Again, the shape and style of online magazines seems to be hampered by the editors’ slavish imitation of print models with a postal delivery system. And what about those virtual covers I mentioned? They’re often very well designed, but let’s face it: online attention spans are short. Why should I have to click through two, three, or even four pages of front-matter and hunt around for navigation cues just to sample a magazine’s latest content?

More specifically, he argues that online journals could learn a lot by adopting the best practices of blogs.

To fully understand this argument, you must first understand the word “blog” as a term that defines a publishing system rather than a content type. What Dave is really arguing for here (although he might not say it in so many words) is the adoption of blogging platforms, those ready-made publishing systems that provide all the fixings of native web publications (RSS feeds, incremental updating, etc), rather than the adoption of silly memes or the abandonment of editing.

Crafting a literary magazine from a blog platform requires some technical know how and imagination, of course. The default page designs that ship with most blog software are completely unsuited for literary magazines, and nothing says hack job like throwing the words “online journal” over a stock Blogger template. A quality online journal can be crafted from off-the-shelf blogging software, though. Linebreak runs on blogging software, but it looks nothing like the average blog because we spent several months kicking around design ideas before coding an original template that fit our concept.

Although Dave wrote his essay two years ago, very little has changed. One thing I discovered when launching Swindle is how few online poetry journals offer RSS feeds, which have been a staple of web publications for six or seven years. (No Tell Motel does, as do 42 Opus and Poetry, but that’s about it). RSS feeds sprang from a publishing model that emphasizes incremental updates and the supremacy of the individual post, whereas most online lit mags are still following a model from the last century, when the cost of paper and distribution dictated a model that emphasized the issue, a cost efficient bundle of content wrapped in cover art.

The nut graph: Too many online literary magazines seem to be unhappily waiting for the day when they can afford a print run, and ignoring most of the benefits of being a web publication in the meantime.

Publishing any kind of literary journal is hard work, of course, and unpaid, and the people who give up their time to do so deserve thanks. But I think a lot of the lingering prejudice against online magazines in the literary world has to do with how poorly designed and conceived many of them are. And it’s time for that to change.