Recently the item The decline of ham radio magazines appeared on /r/amateurradio. The OP (original poster) wrote:
Over the last several years it has become impossible to purchase ham radio magazines in the local book store. National chains or local mom and pop shops, it does not matter. Talking with the managers brings black hole stares to rival the students in Ferris Bueller’s classroom. Yet model railroad magazines are overflowing the shelves. So I ask, how many model railroaders are there? A few quick searches pulled up the magazine MRH model railroad hobbyist. It has a circulation of 30,000. Additionally there is a national organization the NMRA national model railroad association. It has a membership of about 18,000.
By contrast there are about 800,000 hams in the US and 154,000 of those are ARRL members. A person would think we would have several magazines available. I will concede the internet provides much of the content magazines used to. Yet there are many model railroad magazine still on the shelf.
I’m curious for everyone’s thoughts on this.
I replied something to the effect that the print magazine business is a dead-end affair. Association magazines, such as QST, may continue to be published, but that’s only because the association’s dues help fund the magazine. Consumer magazines that rely on advertising are finding it harder and harder to keep their heads above water because companies that used to be advertisers are finding other ways to reach their customers.
If making money by producing a print magazine is tough, you can imagine how hard it is to make any money on newsstand sales. To make any money on newsstand sales, the prices have to be so high as to make them unattractive to casual buyers. Who wants to spend $10 on something that may or may not interest them, especially when free information on nearly any topic is available on the internet? I used to buy a lot of magazines from newsstands, but I can’t remember the last time that I did so.
I think the reason that there are only two amateur radio magazines, including one that’s in an increasingly iffy business situation, is that there really isn’t much that a magazine can provide that can’t already be found on the internet. Blogs and podcasts, including mine (blog, podcast) provide technical articles, construction projects, and news, and do so in a much more timely fashion than print magazines. In fact, I like to consider this blog as a kind of amateur radio magazine.
All of this doesn’t answer the OP’s question about model railroad magazines, but I’m afraid that I don’t know enough about that subculture. Maybe it’s because model railroading is more visual that amateur radio. That’s only a wild-a** guess, though.