New media applications in special interest magazines

The digitalization phenomenon making a mark on the last 25 years of civilization is creating an unmatched global coverage in mass communication history. Mass media, which turned into almanac, bulletins and newsletters, centuries after the stone inscriptions and evolved into newspapers and magazines in the next century making a leap with radio and television at the end of the same period, found themselves in a struggle for existence in the face of products of the digitalization not even a century after the fast-paced progress. Digital mass media products, aka. "new media," force every traditional media tool into a transformation where their unique definitions start fading away. With a minimal structure compared to mass media in terms of business economics and business organization, and focusing on a target audience and advertising activities aimed at a relatively observable market, magazines also face transformation imposed by new media. On the other hand, it is a more complicated process for magazines to this transformation. New media features, such as speed, instant updates, lack of time and space constraints, become evident as risks for magazine media, making it lose its original definition. Nevertheless, with their specific features and being a refined source with their focus on specialized subjects, especially special-interest magazines come to the forefront with their potential to keep their existence and continue their way by internalizing technological-structural upgrades. In this study, the historical position of special-interest magazines is identified, the process of its adaptation to the digital age is reviewed, its place in the consumer society, which is the dominant feature of the globalizing world, is determined with an economic political approach, and its future is discussed in the context of yachting publishing chosen as a sample.