Quote, unquote: on being in a funny, interesting, playful, scary place

I think any smart editor is well aware that they’re in a business that is partly about permanence and partly about disposability. We’re sort of in the middle. Newspapers were much more disposable. They came in one day and they’re gone. Magazines are in 30 days and maybe you file them away, but how often do you really go back to them? So you’re in this funny place between the tactile object and the disposable thing on one hand and the completely ephemeral thing on the other, where people don’t own websites, they just own the computers that websites appear on. It’s a funny place, an interesting, playful place to be as far as I’m concerned. I also look at young people going into media and I understand the scary part of it because it’s not as predictable as it used to be 30 years ago. You got into and did well in a company like Time Inc. or Hearst. You’d have a career. Those days appear to be a little bit different than they were but I can’t imagine a more interesting time to be pushing into media.

-- Scott Mowbray, Time Inc. lifestyle group executive editor and editor of Cooking Light, talking to Samir Husni about the future of print and digital.