In the academia the motto is "publish or perish," and I read periodicals to keep on track of current developments in my field. Famous ones include Oxford's The English Historical Review or the Medieval Academy of America's Speculum. The idea is to get it peer-reviewed by other professionals so that there's a sense of quality control.

Recently there's been an explosion of "fake" journals: Predatory publishers send out advertisements so that, for a fee, your article can appear in their journal. However no one will read this unknown periodical, and your money went to waste. Particularly since there's no peer review, so any idiot can publish their findings.

To demonstrate this, here is an article about The International Journal of Advanced Technology. What I love about this is that they didn't even give a glance to the paper. I know no one's doing proofreading, never mind fact-checking, but you'd think someone would at least give a glance.