At its core, a magazine is just an assortment of discrete content items that have been bundled together so they can be sold on newsstands or via subscriptions in an orderly manner, at a pre-established price and on a regular schedule.   Quite a bit of the material in magazines is already written by non-employees—especially in the more prestigious publications.  At these premium levels of quality, the most important service the editors provide readers is making good choices on which material to include.

There’s no inherent reason for a reader to always prefer the content choices of magazine editors to those of trusted independent curators.  This means that to the public, Web Maven might present himself as WebMaven Magazine—although under the covers, his “publication” would be essentially just a collection of links to content owned by other entities.  (The content-owning entities would still get the lion’s share of online-access revenues.)

There’s also no reason why WebMaven Magazine couldn’t include a mixture of content it owns the rights to and material belonging to other entities.   This would enable a more gradual entry into the publishing world, opening up the field to large numbers of new entrepreneurs with fresh ideas.

Let's call this revitalized approach to periodicals Magazines 2.0