The problem with digital magazine apps is they are pushing an analog business model into a connected world. Publishing! = Magazines. What is publishing? It us

The problem with digital magazine apps is they are pushing an analog business model into a connected world. Publishing! = Magazines. What is publishing? It used to be we print with a period of Y on paper type X, be that daily newsprint (newspapers), monthly super calendered paper (magazines), every few years on acid free paper (hardcover), and weekly super calendered Kraft paper (comics). With digital the lines between the different publishing families are simply erased. Content can be put out at any point in time, and on any format. Further, complete works don’t have to be published all, serialized content is back after having been almost dead for decades. What publishing needs is a business model that helps them sell content of all sorts of length that comes out at all sorts of time. Magazines have always been content buckets, where the taste and choices of the editor in chief and the publications self determined constraints determined if you wanted to buy that bucket. The magazine in the connected world is going to have the problem of most topics they pick to have someone write about will be outdone by many other places on the net and available for free. Take a blog like footnoted.com, they’re doing deep dive financial journalism better than the Wall Street journal. The future of "The Magazine" is BoingBoing.net, they deliver a bucket of curate content filtered through the tastes and choice of their editors. They make income off ads, referral links, and sponsored posts for $5k a pop.