Recently, I picked up several "prestigious" and "renowned" traditional printed Photo magazines when I travelled overseas at different bookstores for several times but I yet didn't find any of them worth buying after scanning through them for just one minute or two.
I actually found that the contents of those are outdated and almost and mostly useless. And Ads could constitute almost half of the pages actually. In fact, for gear related stuff, many of the published information are trivial and well known. In particular, for a particular "Popular" magazine, the camera tests done and published are now rather crude which those "tests" are actually by no means could even match the quality and higher standard for the tests they published decades ago, which is undoubtedly a big disappointment. For photography related topics, some magazines do have more on these and some others have almost none, on the other hand. But I still found that there are little things that are really special anyway. So, why spend/waste a few bucks in buying those afterall?
In fact, nowadays almost everything can be found on the Internet, which are quick to locate and could be far more useful, provided that you locate the right and useful things. The contents are rich and most of them are free basically (even though you have paid indirectly). Even I do find now the newly emerged online photo magazines are edited and produced in higher standards, with more useful and interesting stuff. For example, I do like the PhotographyBB Online Photo Magazine, which I consider to be quite well made so far, and it is highly recommended.
Without true revolution, I just wonder how long will take for those traditional printed media to vanish? My bet is that they cannot survive for more than one decade to come, if the trend continues, frankly.
On the other hand, I do still buy some printed local magazines from time to time, but those are actually new-style ones and I could see the editors do have put a lot of efforts and done some hard works from time to time in finding materials, doing tests, writing photo/software tips and articles and in editing, which are quite different from those old "prestigious" magazines, which seem to be just sitting there and wait to die! :-o :=x