More interesting is to ask what changes should be made, or do we need to admit that most of us find all we want from fishing reading and buying on the internet?
Most of what we could suggest has already been tried, the evocative articles were/are published in Waterlog but the circulation figures are pitiful. General fishing articles with the emphasis on big fish can't be any better or Coarse Fisherman magazine wouldn't have folded.
I don't know what the answer is to boost sales of weekly and monthly fishing journals, but I do know from the anglers I speak to that the first place they go to research tackle and bait is the internet, and more of us are buying it off the internet. If you want information you Google it, ask on a fishing forum, or browse a favourite site. Most prefer to see it in action and search Youtube for a video, the one thing that can't be published in a magazine.
It's not just fishing journals; for instance, like many I very rarely buy a daily newspaper these days but read all the news on the 'net and watch the videos, or tune in to the news, available 24 hours a day, on TV.
It's still good to hold a newspaper, magazine or book in your hands for a better feelgood factor, but there are many of us who are foregoing that for the easy and quick fix that the internet offers.
Fishing journals are still sinking to a levelling off point when sales will see-saw only slightly, but until then more will go under as they lose the battle to survive, leaving the remainder to share what's left.
I don't think it's a case of fishing journals being any better or worse than they used to be, but more a case of there being far more alternative sources of reading/viewing.