There are some sectors of the magazine industry, maybe science isn't one of them, that are actually doing really well. I've been on three different junkets with outdoors magazine editors in the past 6 months, and many large brands that advertise to the Duck Dynasty crowd are abandoning digital and going back to print.
Digital, it turns out, is mostly a scam. I've written in other places about why this is, but the nutshell version is bad ROI metrics and, even worse, the incentives on all sides are so perverted that the bad metrics and rampant fraud are a fundamental structural/business problem that no amount of tech can solve.
At any rate, the jig is, increasingly, up on digital (FB and Google excepted, because they run genuine performance advertising platforms at a scale that nobody else can match), and advertisers are actually going back to print, TV, radio -- venues where the ROI metrics are old, established, widely agreed upon, and fairly reliable.
Anyway, this situation is very complex and very very very different from what the typical HN "dead tree is expensive and for losers, the future is digital!" commenter thinks. If anything is in real trouble right now for deep structural reasons, it's digital, not print.
You probably find all this hard to believe -- I did at first until I heard it confirmed by the sixth or seventh person. I know that what I just said sounds like "up is down, and black is white", but this is how it is in 2017.
I rarely click on ads. I've probably been a successful ad conversion less than a dozen times since 1996.
Print is different. Getting ads is a significant reason for having a newspaper subscription. Many magazine ads are both more useful and more effective than the ad units that you se online. I probably made a Nikon/Canon decision based on a combination of print ads.
Somehow TapeOp magazine manages to deliver ~41.5K free print subscriptions every other month, at least in the US (digital subscription is included).
TapeOp has advertising, not sure if editor/publisher draw a salary, and I'm guessing that freelance interviewers/product reviewers get paid little if anything. Nonetheless, they've been the most kickass music production/recording magazine for more than 20 years.
Some info on how they do it: http://tapeop.com/mediakit/print/
I think print based reading material will have a place for longer than most people would have predicted a few years ago.
I go to their site to subscribe, and they are selling a year of the print & digital for $29. That's insane -- they don't even add on postage fees anywhere in the checkout process. It's literally $29, out the door.
I signed up for 2 years and just hope they are around for that time. I can't believe the direct costs of printing and shipping such a beautiful magazine don't exceed $5 per issue (12 issues over 2 years for $60).
Maybe they have found how price sensitive consumers are for their content, or maybe they know they can get higher ad rates with more print, but I don't see how they're even covering their costs for printing and shipping this to me, much less content or editorial staff, etc.
A few Quora answers put the cost of printing a typical magazine at less than $1 per copy. Magazines have a special postage rate that's cheaper than a single first class stamp. That means printing and sending the print magazine could cost just about half of what you're paying for the subscription, leaving the other half to pay for the content and overhead.
Yeah I didn't really get that. I kept looking for a * somewhere to indicate that it's $29 monthly. I'd have no problem doing monthly. $29 out the door is absolutely insane.
You say the problem is dead-tree publishing but I don't think the additional layout and printing costs are so much bigger than what you've outlined above. They're trying to cut costs by not paying the people who actually produce the content (as opposed to those who package it through the editorial function); their other alternative is to produce more popular content that would attract more ad revenue, but that would mean a loss of quality because markets don't always reward quality.
This is, literally, why we can't have nice things.
Society could harness it for good or bad. We have cheap applied science things (microprocessors with radios and amazing magically touch sensitive displays without ugly cords with endless content and ability to just call each other anywhere* on the planet), and we have of course things like the great firewall of china (and turkey and so on) which do deep packet inspection, enabled by very similar technology companies.
But it's immutable. You can't choose the second best thing. Because that just means your preferences and thus your utility function values underdogs above topdogs, hence you'll see those as the best. It's just tautological. And sure, we'll probably climb out of this hole eventually, but maybe with things like patreon and co: http://alternativeto.net/software/patreon/ (for example AdBlock + Flattr seems like a good solution to the advertising hell)
Furthermore, just to talk about the original point of "capitalism is killing quality news" ... are you sure? I mean there are still quality news outlets, and there will be, but the problem is that people don't read them. And bias. Even if you could sign up to be a journalist and magically get a fixed income if at least 10 000 people are reading your stuff, there would be a lot more crazy/spam out there. _Because_ people are people, they cheat, they like easy solutions, they are greedy. They prefer easy explanations, they prefer silver bullets, they prefer gods and guns for law and order even if we know that education and equality is the answer.
What is happening here is that too many bench warmers are trying to make excuses for why there are enough subscribers to the site. After all, all these people how can't they get a paltry 25k.
Simple, not that many people really know about their site and of those apparently the bulk just don't care. Maybe the content isn't really that interesting. Call a spade a spade.
then throw in, there is just such a wealth of information out there that it is easy to get lost and any one trying to sell stuff is going to have to work very hard to get noticed and even harder to make the sell.
Greed doesn't require capitalism, it occurs about any place where someone has stuff other people don't and where government leadership plays off the feelings of jealousy, income differences, and racial differences. Greed requires politicians who are more quite capable of telling you someone else has stuff you don't have and it is not fair or that you deserve stuff for free... provided you vote for them
The magic of capitalism is happening in China right now. You have hundreds of manufacturers making everything, driving prices down.
In the US, we're more like a command economy in many ways. We have these huge sectors like healthcare and defense that are 100% top down procurement and probably represent 30% of the economy. Another 8% of the economy is financial services, which is mostly a small cartel with direct government supports.
The telecom situation is the same thing. The corporate idiots bake out risks and the US turns into a dinosaur. Lots of real innovation will start happening in Asia.
I have only heard of one person who made it work with a reasonable margin and that is Maria Popovo from http://www.Brainpickings.org but she is an anomaly.
Let's do some math - how many subscribers do they need to break even if they pare down staff, go all digital, and raise their price a bit? Hand-wavy numbers for minimal viable staffing, but should be order of magnitude correct:
$1,400,000 annual burn rate assuming a minimal staff to run just the online magazine and dump print (I acknowledge they have other expenses, but let's ignore them for now)If you charge $60 for an annual subscription - very reasonable for the content - they would need 23333.33 subscribers to break even.
They got $1.2 million last year in grants, some $9.5 million in funding since 2012. If they can't manage to attract 24K subscribers with that kind of funding they don't deserve to stay in business no matter how good their content is.
I love their content, but they need somebody who knows how to run a business to be in charge.