Print media is dead. Or is it? For a handful of well-connected New Yorkers, glossy, start-up magazines are the latest status symbols.

“It’s either mad or genius to start a print publication in 2013,” said Kevin Sessums, the editor of FourTwoNine, a new gay publication exploring topics such as activism, relationships and fashion. It’s also expensive: The first issue of Wherever, a new travel magazine, cost about $20,000 to put out. FourTwoNine wouldn’t say how much it’s spent, but it “wasn’t cheap,” a spokeswoman said.

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What: FourTwoNine hits newsstands in October with Sarah Jessica Parker and Bravo’s Andy Cohen on its debut cover. Let’s Panic went on sale this month, featuring surrealist photography and a story by John Waters. Wherever, a tri-annual, launched last spring, its pages filled with vintage tourism ads and first-person pieces about moving to Bushwick.

Who: Rawan Hadid, 28 years old, created Wherever as a tome for serial wanderers after getting, she says, “tired of looking at glossy travel magazines.” Let’s Panic is the brainchild of fashion photographer Aaron Ward, who grew frustrated with editorial “bleeding into advertising.” Mr. Sessums, a memoirist and veteran writer of Vanity Fair, called magazine editing one of the last “aesthetic dictatorships,” and said he’s aiming to oversee an edgy publication that a reader will “throw across the room…but not throw out.”

Why: “When you’re working for Vogue, you have to speak Vogue,” said public-relations honcho Kelly Cutrone. A magazine to call one’s own operates, in part, she said, as “a marketing campaign…for people on the radar.”

These upstart editors are also aiming to make magazines like the ones they once admired. “There’s a gap in the publishing world,” said Koko Ntuen, editor in chief of Ladygunn, a two-year-old magazine that styles itself as a Vice competitor. “It didn’t seem like this was the time to do it,” Mr. Ward said, “but there’s a crazy hunger for these magazines that I loved growing up. They were inspirational, and that’s gotten diluted.”

This article comes from wsj edit released