Advertisers can be perverse. A friend of mine who used to write for a pretty good magazine was receiving pressure from the ad sales department to review a product that appeared to be counterproductive. He finally did the review. He did a lengthy test, including double blind subjective evaluations with multiple users, instrumented test bench type measurements, in-service performance tracking. The end results ranged from no difference to negative effect on performance in all the various areas evaluated. All that was published truthfully. Very soon and for quite awhile after, the ad for the product included a "As tested in XXXXX" callout.
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As noted elsewhere in this thread, the internet presents a tremendous challenge for a magazine editor/staffer/contributor on a technical subject. If your full-time job is to make a magazine, even if you're really knowledgeable, there is no way you can compete on a wide range of topics with the depth and minutia that someone whose hobby is one particular thing will get into, and will share his experiences on the internet at length. The magazine guy gets hold of the product, tests it, reports his findings. The internet guy makes it his hobby and tries everything he can think of to make it better, working on the one thing for months, tweaking it this way and that, changing the stock, bedding it, getting a trigger job, trying different optics, working up loads, doing what it takes to get the most he can out of it. Then gives away the information for free.
The magazine guy's advantage is perspective, experience, capability. If he's doing it well for awhile, he will get to work with more arms, ammo and accessories under a wider range of conditions than most of us could ever hope to. He should have more resources. Consistent access to good ranges. Accurate chronos. Quality loading equipment. Maybe a chamber pressure rig. Working with some quality trainers. Access to technical industry people - engineers, etc. If his stuff is together, he should be capable of more in-depth, scientifically valid, thorough testing than most people on the internet. Sadly, there's precious little of that approach.
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Archival properties: I and most of my friends are old enough to have built magazine collections as we grew up. Held onto them through college. Maybe thinned down by putting the important stuff in binders. That changed with the web. Forums, as mentioned, often had depth and quality of information on a topic so focused that no magazine could duplicate it. The nature of information changed. Instead of trying to remember which old issue of XXXXX magazine that was in, you just searched for it. Five, ten years after the information was originally posted, you could still find it, exactly as you remembered. But we're starting to see that change. People whose lives at one point revolved around a subject move on. They may continue maintaining a site just as a service to the community that they continue to care about, but eventually, it starts to not be worth it. Especially with cars, which wear out, become uncompetitive with new stuff, lose popularity. Traffic on the site slows to a crawl. Maybe the site gets sold to a business that just runs a multitude of sites for profit, and eventually isn't profitable. Whatever the reason, the site eventually goes away. The information isn't there. Maybe it can be found with the Wayback Machine, but Google won't bring it up. It's effectively lost. If you're still interested in the topic, and didn't archive the materials you wanted under your own control, they're gone. Knowledge that was considered common in an interested group of people ten or fifteen years ago is simply gone. But somewhere, there's a magazine back issue...
