No shortage of experts exists proclaiming that print is dying. Magazines in particular are the polar ice cap of the publishing world, receding at an alarming rate in the face of the superheated Internet. We are told there are no readers anymore – just "eyeballs" and "clicks."

On the scorched earth of this media battlefield (if you'll allow me an old-era print metaphor) littered with the burned-out shells of once mighty magazines, one man is launching a new entry. What's more, he's chosen to roll it out in possibly the least reader-friendly location in the United States – Los Angeles.

It's a city renowned for its municipal attention-deficit disorder, where few people have lingered over anything since the O.J. Simpson trial – and that, of course, was televised. In this town, "reader" is a job, someone who summarizes scripts, the idea presumably being that no one would read voluntarily.

So who is the nut launching a publication in what, if the experts are to be believed, may be the most hostile time for print since Gutenberg? That would be Jay Levin, a middle-aged man with a medium build and a New York accent tempered by nearly 30 years in Los Angeles. His new monthly magazine is called RealTALK LA.

Mr. Levin is remarkably soft-spoken – the antithesis of the caricatured cigar-chomping editor who is once again being imprinted upon us by this summer's arbiter of cultural imagery: "Spider-Man 3."

He is a self-described "pragmatic visionary," with an activist bent and a critical eye. That criticism is often focused on the media, and their failure to serve their readers.

Now Levin is putting his own theories about serving the reader to the ultimate test. Will he prove to be savant or simple failure?

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Born and raised in New York City, Levin was lured to L.A. in 1978 by, of all things, a porn king – Larry Flynt. "It was just after he became a born-again Christian," says Levin. "He was a rebel publisher looking for something to do with his energy." Mr. Flynt bought a small alternative paper, the Los Angeles Free Press, and asked Levin to "make it the Village Voice of L.A." Their partnership lasted just 10 weeks, at which time Flynt fired Levin over editorial control – Levin says he insisted that the sex ads be dropped. One week later, Flynt was shot in an assassination attempt, and the Free Press, which had been losing money, was shuttered.

The paper was gone, but, according to Levin, not the need for it. "The L.A. Times was doing a terrible job of covering the city," he says.

Nine months later, he had found backers to hire a staff largely culled from the former Free Press and cobbled together the first issue of an alternative paper called LA Weekly. It was 24 pages, with virtually no advertising. According to longtime staff writer Steven Mikulan, Levin pulled together the disparate elements of an urban-hippie sensibility with a young club-scene set. Although Levin was sometimes ridiculed for being Quixotic and New Age-ish, the mix found a considerable audience.

"It took someone who was obsessed ... for L.A. to have a literary paper," says Mr. Mikulan. "He was in the right place at the right time."

Levin ran the paper for 13 years. He sold it in 1991 to, appropriately enough, the Village Voice for $10 million. From there, he set off on a series of ventures that included launching a television channel, consulting, pursuing a master's degree in spiritual psychology, and founding a nonprofit to serve L.A.'s poor.

His nonprofit work and a consulting job with what used to be called a "minority-owned" chain of newspapers (there is no "majority" ethnic or racial group in L.A. anymore) led to a realization: "I could see tremendous growth in the middle and professional classes. I had a vision to create a different model for a city magazine."

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