The social media experts that cluster around Twitter like birds on a wire yelp away, singing the same tune most of the time: the new model is about the conversation. And for all the utter balderdash they spout about other aspects of the the online world, they’re right. But while newspaper sites and blogs have learned the value of comments and letting their reader into the editorial process to some extent, magazines largely haven’t.

Magazines, even if they have a presence online, tend to be closed worlds – there’s a clear distinction between the writers and editorial staff and the readers. Compiling the letters page in a traditional magazine is the job that gets passed around like its a rod of uranium smeared with excrement.

Nobody wants to wade through a collection of emails and badly scrawled notes in the hope of finding the three or four rational ones. A lot of the time, the majority of letters end up being written by someone on staff – a collective fantasy of a letters page created out of necessity. But no one seems to ask: why is the correspondence we receive so terrible?

Readers’ correspondence are often little more than a collection of complaints and the rants of the most unbalanced selection of the readership. But that’s a failing of the publication. Because if you’re creating an interesting, worthwhile product, you probably do have intelligent, interesting readers. You’re just not encouraging them to interact with you. Most of the time magazines have made very little effort to bring readers into the process of magazine making. There’s an assumption that they don’t really know all that much.

Every few years, magazine publishers and editors pull together a focus group (conducted with the undeclared aim of justifying whatever new redesign of the site or the magazine they’ve cooked up). Occasionally they sprinkle some “email us” tags at the end of articles or offer some kind of desultory prize for letter of the month. But they’re not actually asking readers to get involved – it’s a low-level, half-arse attempt to connect with them.

In most magazine offices, the reader becomes like an abstract figure. Yes there’s meetings where someone sticks up a picture of the hypothetical reader, yes there are discussions amongst sub-editors about whether that hypothetical reader will “get” a particular reference but by-and-large the reader is just this peripheral concept that’s there to keep you in a job. There’s a contempt for readers that jumps off the page of most magazines being made now. The paper is getting cheaper and thinner and the editorial is chasing after it.

The best publications (in any medium) speak with the voice that readers wish they were confident enough to have. The voice of the magazine is the idealised voice they wish they could speak with. It’s the cool best friend who tells them they are good enough and shows them the next thing as well as showing them the things they already know they love. The best magazines give their readers respect. In fact, creating a brilliant magazine can be boiled down to three words: “surprise and delight”.

So where does letting the reader into the process come in to all of this? Well, it’s not about simply sticking comments below your content or throwing all your articles up online. That can be part of it but not every piece of content can survive that. There’s talk that the Guardian is about to open up all its reviews to comments. That seems like a terrible idea. A review is a piece of subjective comment from someone taking a view on a piece of art. People will disagree with it but the debate that you’ll get beneath a review will always rapidly trend towards a denunciations of the writer for being wrong and denunciations of those who say the writer is wrong. It’s cultural criticism as a blood sport.

The model I’m talking about is a world where the structures behind the creation of a magazine are as exposed as the pipes of the Pompidou Centre. I’m saying let’s dismantle the Magic Circle and, for the most part, reveal how the tricks are done. Wired in the US has been at the forefront of this kind of approach with its Wired Storyboard podcast (which takes you behind the writing of several key features in each month’s issue) and experiments like its Charlie Kaufman article which documented its creation on a blog that then became part of the final piece.

There are obviously some types of journalism that cannot reveal their underbelly – war reporting and investigative pieces require a certain level of secrecy and obfuscation around methods. But almost every other element of magazine creation can be documented and made available, DVD extras to the main feature.

Ben Hammersley has written recently about creating systems where journalism is written with meta-data as a consideration from the start. I agree and see the whole process working like a good butcher’s shop – no part of the animal should go to waste. Interviews should be taped and available to be edited into accompanying audio elements, photo-shoots should be videoed. All the products of a magazine’s creative process should be available for readers to mash-together and remix.

The relevance and importance of the professional writer remains – as a guide to the subjects that matter and a skilled interpreter of information coming in from readers. Readers should be encourage to send in ideas, tip writers off about trends or experiences they have had. Look at the effectiveness of the two giants of American gadget blogging, Engadget and Gizmodo. Much of their success derives from bringing together a community of like minded individuals and encouraging them to contribute. Many of their stories and scoops come from ordinary readers.

It’s true that online comments can become dominated by the ignorant and extreme fringes but that is the same of any conversation. The Internet is an amplifier for arseholes. But as Jeff Jarvis has so eloquently explained in the past, publications should curate the valuable commenters and encourage the community to marginalise the negative and disruptive influences. That is no to say those people who disagree with the prevailing orthodoxy but rather those who attack for the sake of attacking.

The magazines of the future will need more than translated to the enhanced user interfaces of tablet devices like the now almost mythical Apple Tablet. A change in philosophy among journalists and editors is required. It’s getting there but there’s still a long distance to travel.

Journalism will survive as a profession by championing the value of a great story and realising that great storytellers are willing to seek material from anywhere and to learn to adapt and interpret the stories of others.

I like Everett True. Many don’t but I do. He’s a personality and modern music writing has a paucity of those. But that doesn’t mean I always agree with him. This week he’s been posting up the archive of one of his much-missed projects Plan B, a fine magazine which gave birth to many a great up and coming new music writer. But while that’s a brilliant public service it gave me occasion to read his editorial from Issue 0 and now, a few years late, I need to disagree with one of his quips. 

Recounting a trip to lecture some media students, Everett talks about dismissing “NME and Q as being put together by people embarrassed to be writing about indie music…” That’s the point at which he and I take different paths.

Both Q and NME have been terribly compromised publications for years but that isn’t down to the people working on them not caring or not loving music as much as Everett does. It’s because those magazines are cogs within large corporations with confused agendas, turned into toys for editors enthralled with a philosophy of “brand”, “content partnerships” and other phrases that translate to bad magazines. 

Everett’s advice to potential Plan B contributors was “be yourself” but that’s not always been a choice at NME or Q (although NME under Krissi Murrison is 1000% sharper than the dull days of Conor McNicholas running the paper into the ground). Q is like the Borg. It gobbles up writers and pulps them into a bland mush.

The Atlantic has just published a list of what makes great editing in celebration of its 153rd birthday. One point stood out for me as a big failing at Q was this: “Don’t over-edit. You will often estrange an author by too elaborate a revision, and furthermore, take away from the magazine the variety of style that keeps it fresh.” Too often Q has been like a mangle, squeezing until all the writer’s personality is left in the bucket.

That is not the fault of the people who work on Q [I was front section editor there for just over a year]. They are a sharp, smart, committed team with a real love of music. But the product they are made to produce is a sad compromise, under the cosh of powerful PRs trading access for writing about bands that just aren’t up to snuff. Q has to play safe.

Editors aren’t given the scope to be imaginative – they can’t take risks and there have been some terrible decisions (putting Johnny Borrell aka the least palatable man in music on the cover?!). No one in the office besides the boss backed that move but it happened anyway. A few months down the line the revisionist history had begun: “Who’s idea was that then?” 

Plan B was wildly inventive and individualistic. It could never sell more than a nominal number of copies. Q is bland and it struggles to maintain the sales figures it once easily pulled in. Neither is the solution for what a music magazine should be now.

In some ways, the question is whether a traditional music magazine, a bound collection of pages, still has a place. I think it has but a successful one needs freedom of movement that an oil tanker like Q doesn’t have right now. The ship can be turned around but the captain needs to accept that the iceberg it’s headed for is there to begin with. Right now, they’ve got their hands on the wheel and their eyes closed…