Can webzines substitute magazines?

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: After days of rafting, hooking worms for bait and shaking sand out of her skirts during a family trip to Oregon, Karen Snyder took a break. Lounging near her hotel alongside a riverbank, she flipped open her laptop and waved off the kids. “Mommy is going to take 15 minutes to look at what’s going on in the world of Louis Vuitton,” she told them.

Snyder, who owns an art gallery in San Francisco, may not be privy to the inner workings of the fashion world, but she is possessed with the fashion addict’s need to know. She indulges that craving with a host of online fashion magazines,websites that cater to readers who, like Snyder, never seem to get their fill of advance intelligence on trends, shopping or designer dish.

Conceived to mimic mainstream glossies, titles like Hintmag.com, Fashion156.com and Glossmag.ca draw international readerships in the hundreds of thousands. But unlike their newsstand competitors, these publications exist exclusively online, updating weekly or even daily, and offering a sense of community that conventional monthlies cannot replicate.

“People still like flipping a page and experiencing great photographs on paper,” said Imran Amed, the publisher of The Business of Fashion, a Web news site. But a webzine, he said, “can be much more dynamic, change its content faster, create dialogue with a bunch of people passionate about the same topic, and push the envelope in getting them to interact.” That speed of access and a clubby feeling give webzines an edge with readers whose need to track down the latest cult jean or downtown boite borders on compulsion. “These people are the influentials, and they have moved to the Internet,” said Samir Arora, the chief executive of Glam Media.

The challenge for a web magazine is to find ways of reaching them. Most online publishers are self-styled cyberfrontiersmen, struggling to differentiate their sites from the wilderness of chatty blogs, columns and newsletters, few of which have a distinct identity. The fashion webscape is “a very blurry world right now,” said Joe Mandese, the editor of MediaPost.com, an online business publication. “Everything is kind of a mash-up.” Sites and blogs, he said, are trying to incorporate the kinds of photography and video that have long been the province of print or TV. To stand out, a webzine needs content that is memorable while sticking with a format that readers will find familiar.