Media Perspective: Magazine industry could be saved by new DIY publishing.(Viewpoint essay)

The past couple of weeks have been about newspapers, so I thought this week we could turn our attention to magazines and perhaps try to find reasons for optimism rather than just doing the usual doom and gloomifying.

Because, although many magazines are obviously in trouble and will close (there's a recession on, after all), there's clearly something unique about reading print that won't entirely be swept away by digits and e-readers.

Just one reason for optimism is in the nature of that relationship. It's about glossy paper, leisure and soaking up images as well as reading Which makes magazines a great medium for branding, especially for those products composed entirely of imagery and associations: things like perfume and watches. As long as people are willing to pay more than pounds 5 for a watch, then we'll have watch advertising, and we'll have magazines.

So here are three things going on in the magazine market that might point to an interesting future. The first is called MagCloud, a 'print-on-demand' magazine service that takes much of the hard work out of making your own title.

You upload a PDF and they take care of printing, posting, managing subscriptions, all that sort of stuff. This isn't going to challenge the mighty Hello!s and Esquires of this world and it will accelerate the fragmentation of the magazine market, but it's got to be good for the medium overall because MagCloud makes hobby publishing affordable and realistic.

It's always been a ...