Up to now, we’ve had to put up with periodicals’ drawbacks if we wanted to avail ourselves of their unique advantages.  But with the Internet, this tradeoff is no longer necessary.  Periodicals just need to be better adapted to an online environment.

Virtually all major magazines now have online editions, but these have tended to copy the paper format too closely to take effective advantage of the online medium.

Most significantly, they persist in following the issue-at-a-time presentation format, with all its needless discarding of still-pertinent content.

If you want more than the “current” material, you have to seek it out in online archives that have no more appeal than an old-fashioned library’s mustiest stacks—typically via clumsy low-level search engines that can do no more than the most mindless text matching.  As an example of how this goes, I was once intrigued to see on a screen that my ancestor Henrietta Cotta was mentioned in an early-1900s article in the Washington Post.  When I looked up the content in question, it was actually an ad for draperies, for which one of the available colors was terra cotta.

Other periodicals won’t let you read older material at all, unless you pay them an upfront fee.

It’s time for online magazines to stop copying their print editions so slavishly.  In a purely rational sense, current editions are nothing more than gossamer-thin layers of content "sediment"  that, in well-established magazines, has accumulated over time to the point where it can be as deep as the Grand Canyon.

The real content of periodicals is cumulative.  Online magazines need to start presenting it in a way that reflects this.