Had to vote no. Used to get magazines, much prefer forums and real peoples reviews of what they use.

Sick and tired of every performance boat article telling how great it was, what nice features it had and how they liked the layout of two bolsters and a rear bench (Wow, that is different) on every boat. Never saw a review that was neutral or negative.

Get online and read up, you find a lot of crap but a lot of real world experience also. This is going to sound odd, but I trust sorting through the BS in a forum to get a better idea about somethign than reading a magazine review on it.

Brian

These are perfect examples of insurmountable advantages of electronic information delivery, and the pipeline is becoming more ubiquitous every day.
What is the average age an american kid gets his first smartphone these days?

Leaving the content issue aside, the costs associated with publishing- capital investments in bldg, presses, trucks, postage, etc are what is really killing the industry. You need ad dollars to support that infrastructure and when revenue shrinks and is not coming back, the only answer is to cut staff. Quality drops, creating further exodus of ad money and the cycle continues. We are watching the death throes of the industry in real time. It's fascinating to me. I watched with interest as the music industry tied itself in knots for a few years until Apple finally got it right with 99c download bidness model. I remember those exciting times in the early dayz of napster- downloading thru dialup on a compaq laptop with a 133 pentium. haha. Start a couple dozen before going to bed and hope for a 33% success rate when you get up the next morning.

The forums are today's version of chatrooms- aggregators of like-minded enthusiasts, professionals, etc. I agree- the maturation of the medium has accelerated the migration, but the internet is a constantly evolving thing and we have seen first-hand in this forum how a herd mentality can sometimes dramatically shift perceptions and click habits.

The publishing industry isn't going away, but it is being changed dramatically by technology. And technology is always evolving- I'm having the time of my life observing it.

Forums didn't exactly kill magazines, but they didn't help the cause.
I think facebook is a real threat to small forums, maybe to all of them.
Look what it did to Classmates with the addition of one little app, and it's doing a number on the dating sites as well.