Are magazines just dead wood?

The Telegraph reporting:

The history of magazines is closely linked to developments in print technology. A good example is the invention of the steam press in the early 19th century: by slashing production time and costs, it allowed the rich periodical culture of the age to flourish. We hear so much about the poor health of print these days – and the creeping supremacy of digital publication – that the demise of the printed magazine might seem not only inevitable but imminent.

That wasn’t the feeling, though, at this week's V & A Connects event on the future of magazines: if anything, the speakers suggested, digitisation is encouraging editors and designers to think inventively about the creative opportunities that persist in print. For Lucy Scott and Tina Smith, co-editors of Lost In London, print's gentler pace and robust materiality have become fundamental to the cosy aesthetic of their magazine: it seems apt for Smith to describe its "organic" growth. Another refreshing quarterly, Delayed Gratification, parries the rush of 24-hour news with "slow journalism" that takes time to reflect on current affairs.

Small magazines are proliferating in London. Steven Watson, the founder of the innovative subscription service Stack – which transfers the lucky-dip principle of the vegetable box to the delivery of independent magazines – speaks enthusiastically about the quality of their production values and content. There is The Ride Journal, freewheeling its way through cycle culture, Boat Magazine, a nomadic publication that relocates to a different city every six months, the offbeat fashion journal Address, the creative film criticism of Little White Lies. ...While many industry leaders are struggling for subscriptions and advertising revenue, their former readers have started generating editorial content for themselves...
While these publications often pay painstaking attention to details that digitisation renders defunct (the weight of paper, the drying time of ink), their creators are the tech-savviest of Luddites. They market through Twitter and sell subscriptions through Paypal. Talk of "infographics", "mutualisation" and "discoverability" is easy to mock, but it also suggests a progressive idiom that chimes with its speakers’ efforts to establish a new relevance for the print magazine. 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9057645/Are-magazines-just-dead-wood.html