If evidence of the social mood of 2011 and 2012 was anything to go by, the new tech-savvy demographic seemed too mobile and hyper-political to display loyalty to any particular site or publication, unlike the allegiances originally developed by Meanjin, Overland and Quadrant during and after the Cold War. It was also becoming clearer that the traditional oppositional role of the magazines — developed firstly in the Cold War, and later during the ‘alternative’ 1970s — was fading and harder to differentiate, because it appeared (to some) that battles had been won. Evidence of this could be seen in the changing of SPUNC to the Small Press Network — the ‘underground’ reference disappearing. Another major observation is that the magazines which had survived across the decades had predominately published non-fiction, memoir, interpretative journalism and cultural commentary, as opposed to short fiction and poetry, which the universities were still promoting and preserving. It appeared that the Griffith Review was the most stable journal, heavily subsidised and promoted by its publishing partners (Griffith University and Text Publishing) with high-profile themed issues such as ‘Tasmania — The Tipping Point’.

In 2012, while print subscriptions seemed to be stalling, online was on the rise, and Glover argued that there was a future in the digital, ‘bringing citizen-journalists to the screen’ (‘Little magazines’ n.p.) and, ‘as little magazines begin to do this they are not really issue-bound and time-bound little magazines anymore; instead they are high-end literary commentary sites’ (see Meanjin blog and Overland Online).

With the advent of free online material offered by many of the magazines, readers could catch up with preferred articles and stories without having to subscribe or buy the whole publication. But such developments were contrary to what had distinguished the little magazine over its history — the desire to reflect on events rather than report them, as was the traditional function of the newspaper. The social media experiments, then, seemed counterintuitive to the anticipation aspect of less frequent publication, and possibly a threat to considered quality of depth and context. There is a fine line between social media promotion of the main product and the evaporation of the anticipation factor. Sornig, in turn, likened this digital obsession with self-promotion to advertising in its crudest form (36).