Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Allison Domicone, left, speaks with Alexis Madrigal, while Alison Lambert, center, and Tierney Smith browse the first issue of Long Shot Magazine at the unboxing party on Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Media innovation in the Bay Area is not hard to come by, with the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter continually reinventing the way we produce and consume information. Yet one of the venerable media forms that is threatened by the digital tsunami -- the magazine -- is experiencing something of a renaissance here, too. The New York-based glossy magazine business may be in upheaval, with bellwether Condé Nast shuttering five of its titles, but the art of editing, writing and visually crafting an editorially coherent, beautiful and engaging experience is not dead.

Some of the foment is made possible by MagCloud, a Web-based print-on-demand service from Hewlett-Packard that dramatically lowers the financial barriers to magazine publishing. With MagCloud, there are no upfront costs for printing and distribution; a PDF file is uploaded to the MagCloud site, and each time a reader orders a copy, it is printed on high-quality paper and shipped.

The per-copy price is much higher than it would be with a traditional printing process, and there is still the problem of getting people to buy it. But the format has opened the door for people to try their hand at producing magazines.

Plenty of the MagCloud efforts are vanity projects or high-end brochures, but many others are surprisingly interesting, gorgeous, niche magazines -- Mormon Artist, San Louie, Stranded, to name a few -- that would not look out of place at Barnes & Noble.

Probably the highest-profile MagCloud magazine is 48 Hour, which is based in San Francisco and which published its first issue in June. Alexis Madrigal, a co-founder, called it "an event that spawns a magazine" -- the whole thing was assigned, written, edited, designed and produced by volunteers in, yes, 48 hours. It sold over 1,000 copies within a few days, with fans staying connected through Twitter and other social media.

Now renamed Longshot (after a legal dispute with CBS over the 48 Hour title), the second issue was produced between noon, Aug. 27, and noon, Aug. 29.

Then there is San Francisco's Pop-Up Magazine, which skips publishing altogether and opts instead for a live stage performance that is "a love letter to nonfiction," according to Douglas McGray, its editor in chief. The event has been something of a sensation around town, with the latest "issue," presented Sept. 9, selling out the 900-plus-seat Herbst Theatre in about 20 minutes. The performance follows the structure of a magazine, beginning with Mailbag and other short, front-of-the-book items and moving on to columns and feature articles.

Most of the crew at Longshot and Pop-Up work in media --Madrigal is a senior editor at TheAtlantic.com, while Mr. McGray freelances for The New York Times Magazine and other publications -- so creating magazines in their spare time is akin to physicians who volunteer for Doctors Without Borders on their vacations. It's a passion.

Madrigal and most of his Longshot colleagues are hard wired into a digital lifestyle. But Madrigal told me he relished working face to face with people instead of online, and channeling the "electricity" from Twitter into something more permanent.

Evan Ratliff, who writes for The New Yorker and other magazines, is Pop-Up's story editor. He seeks out new material by writers, filmmakers, photographers and others who can tell a good nonfiction yarn, ideally "the part of the story you would tell people over drinks."

As the media environment becomes more and more dominated by pixels on a screen, the tactile appeal of a printed magazine is undeniable. MagCloud is tapping into what Mignon Khargie, an art director at San Louie, the new all-volunteer San Luis Obispo city magazine, calls the desire for "pet-able objects." "Paper and ink are sensual things," Khargie said.

But as Pop-Up shows, it is not just the physicality -- the strong editorial sensibility and creative passion of great magazines constitute their allure.

"A beautiful thing about magazines is you get to control the context as well as the content," Madrigal said, pointing out that on the Web, readers often encounter articles or blog posts as disembodied one-offs.

Search engines are beautiful things when you are looking for, say, the most widely planted wine grape in Sonoma County (that would be Chardonnay).

But sometimes I want more than results. For that, I subscribe to magazines.

This column also appears in the Bay Area edition of The New York Times.