Next Tuesday, Pratt will be speaking at SXSW about her life in publishing and some of the things she's seen and heard along the way. We thought it was as good a time as any to catch up with her and talk about the transition from print to pixels and why, in her view, print just doesn't cut it anymore. 

What is the most striking difference between publishing today and what you were doing back in the 1990s? 

I was always really intent on engaging with the community back in the Sassy days, but it was so cumbersome. For example, we would do a reader-produced issue of the magazine once a year. It meant that people had to actually mail their ideas in, via the U.S. Postal Service. Then we would pick who we wanted, write back to them, get them on a plane, fly them to New York, put them up and have them work on the issue. Now it's just getting feedback and content from readers is just so much easier. On xoJane we put up stories written by readers everyday, multiple times a day. That's one big difference. 

So, you were doing the UGC thing back in the 90s. 

Yeah, we were and also very much incorporating what now would be comments from the readers throughout the magazine but it was all done through the mail. It was a much slower, more expensive and more cumbersome process. I always wanted to make the magazine like a conversation. 

Your South By Southwest talk will focus, in part, on why the print model doesn't work anymore. Why do you think print is broken? 

I actually don't think that print is going to completely die. I think that there are going to be far fewer titles and maybe like one title per category. But I do still think that there's something about the physical format. People still like lying in bed at night and flipping through a magazine. 

There are still some times when I think print makes sense, but for the most part, I think that there's just so much good stuff out there that people can get, for free obviously and that they can get it more quickly. But also I think that people don't necessarily have the trust in experts that they used to. And that's sort of what magazines' bread and butter is: This person knows better than you do how to take care of your skin or whatever. I think that now the people that you trust to get your advice from are the people that are living it and are willing to tell you the truth. And you can get more of that online.

Is there anything from the print days that you miss? 

Aesthetically, the crafting of a layout and every layout being able to be unique and not formulaic or not like what we do now, where everything is templatized. I like being to take imagery and take different fonts and to feel like it's just very open-ended what you can do creatively. So that aspect I do miss. 

There's also something little bit warmer about print. I like the smell of magazine paper. I've liked it since I was a teenager. Other than that, it's a dying medium, for sure. 

What are some of your favorite things about the Web, by comparison? 

The instantaneous interaction with the community. I live in the comments section of xoJane and xoVain. My daughter gets really frustrated that I spend more time with the commenters. She'll notice when I'm doing it - "You're talking to CatButt again!" - But I love that type of interaction. 

Online, people are able to be really raw and put themselves out there. There's a willingness to just completely put yourself out there and now just show people the before or after, but show them the process. Talk about what you're going through before you've got it all sewn up and before you have the ending to the story. I think that works really well online. 

One of things I've always loved is discovering talent. Cat Marnell is a really good example of somebody who I found that I thought was a really compelling personality and a great writer. You introduce her to people and overnight, she becomes a real sensation. I've always really liked watching that process, and now it's even faster. It's also more democratic now. People can rise to the top more quickly because so much stuff is getting determined by social. 

On the other hand, lots of outlets have found the participation to be a little too open and wind up having to do battle with the trolls. Have you dealt with any of that? 

I wasn't sure when we were launching xoJane if we were going to have to moderate comments and how all of that was going to work. I had never been in that realm before. I've been amazed to see how the community just does it themselves. Like, someone goes on there and leaves trolling comment and other regulars on the site will come forward and [say that's not cool or whatever]. So it's really a pretty safe space without us having to do much. I think partly that comes from when people write nasty things about me, for example, I"m in there so much that I'll come forward and say "Oh, I see what you're saying" and I'll just put myself out there and open myself up to it and that defeats it. That's not my intention. I'm actually really interested in what people are saying.

What's the most challenging part of publishing online? 

Everything is competition. Back when I was doing print, it was like, okay, there are four teen magazines. Or there are seven women's magazines. Now, someone's on their screen and are they playing Angry Birds? Are they on Facebook? Or are they XOJane? You're competing with everything. That's much trickier to wrap your mind around. 

Any other sneak previews you can give us about your SXSW talk? 

The premise of the talk is nine secrets. Things that I've learned. I'm going to be telling things that I've never told before about what happened when I left Jane magazine and a bunch of other stuff that I've never talked about before. 

Jane's presentation, Secrets Of A Publishing Renegade will be held on Tuesday, March 12 at 11am in Exhibit Hall 5 of the Austin Convention Center.  

