The Internet age.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Editor's Note - Electronic publishing - Editorial

I love the Internet. It's like having the world's libraries at your fingertips. I appreciate the ability to get information quickly--and to comment on it just as quickly. I've always worked at monthly magazines, and until the Internet came along, I had a gag in my mouth twenty-nine days out of every thirty. Now I can respond right away, which I find cathartic. And it's a relief, as an editor who spends a lot of time rejecting other people's manuscripts, to know that writers have plenty of other outlets now. It is no longer true that a free press belongs only to those who own one. Today, if you own a computer, you can get your word out. That has a positive, democratizing effect on the nation's dialogue.

I do recognize the threat the Internet poses to traditional publications, including to magazines like ours. But I'm not throwing in my editor's pen any time soon.

Daily print newspapers face a much tougher dilemma than we do. I'm not sure they're going to make it, as we're seeing their corpses every day on the sidewalk.

The old cliché used to be that you could wrap a dead fish in yesterday's newspaper. Well, you can wrap a dead fish in today's newspaper because the news is already old by the time it gets to your front stoop.

This is, in part, because newspapers routinely scoop themselves on the Internet, and because other news outlets break the stories on the Web before the paper can arrive.

The delivery system is antiquated. And so is the business model. A lot of advertising, especially in this recession, is vanishing. Some is migrating to the Web.

Weekly news magazines are suffering the same fate. The very title of Newsweek is from a bygone era. No one, anymore, wants to wait a whole week to figure out what the news of the last seven days was. We've been soaking in that news, 24/7. Little wonder, then, that Newsweek has tried to reinvent itself lately.

But magazines of opinion and investigative reporting, whether they...