A bit of a ramble and a rant. I spent over a decade as a print journalist, working for 3 small town papers, and stringing for a bunch of others.
speaking as someone from the "Press" - I suspect what is going on isn't caused by "green" but by realities.
Media has moved more and more to freelancers to produce content, whether it's your local hometown paper, or your trade magazine. I can make about $50 a game to go photograph high school sports as a stringer.
That's less bennies in insurance to and for the employee they have to pay.
Interior pages in print (newspapers and magazines) are governed by amount of advertising they sell. Unfortunately, online advertising rates tend smaller, than print rates. Those are too easy to track exposure. Print ad rates are based on the largest circulation. They charge more since each copy might get multiple sets of eyeballs. But a tablet read is one set of eyeballs. Most people don't set a tablet out at the barbershop or doctors office
Mergers: Every time a smaller media site gets purchased by a larger site, you're adding more layers that the bottom line has to feed. Every one of the papers I used to work for is now owned by a larger corporation with dozens or more publications. They share resources in management and printing costs, and keep churning staff reporters (photogs are videographers now... IF they exist at all. Smaller press is almost always a reporter with a camera).
College grads make less than someone with 5 years of experience. Cut them loose after a few years. Keep one or two senior people, and let them manage five local papers across three states. Give them a stable of contract employee "stringers" making $50 a story.
Magazine press has a larger staff level, but Kalmbach saw the wave of the future. They pay for their hosting, their server space, and built a firewall between content and readers. The Print Magazine was a gateway to get eyes on the Trains.com site. Every time I got a chance, I tried to answer surveys with "I don't care about toy trains, my HOA won't allow garden railways, and I don't have time to read MRR, when will I have time to read Trains mag online? Let alone watch the videos from all of those magazines???"
Now, I've done a few online subscriptions for magazines. They're not great, and each one seems to have a different app. If this doesn't get resolved soon, the publications will struggle to grow their online presence. The only saving grace in the MRR publications is that most of their readership is print or "let me look on my computer's big screen" and don't do much with tablets. -- But even here, on this forum, I see a lot of you reading on tablets.
The magazine industry should learn from the book industry. Amazon changed the book landscape when they introduced the Kindle tablet, and the e-pub *(they call it a mobi file, but they've converted to an epub, since that became the industry standard). With my books the same epub file for my mystery books can go to Kindle, Kobo, AppleBooks, GooglePlay, etc. The text free-flows - make it larger or smaller. Pics go in sequence, click to see it larger. Click to go back to text. "Layout" is just a lot of text inline that I can resize once to my comfort level. It stays set there across multiple publications.
Magazines haven't figured out that the page layout in print, does NOT have to be duplicated online. They seem stuck in the stone ages of treating an e-publication like a web-page at best. Usually, they treat it like a magazine page. No free flowing text. Enlarge the page, and scroll around it with your tablet. I spend more time scrolling and pinching to switch between text and images on the static mag-e-pages than I do reading the articles. Most often, I just look at the photos and ignore the text due to scrolling/resizing pains. I might as well get a girly magazine online if that's the case.
Soapbox is going back under the counter for now. Thanks for letting me rant.
