I fear that the future of all print based periodicals is gloomy, and we will see continuing mergers and closures, until maybe ending up with just one title for any given subject. Some of the leisure flying mags seem to be hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and others, like Loop have gone entirely digital. There is a new generation coming up, who have no habit of consuming ‘hard’ copies off the news-stands, unless they are ‘giveaway’ newspapers.
For those who have been eeking some sort of an income from either written or photographic contributions, the rewards are negligible now, little more than beer money, and I suspect that neither the publishers, staff or freelancers are making much money either.
The root of the problem is that people have become accustomed to getting ‘information’ free of charge, be it a digital music file, or a photographic file, and all this information is instantly consumed, and disposable. Photographs are no longer individually cherished, because they are everywhere now, and there will be another one along any second.
One might suppose that the ‘democratizing’ of information would lead to an explosion in great writing, but in truth the reverse is true, because, the wheat is lost in the chaff of a million blogs and online sources.
Where there was once a source of outstanding professional journalism in the monthly journals , contributors seem now to be enthusiastic amateurs, often with no particular talent in that area, and the fall in quality is very evident, leading to the death spiral of falling sales, falling revenue, cheaper paper, less money for contributors.
When everyone is a journalist, nobody is a journalist.
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