Disclosure: xoJane is owned and operated by SAY Media, ReadWrite's parent company. 

As magazines make the transition from print to pixels, some publishers are using the move as an opportunity to jack up their prices - in some cases, to more than they were charging for print editions. And that's for tablet versions that are too often crappy afterthoughts. 

To be fair, magazines are contending with legitimate financial concerns. Their advertising revenue has been declining and the historically discounted subscription rates they've charged for print delivery just aren't enough to pay the freight. To cope, many publishers are asking readers to chip in more - on digital versions as well as print editions.

There are some problems with driving up prices too much, though.

For one, everyone knows it's cheaper to distribute content digitally than to print it and mail it. Asking buyers to pay more for something that costs you less to deliver is the kind of tactic that makes many subscribers feel exploited. It's a head-scratcher, if not a subscription-canceler. Sure, magazine makers may still be coping with meaty legacy cost structures. But that's not our problem, is it?  

Readers Have Way More Choices

There's also much more competition. Long gone are the days when magazines competed only with each other. Today, the entire Internet churns out content at a volume too great for any one human to keep up with - and it's all instantly available at any time. 

In addition to traditional magazines gone tablet, there are the digital-only magazines, sitting right there on the skeuomorphic newsstand shelf. For every frustrated TIME subscriber, there's a free download of the Huffington magazine, not to mention personalized, social-fueled digital "magazines" from Flipboard, AOL Editions, Google Currents, Zite and an ever-growing list of others. If Wired jacks up its prices, there's always digital mags from The Next Web and Engadet, not to mention the huge selection of tech coverage available through news aggregator apps and feed readers. 

How Publishers Have Fared With Tablets

Not everyone in the publishing industry is enamored with the idea of publishing native tablet apps for readers to flip through. MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin vowed to kill his magazine's native apps, citing high costs, technical challenges and the walled-off, un-Web-like nature of apps. The Financial Times famously pulled its iOS apps in favor of the HTML5 approach and isreportedly seeing more traffic and revenue since making the switch. Indeed, research has suggested that most readers prefer Web apps to native, platform-specific publications.

Still, some magazines have done pretty well with their digital editions, especially when they bundle them with print. In the United States, tablet publications are the second highest-grossing category of apps on iOS, according to an independent audit. Time and Conde Nast are selling the most digital mags, with news and women's interest magazines dominating those sales. 

Half of Wired's revenue now comes from digital, which is a rare but promising milestone for a legacy publisher. I still subscribe to Wired in print, and I appreciate the fact that the iPad edition comes at no extra charge. I also happily pay for Marco Arment's experimental publication The Magazine, because it consistently publishes content I enjoy in relatively small doses, rather than flooding me with irrelevant features and full-page ads.

"The Magazine was profitable from day one," says Arment. "As subscribers increased past break-even, I've been able to reinvest the additional income into more articles, higher author payments, original illustrations, photos and a professional editor."

While Arment won't disclose hard numbers, he says he's satisfied with what he calls The Magazine's "fantastic success." By utilizing what publishing expert Craig Mod calls "compact publishing" and monetizing it fairly, Arment has managed to build a profitable, if small media business in an age when industry trend lines have the stubborn tendency to slide downward.

There's clearly a limit to how much people will pay for magazine-style content. And it's not at all clear that number is rising instead of falling. Folks who want to remain in the publishing business need to figure out a hybrid model that works, and not just jack up their prices to make up for shrinking subscriber rolls. 

Digital Magazines Suck

The business model isn't the only issue here. Just as important is the consensus that most digital magazines just aren't very good. In far too many cases, subscribing to a magazine on your tablet means downloading a bloated, glorified PDF that hardly delivers the potentially magical experience the form factor allows. Even some of the digital-only magazines from online publishers mimic print page-for-page in disappointing pinch-to-zoom layouts.  

There are some promising alternatives. Wired's iPad app is pretty print-centric but at least the editors go to  the trouble of adding multimedia bells and whistles.  The Magazine takes an attractive minimalistic approach - both in terms of publication design and pricing.

Traditional publishers may want to look to The Magazine for inspiration, as well as to social news aggregators like Flipboard and Zite, which have managed to produce truly addictive reading environments worthy of a slot in one's home screen dock. Rethinking magazines for tablets will require publishers to get completely out of the print mindset. That means different layouts, lighter file sizes, deeper social integrations and yes, occasionally pointing readers toward content published by others. 

