(Note: This is a post submitted by BNET member Karen Steen. To submit your own post, click here.)

When U.S. News and World Report announced it was switching to a biweekly schedule, BNET analyst David Weir made a bold suggestion:

Freed of the pressure to produce so much new content, magazines have a chance to return to their roots over a century ago, when the muckrakers and story-tellers mesmerized their audiences.

I’d second his notion and throw in another group of mesmerizers from print publishing’s heyday: illustrators and photographers.

Though the web is primarily a visual medium, few sites exploit it because users are in a hurry and images take too long to load. Magazines, on the other hand, do not need time to load, or even boot up. Besides, they’re what you reach for when you want to waste time. And this is exactly what print has to offer that the web cannot: not just fantastic image quality, but the look and feel of the pages in your hand, the ability to read them slowly, while lying on the couch.

If you think that’s old fashioned, consider the continued spread of the crowdsourcing magazine model: users submit their own articles and photos to the magazine’s website; other users vote for the best submissions; and the winning entries get reproduced in the print publication. Last month, Weir explained how well this is working for startups JPEG and Everywhere and even stodgy This Old House. Now Business Week has announced it will give the model a try.

Aside from the crowdsourcing aspect, what’s innovative here is that the model relies on print to do what it does best. It’s not that you can’t already find this material online. It’s that looking at it on glossy paper — while lying on the couch — remains a vastly superior experience.