Forums are definitely not as popular as they were. However, I would say that forums, when they were at their peak, were not much more than Facebook is today. At my peak of forum consumption-- say, about 2005, there were many forums that seemed like they were just there for:
1) The aggrandizement of the moderators
2) Astronomical post counts.
In one instance, a turkey forum, every legitimate post on every thread was followed by a few dozen "Whoo-hoo!" responses, usually filled with a lot of emoji's and animated gifs. Most of those ding dongs migrated to My Space and then to Facebook.
Magazines? At my peak, I had over 2 dozen subscriptions. I gave up my last one a while back. Even the ones I wrote for became nothing but ads and fluff.
Forums like this one are still excellent sources of material. The other thing I regularly read are weblogs. I'm rather partial to the latter, because I've been publishing my own since 2004.
One thing that has attracted my attention is Pinterest. It's a little like leafing through a magazine in the doctor's office. However, if you see something you like, you can click on it and see what may be an interesting article. It also allows you to pin stuff you like to your own topic-centric boards for later retrieval and you can open those boards for subscription, so other people can see what you've found. The more you use it, the more Pinterest fine tunes itself so that you see more of what you like. You can also tell it to "Hide" the stuff you don't like.
A trick I've learned over the years is to Google something and then to turn to the images tab and browse pictures instead of text. It lets you search gobs of stuff much faster-- as they say "a picture is worth a thousand words." Pinterest is like that.
I've got a board on Pinterest for ideas for the addition we're going to build when KYHillChick and I retire to the farm. We use that board to share architectural ideas.
