Writing for Magazines

One thing you hear a lot with writers is how they started by sending stories to magazines. But I have never seen any of the kinds of magazines they seem to have written for. Are they a thing of the past? Does no one read them enough to make writing for one profitable? I considered writing some sort of pretentious fiction for the New Yorker, but I didn't see anything on their site about pay. Mad Magazine, on the other hand, claims to offer $500 for the first submission from a person that they accept.

>>5
Pretty decent, when you've got the experience. One quality article might bring you up to about $1000, but only when you've written enough for enough different magazines, of course. Most of the time you'll be taking on diverse subjects, if you wanna earn much: specialists rarely write well-paying articles; more often than not, magazine authors write after a quick one-day research on google and maybe a skip through one book on the topic if readers are particularly lucky. Whether or not you can write about things you neither know, nor care about in such a way as to convince your reader you're a seasoned specialist in the field, decides your pay.

Basically, your pay as a non-fiction magazine writer =
(ability to write convincingly about any kind of crap)
multiplied by
(number of your previously published articles).