"Get Your Glossy Online"

The above line is from an anonymous reader who posted it — after the words "Save a tree" — as a comment to an interesting piece about the future of magazines. The story was in the New York Observer but you can read it here. (Save a tree, get your pink paper online.)

Among the magazine insiders commenting on the future of print media are Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter (who envisions a new "electronic book" in our future world), Esquire editor David Remnick (who imagines more innovative printing practices), and Wired editor Chris Anderson (who sees magazines staying the same for awhile). Go figure.

Editors at many print magazines (including American Photo) may take comfort in the facts that a) a new medium doesn't necessarily kill an old one; b) nothing looks better than a picture printed on decent paper; and c) people don't usually take their computers to the bathroom or curl up in a tub with them.

But a new fiscal Darwinism is at play: One point of the article is that magazines are, more than ever, under pressure to support advertising and make money — which means to go where the readers are, and the instantaneousness of the Internet is snarfing them up.

Some editors point out that long magazine pieces are not, and should not be, instantaneous. “Let’s say God forbid something awful happened on a Monday, and someone Herculean could write a 5,000-word piece by Wednesday,” The New Yorker editor David Remnick mused to the Observer. “Could I put that online? I could imagine it. But we are very, very, very rigorously edited and fact-checked ... so it would be very, very exceptional.”

In tomorrow's fast-moving media world, such exceptional work may need to become the rule. — Jack Crager