When you hold a magazine, you are holding a set of decisions that were made under constraint. Paper is bought by weight. Pages come in multiples of sixteen. Ink is a cost line. None of this is romantic in the abstract, but all of it shapes what you are reading.
The first constraint is length. A page holds roughly [word count] words at our type size. That number is not a suggestion; it is a wall. Writers who have never worked in print tend to write to the length they feel the idea deserves. Writers who have worked in print write to the length the page will take, and then make the idea fit. The second group is usually better to read.
The second constraint is sequence. In a digital feed, every piece is somebody's first piece. In an issue, pieces sit next to each other, and the adjacency does work. A heavy reported feature reads differently when it follows a light column. A photograph reads differently when it faces a page of dense type. Editors spend real time on this, and readers feel it without being able to name it.
The third constraint is permanence. Once the issue is printed, the typo is printed. That sounds like a downside and mostly is, but it also produces a kind of care that deadlines alone do not. There is no quietly fixing it at 2am. There is only getting it right before the file goes.
None of this argues that digital is worse. It argues that the two forms ask different things of a writer, and that a magazine that treats its digital output as a dumping ground for print leftovers is wasting the form. The web can do things print cannot: it can be long without costing paper, it can link, it can be corrected, it can reach someone who would never find us on a shelf.
So we run both, and we try not to pretend they are the same thing. The print issue is the considered version. This site is the running version. Both are the magazine.