CACM was reformed a couple of years ago. In one issue, it became vastly better and it has sustained its quality since that time pretty well. There are always two journal articles with nice introductions for those of us who don't follow their respective fields regularly.

The rest of the articles tend to be pretty solid too; there's very little IT drivel or academic navel-gazing left. It probably doesn't hurt to have some awareness of what's going on in academia even for those of us who work in industry anyway.

Not that any of this really refutes your main point that digital distribution is inherently more personalizable.