The web is great but I still love print photo mags and here’s why

Until very recently I was the editor of N-Photo magazine – a publication dedicated to users of Nikon cameras. But the commercial pressures for print publications – a declining readership, advertising revenue having fallen off a cliff over recent years, and the increasing costs of things like paper – has finally forced the magazine to close after 168 issues (92 of which I was editor).

While on one hand, it was a sad day – heralding the end of my 35-year career in print journalism – on the other, it opened a world of opportunity, and I’m now relishing my new role as News Editor of this website.

The web trumps mags in so many ways. News really is new – the time from gathering information to having it disseminated to the masses is only as long as it takes to write up the story – a matter of hours compared to several weeks for a print publication. One result of these lengthy timescales involved in putting together each issue of a magazine (it typically takes over two weeks from the press deadline to a magazine appearing on the newsstands, and the vast majority of the content is written weeks or months before that) is that ‘previews’ of new cameras often wouldn’t appear until after the product itself appeared in the shops, while reviews of products long on sale were of little use to the early adopter.

The size of the audience pales into insignificance too. At its peak, N-Photo was selling over 30,000 copies per month but by the end it had dipped to around 8,000. Digitalcameraworld.com gets more than of 3 million page visitors each month, so if a particular article gains traction and goes viral, it could be read by hundreds of thousands of people.

And if you want to learn to do something specific photography-related, for example, realizing that there's a partial eclipse due to make an appearance this evening and want to find tips on how to shoot it, then a quick internet search is likely to lead you straight to a story with everything you need to know, such as this one .

But there’s one thing that magazines offer that websites don’t. While the web is great for learning about stuff you know you want to learn about, magazines teach you things that you didn’t even realize that you wanted to know.

In our final issue, we explored what it’s like to be a news photographer with Getty Images staffer Leon Neal, who shared his top tips on the subject. We were flies on the wall (or mosquitos in a boggy marshland) as we documented a one-on-one workshop with macro photographer Tony North and one of our readers. We had an engaging interview with Greek mushroom photographer Agorastos Papatsanis. We followed the life of people who live their lives on Britain’s canals in a photo-documentary piece from barge-dweller Tracey Welch. We rounded up all 10 of Nikon’s current range of Z-series mirrorless cameras in a massive and in-depth group test. And we produced tutorials on subjects as diverse as photographing badgers to shooting a time blend to combine sunset and light trails in the same shot.

Some of these (such as the canal boat article) will find their way onto this website, and you may find them by following links that pique your interest (or if you happen to specifically search for them), but it’s the curated content that magazines provide – where a collection of articles written by experts are brought together into a single volume because the magazine team thinks they will be of interest to their readership – that makes print publications such an engaging read. And there’s just something about sitting down on the sofa to leisurely flick through the pages of a paper magazine…

The final issue of N-Photo went on sale in the UK on September 26 (and will reach newsstands worldwide in due course), but if you like to be kept informed about all aspects of photography – especially areas that you hadn’t even considered before – then why not subscribe to one of our remaining portfolio of print publications? We have a choice of three monthly photo magazines produced in the UK, and a further two titles published in Australia – if you still love print, do please give these your support..

Buy a back issue of N-Photo magazine whilst they are still in stock