Before we started 8020 Media and our publications—JPG Magazine and Everywhere—we talked to a lot of people who felt that magazines were a thing of the past, that the Internet had killed them and it was only a matter of time before they were gone.

This might seem difficult to argue with on the surface. There are plenty of magazines going out of business all the time and lots of bad news from publishing industry press about the future of magazines. But something felt wrong about this perspective, not the least of which was that we all had more magazine subscriptions than ever before, and the magazines we really loved seemed so vibrant, innovative and successful.

Our hard-copy circulation hovers at about 23,000 for JPG, printed by Quad/Graphics, and the website gets about 500,000 unique visitors a month. On average, each print issue generates about 20,000 active photo submissions. We expect similar numbers from Everywhere, a travel community and magazine, in the next year or so.

About half of the magazines' web traffic comes from word of mouth—contributors urge their friends and family to vote for their photos or stories. Advertisers, meanwhile, can sponsor sections. Our online version is free. Readers can also download and print a PDF of the entire magazine for free. We are certain that holding a high-quality, printed magazine can be more satisfying than viewing it online.

Even with free PDF downloads, 70% of our magazines on newsstands are purchased—a surprisingly high newsstand sell-through rate. All this success was especially interesting to us because we were all textbook examples of modern, web-centric people who got our news from RSS feeds and checked our email every 30 seconds.

If we still cared about magazines, then they must not be dying for everyone.

Based on this insight and our passion for what we knew magazines could be, we started 8020 Media four years ago. At 8020, we make magazines like JPG and Everywhere that fuse print and digital publishing workflows to forge an entirely new and successful publishing model. Our magazines, for instance, are entirely created by a community of people on our websites. Site visitors submit all of the content, photos and stories, and they vote on what they think should be in the magazine. We then produce the printed magazine that is distributed through traditional channels.

So what gives? If magazines are about to go the way of eight-tracks and Betamax, why are we basing our livelihoods on them?

Well, to begin with, we realized that the magazines that we really loved provided an experience that was superior in print and didn't try to compete with the web. Yet the web had a powerful place in the creation of the print magazine. This meant, to us, that the magazine had a very powerful role to play if it was created with the right process in mind. We asked ourselves: What would a magazine be like if it were invented in the modern era in which the web already existed?

When most people think of magazines, they think of print; but magazines are more than just paper. They are comprised of a delicate ecosystem of ideas, people, curation and experience. Magazines are, at their heart, an artifact of a community's shared interest. So giving that community a voice is pretty important, especially to a generation of people who share their voices everywhere. Without the community, magazines are just editors and advertisers fighting to be the loudest in the room.

A modern publisher has to look at the area of interest and see where its people are and how they are getting their information today, and then create an experience that makes sense to how that community naturally organizes.

So if a magazine is more than just print, what exactly is it? Print does some things extraordinarily well: Its tactile nature makes it truly unique, and it is hard to beat the rich presentation of big images on large-format printed pages. Print's enforced scarcity is an increasingly rare quality as well, as there are fewer and fewer opportunities to be part of something really scarce.

And, perhaps most importantly, a printed magazine can be inspirational. The curation and presentation leads readers down a serendipitous path that they may have never entered into a search-engine box.

However, there are plenty of things that print can't do well: data, timeliness and social connection, to name a few. News and information get out of date, data can't be searched or reorganized, and there is no way to connect with all of the other people who read the magazine. A good magazine should realize what kinds of information are good in print and what is good online, and create a suitable structure, rather than trying to make a magazine that would be better on the web.

With our magazines, we try to think of a cycle where the magazine, the person and the website all play equally important roles. We start by thinking of the magazine as an inspirational tool. Whether the title is travel, photography, cooking or anything else, the magazine's main job is to inspire people to get up and go do something.

Then the website is the place people come to take action, to plan a trip, find a photo challenge, a recipe to cook. The web is where they interact with everyone else who shares their interests. Then people go out into the world and do their thing, travel, take pictures, cook . . . whatever, and then return to share their experiences and knowledge with their peers on the site. Our job is to make the site vibrant and compelling so that people want to contribute and share regardless of us or the magazine. We have to build the tools to be good enough that we get what we need effortlessly.

Once we are able to get fantastic photos and stories for the magazine, the process starts all over again as inspiring content in the magazine.

Of course, not every magazine has to be all reader-created, but it is important for publishers to knock down the walls between reader and creator as that is increasingly what people are looking for. And it isn't just about magazines being smarter about the web. More websites should recognize the power of print and look at ways they can create products that come from their online efforts.

It is easier to make magazines than ever before. It used to take a huge staff of people, but with powerful yet easy-to-use tools like Adobe InDesign and print-on-demand services such as Lulu and MagCloud, a very small group of people can produce a magazine now. These tools have made it possible for us to be much more innovative in our approach by focusing on what really matters to us.

The bottom line is that the web isn't going to make magazines go away; apathy will. But if publishers can embrace the changes in how people are organizing and consuming information, the web and cross-media publishing tools from partners like Adobe can make magazines better than ever.

ONLINE: See it at jpgmag.com and 8020media.com.