But hackaday and the like seem to do just fine. Granted lots of puff pieces and reviews. But byte/DDJ/Radio Electronics, etc had lots of ad's too.
So, where is the cost? People seem to be willing to submit quality articles just for the exposure it gives them. And surely its possible to set a price on a magazine that can play for printing+postage sufficiently to make a small profit too.
The problem I see with hackaday and similar is the lack of quality curation. Make magazine has this problem x100. AKA, no one older than 6 really enjoys an article on how to make snow cones, when they are looking for build plans for a 300 BPS modem. I learned a lot of my early programming skills reading Doctor Dobbs and Nibble back when they had articles on data compression, or whatever.
In a way its why I read hacker news too, the book recommendations, and articles like this one are a pretty good replacement, although again one has to filter the noise, and the temptation to post things rather than write code is much larger.
So, I return to the original premise, maybe what is needed is a good editor/curator who removes the useless noise and slims it down to articles on how to write compilers, JPEG decompressions, and the like.
So, where is the cost? People seem to be willing to submit quality articles just for the exposure it gives them. And surely its possible to set a price on a magazine that can play for printing+postage sufficiently to make a small profit too.
The problem I see with hackaday and similar is the lack of quality curation. Make magazine has this problem x100. AKA, no one older than 6 really enjoys an article on how to make snow cones, when they are looking for build plans for a 300 BPS modem. I learned a lot of my early programming skills reading Doctor Dobbs and Nibble back when they had articles on data compression, or whatever.
In a way its why I read hacker news too, the book recommendations, and articles like this one are a pretty good replacement, although again one has to filter the noise, and the temptation to post things rather than write code is much larger.
So, I return to the original premise, maybe what is needed is a good editor/curator who removes the useless noise and slims it down to articles on how to write compilers, JPEG decompressions, and the like.