Challenges Facing the Magazine Industry

A big challenge that I feel is facing the lack of available content for magazines, for example let's look at the biggest media event of the summer: Miley Cyrus's performance and the VMAs (Video Music Awards).

This was big, everyone had heard about this. It was covered on every network, it was all over the internet and all the magazines and newspapers were talking about it.

Supposing this (or something similar to this) had happened 40/50 years ago, when it would not have been shared quite so easily. Modern advances help information travel so quickly these days, video sharing websites and social networks, but without them this performance would have only been seen by  a very small amount of people. This is where magazines come in, they would help people who didn't see the outrageous event by explaining it too them. While some magazines still do this, it's very brief and probably skipped by the readers. By not being able to explain what actually happened you miss out on anything actually substantial or interesting to know. A lot of the articles covering Miley Cyrus's performance were double page spreads full of screen shots of her performance and various reactions to what happened. The usual reaction of this from the reader is this: 'Ha. They know that happened. I know that happened.' and then they move on when they've given the not-so-exclusive photos a two-second glance.
The internet is brimming with with everything that magazines cover, which really doesn't leave anything new for them to cover. So, the challenge for them is to find some interesting content which almost no-one else knows much about, the only problem is that doing that is pretty much impossible.