The
print publishing
industry has been under
siege by the
Internet for some time now, and once a viable
electronic replacement to
paper becomes available, paper will eventually disappear, only used for the most basic applications. Depending on the speed of
technology developement, that time may be 5 to 15 years away, but it will come.
That's not the real crisis. Publishing companies are more than ready to move their content online, making their information available to anyone anywhere willing to access it. Whether you read their articles on a CRT, an LCD, a sheet of electronic paper, or a piece of newsprint, they are ready to deliver content to you. With some exceptions, writing articles for the web differs primarily from writing for print in ways that have mostly to do with immediacy and a shortened development cycle.
So what is the problem? Advertising. Even if people wanted to buy subscriptions (and most don't), that is only a small part of a publication's revenue. Advertising is the primary source of income. The problem is, some web developer told someone long ago that web advertising was trackable, meaning that an advertiser could pay based upon the amount of customers delivered to them by the referring site.
What advertisers forget is that is takes money to generate interesting, intelligent content. Until the paradigm of internet advertising returns from the tyranny of trackable results, we will suffer from ever-shrinking levels of quality as the money is leached out of advertising. The print version of Time magazine still charges you full boat for an ad, no matter who flips the page without reading it.
The really sad part is that the marketing money isn't going anywhere. Since the new paradigm is delivered customers, publications are forced to pimp their mailing list to generate income. The more scrupulous publications dress it up a bit by issuing a "targeted newsletter" with articles dealing with a specific subject, usually one near and dear to the advertiser. For example, a decorating magazine could send out a "targeted newsletter" to the readers who identified themselves as gardeners with recent articles on gardening, with the newsletter sponsored by a trowel company. This means that your inbox will start to fill up with interest-oriented spam, the most insidous kind.
The really, really sad part is that these efforts still don't bring in the advertising revenue print demands.