both aesthetic and literary merit. “We’re focusing on aesthetics, we’re focusing on craft,” said Fraser. “We’re focusing on beauty — sure, politics and science and religion, other philosophy, these things are all integral — but they have to be crafted in such a way that makes them aesthetically interesting on a literary level. And that’s the readership that we’re going for.”
Fraser and Bennett originally wanted to publish quarterly but shifted to a biannual publishing cycle due to logistical considerations.
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