work in progress ...
I have a mild addiction to magazines, particularly the mix you find in international airports. Here's a breakdown of some of the ones I like.
I've been reading New Scientist pretty much every week since way back when it had a chunky font. I always remember my mum asking "how can so much happen in Science that it can come out every week?"
It has deteriorated over the years in a similar way to Horizon. The content has become diluted to the point where sometimes all you get from an article is a vague flavour of the subject. For example, in "Cracking the hardest mystery of the Rubik's cube" the subject is quickly established: there is a search to lower the limit on the maximum number of moves needed to solve any given rubiks cube. There is some very minimal discussion of how this has been investigated. The rest of the article is largely a list of names of people who've managed to reduce the estimate of this number (known as the "the God number"). There are absolutely no diagrams.
Compare this with Scientific American. For one thing, it often has very many naturalistic diagrams. I've found myself staring at them in appreciation, but not actually learning much because they are too detailed. The data density hides the point of the diagram. New Scientist was historically better because it allowed itself to have very iconic and minimal diagrams which illustrated the salient points.
I'd like to have something handy to back all this up, but I was forced to throw away my 'archive' back when I was a teenager. Just as well really, as even only a New Scientist archive from 1989 until now would weigh around 310kg ((2008 - 1989) years * 52 weeks * 77pages * (64g per square metre / 16 A4 pages per A0)) and would stand at around 4 metres tall ((2008 - 1989) years * 52 weeks * 4mm per issue).
American Scientist
... work in progress