I've been recently scanning through some old issues of Hugi (www.hugi.de - a Diskmag about the demoscene in general) and it's brought a few thoughts to my mind. In the last few years as a Diskmag it's seen the article contribution that it recieves dwindle and the content of the mag is but a third of what it once attained, over 1.5MB, yes 1.5 megabytes, of text. Now I've been interested in the demoscene for years and have read a fair few diskmags and seen many of them dissappear. A lack of contribution leaves it down to the editor to create more and more of the required content, eventually making this person so dissillusioned that the diskmag closes.
This is all well and good, you are thinking but you were talking paper before not digital medium. This is true and my point here is that similarly paper magazines albeit not shutting their doors and dismantling the presses, they are shrinking. I've subscribed to Computer Shopper for a decade, I've seen issues with over 1100 pages, and now recieve a monthly copy that barely breaks 350 pages. The content of these pages also seems to have decreased becoming more focused at the new computer user and less at the advanced user.
Where does the internet fit in to all this? Well this is where, you are reading this message on a forum, linked to a site that hands out news, reviews, hints, tips and contains lots of people willing and able to help you. And all of this is available free of charge, well you have to look at the odd advert banner at the top but it's not taking money out of your wallet. On the internet the news is fresh, it's just happened, by the time the magazine gets to you the news can be nearly 2-3 months out of date. I've noticed that since I started reading The Register (www.theregister.co.uk) about 6 or 7 years back now that I routinely ignored the news in magazines because of how out of date it was and skipped to the juicy articles.
Now many moons ago you had to buy magazines to get the updates, news, reviews and information you needed to help decide on new tech to get or information to help get the most out of your tech. Looking back do you buy as many tech mags now as you did say only 5 years ago? I know full well I don't. And it's not just tech that's covered by the net any host of subjects are available in detail online for your perusal, and with the advent of easy to set up forums and content systems you will often find a community in a similar situation to yourself ready to lend a hand.
Further progression is at hand, with the aid of XML and RSS feeds you can now find it's easy to download the content that previously required a PC to your PDA or Smartphone. Allowing you to view said content while commuting on the train or the bus, a quick sync in the morning giving you news content more relevant and cheaper than buying a newspaper or magazine to read during a similar point in time. Which handilly leads us back to an earlier point in the proceedings on diskmags. In the most recent issue of Hugi (number 29), the editor (Adok) commented with regard to a movement to an online system whereby news, articles and other content are added as and when they arrive rather than people having to wait a number of months for the content to build up enough for another release of the mag. The diskmag now becomes just an archive of information from the previous period, articles/views etc collated into one manageable unit. In our situation the XML/RSS feeds become a replacement of the mag, all the news and information you want, if lacking in articles/reviews.
So where do we go now? As we witness many publications downsizing or changing focus from their previous drive to a target that may create more revenue it seems all the more reason to seek out sites like this one that can supply the information you desire without costing you money or felling rainforests to get information to you. In the short term magazines aren't going to go out of business because of the internet but consumers should find it easier to find and read the information they want for free.