Magazines

As of January 2012, there are currently three major freshwater aquarium magazines being published in the U.S.A,  Aquarium Fish International, previously published as Aquarium Fish since 1988, Tropical Fish Hobbyist, published since September 1952, and Amazonas: Freshwater Aquariums & Tropical Discovery, debuting in January 2012.  
 
Aquarium Fish International has a modest website hosted at FishChannel. AF  the print magazine made an early start at archiving the main articles in back issues, from its beginning in 1988 until 1992, but they discontinued the practice; the historic archive was at CompuServe, but seems to have passed over the Event horizon into the Black Hole.
 
 
Aquarium Fish published a promising e-zine titled Aquarium Frontiers at its old website; content was subequently dropped by Animal Network. The incomplete "archive" of Aquarium Frontiers, assembled by Kevin Done, is at Reefs.org. The e-zine had a more definite reefkeeping slant than the magazine, reflected in its selective archive, but it was the place to find Karen Randall's comprehensive "Aquatic Horticulture" series, archived at the site and also indexed and linked at  Chuck's Planted Aquarium Pages.  But the site gives no inkling of the range and depth of the articles Aquarium Fish the magazine has published; for instance, if you want to reread Dr. Tim Hovanec's outstanding AF articles on filtration and the chemistry of aquaria,  you'll have to see the revised versions at Dr Tim's Aquatics.
 
Freshwater and Marine Aquariums (F.A.M.A.) , no longer published separately, was adrift round a hard core of contributing editors, but still printed some of the best aquarium articles around. The bias at F.A.M.A. was somewhat marine, the layout pretty dense. F.A.M.A. was largely incorporated into Aquarium Fish International.
 
Tropical Fish Hobbyist, founded in 1952 by Herbert R. Axelrod, is the magazine that became the flagship of the TFH publishing empire, and for years was the all-but official organ of the aquarium hobby supply industry. In New York it was the only magazine you were permitted to buy at LFS counters, through the 70s and early 80s. TFH has published many useful articles over the years. For many years I couldn't learn to like it, but in its new redesigned guise, first under the hand of editor Mary Sweeney and now for almost a decade that of David Boruchowitz, it's the handsomest of the fish magazines. During 2003 TFH  caught up with the Web and added many .com references, then expanded to a digital on-line supplement to the print magazine, in a larger glossy format. The handsome current TFH website is now a comprehensive view of the magazine, with many archived articles and features, going back more than a decade, and selected viewable features from current issues. So I've come round to TFH at last.
 
I miss Karen Haas' selective index of substantive articles from more than ten years of TFH and Aquarium Fish, plus some FAMA and Cichlid News, compiled on-line as a massive labor of public service, obviously spurred by her fanatic sense of order.It was at www.haasaquarium.homestead.com but I haven't been able to track it down.
 
Amazonas: Freshwater Aquariums & Tropical Discovery published its debut issue as a bi-monthly in January 2012, and it looks so hopeful I've signed up as a charter subscriber.  Its editor is Hans-Georg Evers, who began Amazonas in Germany in 2005, catering to the fairly advanced grown-up European aquarist who reads German, and this English-language version is put out by the same publishing team as the very spiffy cutting-edge Coral: the Reef & Marine Aquarium Magazine, which means that production values truly stand out. Photography is brilliant. The content isn't actually limited to the Amazon basin, naturally: it will be covering all the life-forms of fresh and brackish waters, fish, invertebrate and plants. Articles carry scientific references, and aquaristics and science blend easily in the content.  Each issue will be organized round a theme that occupies about half the issue's content: January/February 2012 covered Loricariids, especially their breeding. The March/April issue will feature dwarf shrimps. Outstanding fish rooms and descriptions of tropical fish-collecting round out the picture.
 
Its website, is www.amazonamagazine.com, is already online.
 
 
Specialized magazines. In addition, there are several more specialized magazines you aren't just going to bump into, either at the LFS or at the corner newsstand. You should know these exist.
 
Practical Fishkeeping, published in the U.K. (US$6.50 an issue, if you can find it), is a long-established magazine with a faintly punk pasted-together tabloid look that exudes an air of frankness about the hobby market, with articles offering the real comparative dish on test kit accuracy, for example. Strong on modern Brit virtues of self-reliance, improvisation and cheeky puns, it stretches a little thin to cover pondkeeping and coldwater fish as well as marine and freshwater tropicals. It's worth subscribing. The official PFK website.  Still firmly rooted in the analog universe, PFK offers photocopies of many articles from back issues, if you'll snail mail your cheque.
 
Cichlid News  is a quarterly that's been published by Aquatic Promotions, Miami FL, since 1992. A subscription is US$20 per year. Articles cover exploration in the field (Lake Malawi gets a lot of play), cichlids in science, articles on individual species or more general cichlid topics. If you're any kind of true Cichlidiot, you already know how essential this 'zine is. Check the website, where selected articles are downloadable. A complete index is archived at The Cichlid Room Companion.
 
Stylish from the start, Planted Aquaria Magazine, a quarterly edited by Dave Gomberg in 2000 and 2001, wasn't available at your LFS either. You had to subscribe. Though PAM covered the management of planted tanks, enriched substrates, plant physiology and taxonomy, plants in their natural habitats and in aquaria with a wide European and global angle, and though it featured most of the big guns in the planted aquarium field, there just wasn't enough subscriber support, and it had to be discontinued at the end of 2001. Its place has been filled by The Aquatic Gardener: Journal of the Aquatic Gardeners Association, which is free to members. An index by author or subject is maintained at the  Aquatic-Gardeners site.