Like a record label in the music business or a gallery in the art world, a magazine ultimately owes its existence to its ability to match content to tastes.  Its core business is to obtain material that people with a given set of tastes are likely to enjoy (whether by hiring staff writers, selecting appropriate freelance materials, or a combination of both), and then to make people aware the product is out there and available.

There is no reason why this function cannot be performed better online by more people.

With online publishing, the barriers to entry are significantly lowered.  It is not necessary to hire a full-time staff, cultivate independent writers, arrange to have the product displayed on newsstands, or pay large sums for printing and postage.

The simplest form of “virtual magazine” can be created just by recommending a given set of written material, utilizing the same online service by which other taste mavens willl soon begin recommending online music or paintings.

A more polished product requires little more than a home page with links to various articles, which exist on pages of their own.

As aggregators like The Huffington Post have shown, it is not necessary for a virtual magazine to actually own any of the content it links to.  There are ways, however, that this can be done without generating the ill will and feelings of exploitation that currently tend to be associated with aggregators.  

Consider an arrangement where writers would put their own work directly on the Web, and would earn revenue in some form each time a user clicks on it.  (This revenue could come from advertising, or from some form of pay-per-click arrangement involving micropayments--say, a nickel per page--yet to be devised.)   Surely this revenue could be shared to everyone's satisfaction with an online virtual magazine that brings in new traffic which generates  revenue.  

Alternatively, the writer might post his or her material in a form that enables virtual magazines to insert ads that they're being paid to propagate--in which case the virtual magazine would pay the writer a share of the ad revenues.  

It would be especially beneficial to writers if arrangements of non-exclusive magazine inclusion could become the norm.  Not only would writers be able to derive revenue from inclusion in multiple magazines, freelancers would no longer have to agonize over which particular magazine to submit their work to--and in the case of time-sensitive material, risk not being able to sell it at all, if their first choice rejects it.

Most important of all, more good writers and their work would finally reach readers, once virtual publishers and other online taste mavens  eliminate the current content-gatekeeper bottleneck.