You are where you publish

It is quite bizarre to see the decline of active web magazines right now. It seems that we all get busier in our real jobs or have different opinions on how things should go forward.

• Evolt.org is still on the move and our moderation and review queue gets longer and longer.
• A list apart has a blogworthy news item as the latest issue after a nearly one month silence.
• Sitepoint.com publishes one product review wrapped up as an article after another.
• Devarticles publishes a backlog of one author (which are in parts very badly researched) mixed with canned articles taken from different books.

It is no wonder that others like Digital Web are drowning in articles, and have a publishing queue filled up to August (I will have another article there on 20th of May – first free slot).

Having published articles with most of them, it pains me a bit to see the decline in activity, as it is a lot easier to find good articles when they are published on a web zine rather than googling or digging through blogrolls / RSS feeds.

The benefits of a web zine are (or in some cases should be):

• Articles get reviewed by an editor, and errors / typos fixed (I am one of those at evolt.org)
• It is easy to find the articles
• Considering the web zine, your article will be held in higher esteem than on your personal blog, as it got published alongside other, highly respected writers.

The problems the web zines face are:

• The amount of bad articles being submitted, spam to filter through and just plain wrong submissions is staggering
• They either have to have highly motivated editors who work for free or have to advertise cleverly – you can do it wrong – personally I wonder sometimes if the message comes across at some of them.

Are we facing the death of the web zine?