On the whole, digital magazines have a long way to go. When they get there, those of us who are most hungry for the news, analysis and entertainment they provide will happily pay up. Hopefully, there will be enough of us to make the best digital magazines into viable businesses.

As failures go, this one is pretty spectacular. News Corporation worked closely with Steve Jobs himself to get the world's first iPad-only newspaper off the ground, having invested $130 million by the time it launched in February of last year. Flanked by Apple's Eddy Cue, Murdoch told launch event attendees that they were spending half a million dollars per week to operate The Daily. The world's second largest media conglomerate teamed up with the most valuable tech company on the planet to launch a product that attempted to reimagine news for the digital age. And it flopped. 

Signs of The Daily's struggle became impossible to ignore in July, when News Corp announced that it would be laying off 50 of its 170 staffers and trimming the app's content. By that point, The Daily was said to have 100,000 paying subscribers, which apparently wasn't enough to sustain the operation even another five months. 

Why The Daily Failed 

Questions swirled about The Daily's viability from day one. Sure, you had the likes of Murdoch and Jobs behind the project, but a glitzy launch event with a stage full of powerful executives doesn't necessarily translate into a sustainable business model.  

In his Newsonomics column for Neiman Lab, Ken Doctor estimated early on that The Daily would need to reach 200,000 subscribers to break even, which obviously didn't happen. Doctor was cautiously optimistic that this was possible, but noted that it would challenging given the publication's single-platform approach and limited Web presence. 

That iPad-only focus is part of what drove The Daily into an early grave, according to former contributor Trevor Butterworth, whose Facebook commentary was republished by Romenesko. 

"You can’t create an entirely new brand and take it behind a paywall after 4 weeks, while limiting its footprint on the Internet, and then expect people to buy it," Butterworth wrote. The content itself, he says, was just not good enough to attract paying subscribers.

Another economic hurdle is Apple itself. The company infamously takes a steep 30% cut from publishers' subscription sales, which makes it that much harder to turn a profit. This revenue share is the reason the Financial Times refuses to publish an iOS-specific app, instead opting for its own HTML5-based Web app.

A Rocky Start For iPad Publishing

The lesson News Corp just learned about tablet publishing economics was something The Huffington Post got a taste of in August, when it decided to remove the dollar-per-issue price tag affixed to its iPad-only magazine and instead offer it for free. Granted, the two products' cost structures and general business philosophies were quite different, but HuffPost's dismantling of its paywall was another clear sign that selling content to tablet owners might be harder than initially thought. 

Traditional publishers, many of whom looked to the iPad as their digital savior when it launched, have had mixed results. Wired's publisher loves the success he's seen with tablet apps, while MIT Technology Review editor Jason Pontin thinks the technology and revenue model is too cumbersome for media outlets, who would be better off publishing on the Web. 

There are also inherent limits to the iPad format, as Felix Salmon at Reuters points out. Tablet-based magazines and newspapers might have more gee-whiz bells and whistles than print, but the Web can still be a faster, less clunky medium for publishing. 

"No iPad publication is remotely as innovative or as fun to read as, say, BuzzFeed, because BuzzFeed has coders who can do very clever things with their chosen platform, and iPad publications don’t" writes Salmon. 

Indeed, research suggests that readers prefer their tablets' Web browsers to the meaty, slow-to-update and even more slow-to-evolve native apps that publishers have been eagerly developing since Steve Jobs first held up the iPad on stage in 2010.

New Experiments In Tablet Publishing

So The Daily's model didn't work out. Fortunately, others are willing to experiment with the format, even if it's on a much smaller scale. 

Inspired by the Netflix model, magazine subscription service Next Issue launched on iOS in July. For $10 per month, readers can get access to dozens of magazines from the likes of Conde Nast, Time Inc. and Hearst. This approach comes with challenges of its own, but it's certainly worth a try. 

Then there's The Magazine. Instapaper founder Marco Arment launched the stripped-down, iPad-only publication in October and it couldn't be more simple. For $2 per month, readers are promised eight thoughtful, well-written articles delivered in bi-weekly issues. The Magazine eschews the clunky, multimedia-loaded digital editions of print magazines in favor of a no-frills, high quality reading experience that Arment hopes people will think is good enough to pay for.