We Love the Smell of Print in the Morning

Posted by Derek Powazek on 15 August 2006 (8020 Media)

When we tell people what we're up to here at 8020, we often get one question: "Magazines?"

Yes, magazines. Actual print read-it-on-the-toilet magazines. Traditional paper arrive-in-your-mailbox magazines. We are going to publish truly awesome magazines.

Here at 8020 HQ, we're web critters. Collectively, we've got over 40 years experience building websites. In the good ol' days, when the web was new, it was fun to imagine a future full of screens and pixels and not a trace of paper to be found.

But something funny happened on the way to the all-digital future. Paper didn't go away. In fact, to those of use who live and breathe the web, paper became more interesting, not less. More exotic, emotional, and real.

Don't get us wrong, we know that the internet changed everything. But it was a mistake to think that just because this funky new medium was good at some things, that it would be good at everything.

Here at 8020, we're embracing each medium for what it's good at. The web is an unparalleled invention that allows far-flung people to find each other, have conversations, and sometimes, when you're very lucky, form communities. But it's ephemeral: Just try to find that cool website from last year, or even that interesting NY Times story from last week. The web self-mulches at an ever-increasing pace.

Print is difficult. It's cumbersome and expensive. Highly impractical. But it's also archival, beautiful, and emotive. Print can be intimate in a way the web never can. Print is part of real life. It's there with you in the cafe, the restaurant, the bathroom. You can lose yourself in a story in print more than you can on a screen.

Most of all, the internet has freed the printed page from having to be about data. Where do you go to find out what the weather is like in New York? It's hard to imagine a time when people would turn to the printed page for such information, but they did. Now, with an internet brimming with data, magazines are free to skip the data and focus on what they do best: communicate, entertain, and inspire.

The internet is not going to make magazines go away - it's going to make them better. And we're here to do our part to help push that along.

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