I'm not nearly as pessimistic about the future of magazines as Cable is -- or as Jesse is -- for a few reasons. And not all of them are self-serving.
First, after years of trying in vain to convince myself that portability isn't an issue, I'm finally willing to acknowledge that it is. Here I'm my own focus group: Most of what I see online I print out to carry along me and read, whether I'm walking around the corner to get a sandwich or boarding a plane. I know it's possible to save articles from Slate or posts from James Wolcott to my desktop, but I'd rather hold the thing in my hand, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
Second, the glossy monthlies have an edge over the bloggers and magablogs in the sense that way too many people are willing to hit send without pausing to think. The immediacy of the Net is at least partly undermined by the theroetical notion that every flatulent utterance is Proust. I don't mind waiting thirty days for something more thoughtful. (I grant you that not every glossy does thoughtful these days, but you get the point.) The weeklies, on the other hand, are screwed. Seven days is not enough time to be thoughtful. The temptation -- or, more accurately, the need-- to be timely is a drag, whereas monthlies are not nearly as wedded to the clock. Cable's right that a lot of them have tables of contents way past the sell-by date, but technology allows many of us to print much closer to the day we arrive on the newsstands, so that's less of a problem than it used to be.
Third, magazines chasing youngsters by publishing blogs on their sites -- where the editors and writers on the staff box continually post in a typically unsuccessful attempt to one-up each other -- rapidly turn into good blogs with shitty magazines as brand extensions. Setting aside the issues of liability and standards relative to the big brand, blogging -- for magazines, at least -- seems too much a distraction.
LIFE will go on. And TEXAS MONTHLY too.