The New York Times has an interesting article in today’s issue on how print magazine publishers are targeting students by offering digital editions on the web. “There’s no question that younger people are much more oriented toward getting information from the Web than older people,” said James Meigs, the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics, a Hearst publication. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a place for magazines in their lives.”

The economic advantages of digital publishing over print is obvious, so where are the purely Web-based competitors of these interlopers from the print world?

Blog networks, which are commercial content providers crystallizing out of the jungle that is the blogosphere, are the prepubescent digital equivalents of the big magazine publishers.

The question is : have they the talent and publishing skills to take on the new breed of magazine publishers muscling in on their patch.

By adopting a magazine format, as Syntagma Web Network Magazine has, they can challenge for this market from the inside looking out, rather than the outside gazing hopefully in.