I’ve been a lifelong magazine addict. I blame my mother. Growing up in the hinterlands of southern Ohio, back in the day when our house was the last one one on the street in a sleepy suburb north of Cincinnati, my intellectually starved mother subscribed to a slew of magazines: Esquire and New York in their heyday, the New York Review of Books, Harpers, Horizon and others. I went into newspaper work because Esquire, in its pre-lad mag days, didn’t present an easy entry path to an unpublished, Tom Wolfian-wannabe essayist from Forest Park, the Planned Community.

These many decades later, the whole newspaper/magazine industry is perched on a fault line called the Web. Short of the New York Times, I don’t think any newspaper alive today can be sure to be alive five years from now in its current incarnation. Magazines, too. What will replace them since the need to have someone filtering the massive info-onslaught will never go away? Well, everyone is a-buzz about the iPad’s launch this next Saturday. That’s a start although only a start. We need some kind of income-generation beyond banner ads, perhaps a micro-payment system that nicks you for a fraction of a cent for every page you visit, so that at the end of the day, you’re billed a quarter for your visit to the Times or Charleston Gazette or the Poughkeepsie Parakeet. Information may want to be free, but someone needs to get paid to write it up and shape it into something sensible and worthwhile.

Meanwhile, what might the next newspaper or magazine actually look like short of the gloppy, confusing mess that most newspaper Web sites resemble? Time Inc., proposes the following look for Sports Illustrated in the ‘coming soon‘ video below of a magazine tablet. I want one of these for my magazines and my newspaper.

Jack Shaffer over at Slate isn’t so sure iTablets and their ilk are any magic bullet, though. (more…)

You think you’ve got problems? I think I’ve got problems? Boy, have we got problems in our life. But what if you only had one leg? Now, that’s a problem. That would get you down, wouldn’t it? Or …  you could dance the salsa.