Magazines Evolve With Print Media Technology

In the 1950s, when cameras were large boxy objects usually steadied on a tripod, the film that went inside them required a long time to develop. Then Polaroid introduced its instant film, which developed within minutes of pulling it from the camera. Around the same era, magazines went from mostly text to a graphics-driven format. Magazines like Look and Life continued to be a balanced mixture of photos and writing. And while cameras got smaller and their ability to capture color and light became more agile and sophisticated, the technology did not change drastically until the age of personal computers and digital technology.

As the industries of photography and printing advance, so does the magazine industry that literally puts those two together into one readable sandwich. As soon as digital images came onto the scene, so did hundreds and thousands of new magazines. During the 1990s, many media companies went from color separations and other slow and expensive processes to the more advanced digital format. This allowed photographers to take a picture in the field and send it through email to the publisher, skipping over the printing process entirely. An occasional scanned image might be used from traditional film processing, but for the most part, magazines have switched entirely to the digital format. This drives down the cost to produce them, quickens the time it takes to produce a magazine, and makes them more graphics-driven and visually colorful.

In order to get customers to subscribe; each magazine has to struggle to set its own brand identity apart from the crowd. The real winner in the competitive arena is the magazine reader, because now there are more choices than ever and the content is more rich and entertaining. But the prices are within reach and competitive, making magazine reading a rather affordable pastime.

Major bookstores that carry magazines will now dedicate an entire section of the store to them, because there are so many to display for consumers to choose the ones they want. In the genre of home decorating and lifestyle magazines, for instance, there are at least 100 for every one that existed in the pre-digital era. Of course this also heats up competition between magazines, because instead of just having one sports magazine like Sports Illustrated or outdoor magazine like Field and Stream, there are dozens of magazines in that same category.

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Jeff Lakie is a freelance writer with many years of experience writing articles on professional photographer magazine subscription related subjects. Take a few moments now to visit our site and see what we have in store for you.

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