I have the privilege of working for The Kiplinger Washington Editors, and my boss, Knight Kiplinger, gave a very interesting interview to Mr. Magazine about the current state of the magazine industry and the future of print publishing.

See a summary and edited text of the interview here.

Like Knight, I think the death of print has been over-stated. It strikes me as one of those extravagant “futurist” predictions like a paperless office. Does anybody have a paperless office? Of course not. In fact, we print more stuff now because it’s so easy.

We’re seeing a fragmentation in delivery options because there are so many ways to consume content. Print. Desktop. iPad. iPhone. Kindle. And that’s going to increase. Pretty soon we’ll be reading magazines on heads-up displays in our eyeglasses.

But just as AM radio is still around, print will be around for a long time. It’s a different kind of experience, and some people will prefer it.

I agree with Knight that publishers were short-sighted in putting their content online to chase after ad revenue. In the early days of the internet, an incredible amount of money was spent in online advertising, and it looked like a good deal. That ad revenue has dwindled (partially because the ads are ineffective — people have learned to ignore them) and publishers are left with an environment where people are accustomed to getting content for free. Some people even act as if it’s their right to get content for free.

We need to take a step back. Publishers should have some content available for free, but some of it should be behind a paywall.

To some extent the genie is out of the bottle. There’s tons of free content online, and there probably always will be.

However — there is a value to carefully selected and edited content. You can download the Zite app to your iPad and create a personal finance “magazine” if you like. It will pull in free stories from all over the web, and some of them are probably good stories. But which ones? Some of them are what you really need to hear and think about now, but others are dangerous nonsense. Are you sure you know which is which?

There’s a time and a place for free content, but when it matters whether the advice is good or bad, whether the facts have been checked or not, whether the data is current — it’s worth paying a little to be sure. A modest subscription fee is worth the peace of mind you get knowing professionals have reviewed and approved what you’re reading.