Today’s publishers have a business model that involves passively waiting for writers to approach them directly and individually—and then saying “no” a lot.

Under this arrangement, writers are often forced to make difficult choices about who to approach first.  If their material is time-sensitive, the wrong choice can mean it won’t be published anywhere. And even if the material is not time-sensitive, an intolerably long time can elapse before the writer sees a payday.

Under Magazines 2.0, there would be no reason why writers couldn’t directly publish their work online themselves—and thus keep the lion’s share of the revenues, leaving it to the virtual publishers to scramble to present this material to the public in hopes of earning a couple of pennies for each read. (In the aggregate, these pennies could actually amount to quite a bit of profit for the magazines—especially since they would not incur any expense to create or obtain rights to the material, or to distribute it.)

For writers, getting more fairly and equitably compensated for their work would not be the only benefit of Magazines 2.0.  Gaining a seat at the table of discussions that lots of people value and “listen” to can do a lot to reduce a previously-overlooked scrivener's sense of being dismissed as inconsequential.

This salutary effect is likely to spread to the writer’s friends and acquaintances as well.  And just knowing a person like yourself who has been accepted into the larger conversations of the day can substantially diminish your own sense of being insurmountably excluded.

A similar model of content curation, marketing, and distribution could also be applied to more than just our reading material—and yield comparably positive results.