The problem, whether or not the content is free, whether some of it is rubbish, whether the writing is good or terrible, it is immediate.
We no longer have to wait until next month to read that review on the newest gear, we can read it today.
Not only that, we can read several reviews on the same piece of gear, without subscribing to a number of different magazines.
Then we get together on a forum like this one and compare our own experiences and our own photographs.
Sure, some of it is rubbish. But most of us are intelligent enough to sort out the rubbish and toss it out.
And if we aren't that savvy, there are several respected members on forums like these that help us come to the right conclusions.
And my memory recalls that there was a fair bit of rubbish being tossed off as fact in the magazines as well, with no world wide gathering of peers to identify it as such.
And face it. Subscriptions never paid for magazines anyway. It was the advertisers. It was all those advertisements we used to curse as we sorted through those magazines like Popular Photography and others.
The print media just cannot compete with that. It is very hard on everyone who depends on those magazines for a living but the continued death of most of those magazines is inexorable. Some will survive, by being the best at what they do with high quality content that makes it worth subscribing. Some just because they are the last of their kind still standing.
