Are magazines the first print medium to be obsolete?

My recent interest addition of digital photography sent me on a search for topic area expertise. I got the first primer from reading highly recommended books. That set the framework. Now I'm after a more constant stream of subject area information spanning the entire topic so I can keep experimenting and growing my expertise.

This is where you typically turn to magazines, reading short snippets from experts. So I went on a search for magazines online. Good place to start is Amazon's magazine store, probably one of the most comprehensive searchable list of magazines. I found a few, read the customer reviews, checked the magazines out online (one had a sample issue I could read in .pdf) and narrowed it down to two, and subscribed via Amazon.

Now back to the point of this post. Many of the review comments of those magazines referred to the fact that the posters read a lot online, and whether they were able to get information they didn't already get online through blogs and other sources. So the question is - are magazines an outdated medium in the age of blogs and websites? Reading an entire book online is still a bit too cumbersome until the various digital devices on the horizon make it more convenient. But the length of a magazine article is easier to consume in a browser, and in the typical length of an online session. Typical content of magazines breaks down into three components: topic articles, product reviews, and advertisement.

Product reviews from magazines are already obsolete. There are many websites which do a much better job. On digital photography for example, the dpreview website is widely respected as the best product reviews for that space. Amazon's customer reviews are another key source for product information. Because those reviews are by actual users, and by people who have no conflict of interest the quality of reviews is usually much higher in terms of content, though maybe not as much in terms of journalistic aspects.

Topic articles are what keeps the readership hooked, and is the main value proposition of most magazines. This where blogs are rapidly replacing magazines, as the blog post and the topic article can cover the same content, length, etc quite easily. And as a reader after some initial research to find good blogs, it's much better to read a number of blogs than to subscribe to magazines. I can easily cover a wide range of views on the topic, without the filter of one or very few magazine editors. It does leave the quality control issue - without the magazine editor purging poor content, its up to the reader to filter. But again this is where the times are bringing suitable replacements: as a increasingly sophisticated information society we get better at information filtering. And technology using community and social data engineering is quickly providing automated filters - such as flickr's interest measure, favorite votes on technorati, helpful votes on Amazon. The wisdom of crowds in many cases exceeds the quality control a single editor can apply.

This area also blurs with many news media offering RSS feeds for their content, collapsing the medium into the same stream used to read blogs.

Then there's the instant gratification in the consumer. You can read a blog instantly, including all the archived posts for as long back as it goes. With a magazine subscription it will take 4-12 weeks before your first issue, and you don't get archived content unless the publisher offers it online. That's a significant delta in today's environment of overnight shipping for many purchases.

So how long will magazines stay with us? And what subject areas will die faster than others?

For now I added two magazine subscriptions. I'll see if I end up renewing them in 12 months.