With tradition comes a sense of comfort and rightness. But PC Magazine feels neither comfortable nor right about persisting with a print edition. Like the hood ornament, print zines may soon be just a luxury item.

Does this mean Time will go online-only?  Almost certainly not.  But the trade journals and vertical publications with a small circulation may be forced into an online-only format due to a number of reasons:

1 – There are just TOO MANY magazines out there.  In any given vertical, there are 3 or 4 magazines. Penton Media here in Cleveland publishes 40 or 50 vertical rags alone, many of which overlap each other in content.

2 – Demographic information about news consumption is easier for the publisher to obtain in an online format.

3 – Social media and the democratic web create “online weather systems” around news items, prevailing concepts, and fads.  It’s nearly impossible to catch a breeze from one of these online weather systems using print journalism.

4 – PCMag has already crossed over the “web revenue hump” that so many publishers struggle with even now.  With 70% of their brand’s revenue coming from the web, it’s pretty hard to argue in favor of keeping a costly print edition around to satisfy the old-timers.

5 – Blogging matters.  It used to be that print journalists, and in particular, newspaper folks, would dismiss bloggers as inaccurate, teeth-bearing, shit-stirring zealots.  As it turns out, many in the old media were of the same ilk.  Sometimes it hurts to look in the mirror.

6 – Community-based interests, be they purely cultural or geographic, are easier to satisfy using the web. Hyperlocalism in news coverage prevails on the web.  It’s what separates small, promising web publications like chroniclet.com from the behemoth one-size-fits all monsters like NYT.com.

Still, I’d rather read Time magazine that read a 5000-word piece on my iPhone.  I like my iPhone, but do I want to read that much on it?  No.