Interesting pull quotes from the New York Observer’s “Where will Magazines be 10 Years From Now?”

Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter thinks in ten years we’ll be carting around a little, plastic electronic book where all our content will be beamed in.

Wired Editor Chris Anderson says no way and magazines are going to look about the same.

Although I believe that emphasizing the important tactile experience of magazines and the longer feature pieces as pros for print, I’m a little worried about how publishers could be playing the exclusive game in the future.

The point, then, is to capitalize the physical experience of reading magazines. If it’s all about textual and textural experience, then the more dear that experience becomes, the more of a luxury object it becomes.

“The correspondence between physical luxury as a subject and physical luxury as a thing,” Kurt Andersen, the former editor of New York, thought out loud. “As paper magazines become rarer, it might seem like they become a physical luxury and thereby gain. The affinity between thing and subject might be greater in 10 years.”

But there is always the tension of where you find your revenue–a continual question plaguing the progressive media. We don’t exist to “satisfy advertisers,” (see pull quote below) but to produce kick-ass journalism and media products, but must uncomfortably play the advertising game to support that work. Why uncomfortable? Because our very social mission and existence is often in antithesis to the corporate, consumerism model of the advertising world. But we must find the balance.

“If you look at recent magazines that are successful businesses, many exist to satisfy only advertisers,” said James Truman, the former editorial director of Condé Nast. “Any publisher has to look at those as successful business models and successful business models tend to be copied.

“Editors were protected a long time ago from thinking about their magazines like businesses, especially at Condé Nast, but that changed in the last 10 years,” he said. “Now editors are brand managers as much as they are editorial experts.”

Yes: In the world of the future, the editorial experts will be ad buyers and magazine buyers. And their world is becoming increasingly digitized, their expectations of time spent reading words diminishing, their capacity and taste for internalizing information in different ways—non-narrative, nonverbal—increasing. That is, the Internet won’t replace magazines, but it might replace their readers.