In the future, ads will pop up in our cereal bowls. Our dreams will be interrupted by commercials. But we’ll still look to magazines when we don’t want to be found.

The above is actualy copy from an ad for magazines by the Magazine Marketing Coalition. The campaign (magazine.org) features some intriguing facts. Check out too, the ‘covers of the future’ that magazines could be featuring (like the one on the left.)

Stories such as the ‘see-through SUV’ for an automotive mag, and ‘What your man’s POD says about him’ for Cosmo etc would be still in the print medium, they say. As a big fan of magazines, I don’t see them going away; back in 1998 I argued with one publisher that having an online version would not erode the reader base!   

HOWEVER, there is evidence that if print doesn’t pull up its socks, the portals are going to make a killing. Case in point, the BBC. Yes that BBC! For all it’s problems over the years (I know, I went through a BBC radio training in1988) ‘aunty’ as it is affectionately called, has been ahead of the curve in marketing its services to the 24/7/365 news-hungry world. They are also currently running a podcasting experiment for BBC radio.

The Economist magazine had a story (Ha! see what I mean) a couple of weeks back on how the ‘lumbering giant’  is partly responsible for sliding newspaper readership in Britain. BBC has a whopping 525 Web sites, and BBC news has 7.8 million unique visitors –a week!

So against all this, it is wonderful to see the renewed interest in publishing, here in the US, and definitely in Asia. Tim O’Reilly the founder and brains behind several ventures around O’Reilly Media, recently introduced a magazine that he calls the "Martha Stewart magazine for geeks." It’s called "Make." Actually MAKE is a ‘mook’ or what the publisher calles a hybrid between a magazine and a book. There’s a companion Zine, too.

So is print here to stay? The Magazine Marketing Coalition has these numbers. The popularity of TV viewing fell from 25% to 21% from 1995 to 2005. In the same period, the popularity of magazines jumped from 28% to 35%. Customers have spoken: To mangle the Fox network’s words: you report, we decide!