Editor’s Note:  This article has been reprinted with permission of Tony Silber, Red 7 Media.

Technology, economics and consumer demand are driving magazine publishing to increased specialization, and the converging trends will enable the creation of a new class of micro-niche titles, two magazine industry observers predicted this week in bookend keynote addresses at an exclusive publishing retreat in Vermont.

Robert ‘Bo’ Sacks, the president of Precision Media Group and editor of the influential “Heard on the Web” e-mail newsletter, described a world where emerging standards such as Job Description Format and Extensible Markup Language will make what he calls El CID—electronically coordinated information distribution—ubiquitous, allowing the easy and efficient creation of magazines with hyper-short pressruns and extremely personalized articles.

Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi and a well-known chronicler of consumer-magazine launches, noted that the number of consumer magazines has tripled since 1980, and that much of the increase is from one-shots and highly-targeted spinoff serials—specials—from big-brand titles. “A magazine with a five-million circulation will be considered enormous-sized,” Husni predicted, while split editions, such as AARP The Magazine’s three demographic versions, will become prevalent.

Husni and Sacks spoke at the Lane Press Centennial Publishers Roundtable, in Vergennes, Vermont. Among about 70 attendees were the owners/publishers of such titles as Natural History, Opera News, Columbia Journalism Review and Our State North Carolina.

While both speakers articulated a vision of increasingly shorter-run, targeted publishing driven both by technological advances and the economics of mass distribution, Sacks in particular described how the mechanics of a dramatically changed magazine-production process will make that happen. There are two avenues being developed, Sacks said. One is e-paper, and the other is the combination of PDF, JDF and XML, which has completely eliminated the film-based production process (This year’s DRUPA, the giant German prepress conference held every five years, was the first “film-free DRUPA,” Sacks said). The combination, according to Sacks, has already created great efficiencies and is in the process of creating a single publishing workflow capable of creating, managing, and delivering content—the same files—reliably and effortlessly to multiple devices simultaneously.

Proofs, make-readys, and human operators such as pressmen, will be a thing of the past, Sacks said. But the shift to XML and PDF publishing does not necessarily mean that fewer magazines will be printed. “It might even lead to more magazines, but with shorter press runs and more passionate audiences,” Sacks said. “Or how about the ability to mix various sections of separate magazines from separate publishers into one combined and bound issue? I call it ‘Kiosk Publishing.’

In Sacks’ view, this hyper-focused publishing will naturally include advertising with the same lever of targeting. “There will be no need to drop the wrong ad down and waste impressions of women’s products on men and men’s products on women,” he said. “Your El-CID computer or the publisher’s database will adjust with the printer to deliver ads focused to you. This will be the best marketing tool ever developed.”

And just as publishers are evolving into multi-channel information providers, publication printers must also transform themselves into providers of broad-based multi-path information delivery systems. When is the last time anyone saw a teamster actually leading a team of horses, Sacks asked. And yet, he said, teamsters today still perform basically the same function, delivers of goods in the chain of commerce.

For Husni, the future holds more magazines about more subjects, more consolidation of publishing companies to the point that all the major magazines will be owned by no more than five mega-corporations, and an increase in book-a-zines and digests. And while he predicted that print publishing will never go away, he added that publishers should “remember that ink and paper are manufactured in factories, and magazine brands are manufactured in readers minds, one at a time.”