I subscribe to a variety of magazines in print and iPad editions. Wired, Mens Health, Economist, Car and Driver, National Geographic, and Popular Photography, to name a few.
I haven't opened a print edition in over a year. That said, I also am not opening these on the iPad, except when stuck on a plane waiting for the flight attendant to finish his seatbelt dance.
Why not?
1. Every time there's an iOS update, the apps forget who I am, and I have to re-register. This usually results in me just ignoring magazines for a quarter or two.
2. They notify of new content, but do not pre-download it. They're huge, 500MB for a magazine, but I have a 64GB iPad -- a lot more memory than patience. When I launch the magazine and see I'll have to wait 5 minutes to download the latest issue, I close it again, and that magazine is lost to me.
3. Some make me scroll around too much. Economist does not. Economist is actually even easier to navigate on the iPad than in print. Of the magazines I do get, GQ is the worst at trying to leverage "new media". I have to paw at the screen 20 times to skim one factoid page, and it's ridiculous. Popular Photography is similar, and I have finished issues only to realize I'd missed entire sections.
4. The pricing model is stupid, and too many magazines don't give a digital subscription along with the print. I can see why most want their print circulation numbers higher -- they're a whole different set of ads and ad pricing. But to have "digital only" subscriptions cost 4x the wholesale print price is ridiculous. Every magazine I mentioned, I buy in print, copy the subscriber ID off the label, and get the digital. I chuck the printed copy or leave it in the company lobby. It's a waste, but when it costs $5/year for print+digital instead of $50 for just digital, I suspect I'm doing exactly what they want. If, however, the publishers that don't have this kind of offer were to let me subscribe digitally for a reasonable price (no more than $1/month since I still have to see the ads and they don't have to handle printing and mailing it), I'd subscribe to a lot more titles.
So, these are the problems, and they're fixable. What he is proposing, however, I disagree with, strongly. Fast moving content is not what magazines are for.
DPReview is a fantastic photo blog, but it's a fundamentally different experience than browsing an issue of Popular Photography. The issue has a theme, a connective binding that ties all its articles together. There's a comfortable familiarity with the voice of the editor. You enjoy a sense of expectation when waiting for the next issue. You go back and revisit a prior month's issue when you're considering a certain kind of gear. These are all very different from the ephemera of the journo-blogs. Each has its place. Blogs replaced the daily newspaper, essentially giving me my Tech section, my Startup News section, instead of whatever my local paper had. But magazines and newspapers coexisted for over a century and it's because they're fundamentally different experiences.
With magazines on the iPad, it's fantastic to travel with 50 magazines at hand, not taking any space. The color images in National Geographic are spectacular, and I don't miss the paper edition. (Mine are all still in their plastic.) The article typography and minimalist layout on Economist is a joy to read.
When done wrong, I can't be bothered to wait for a download, to paw around to find the end of a story, or to pay 5x as much as I would for print.
When done right, I'm convinced these digital editions are the future of periodicals, and blogs are the future of newspapers.