In about five minutes, I compiled a magazine on the fabled Blackwing 602 pencil. As with everything in Flipboard, the app chose a photo for the cover page (which I could optionally override) and laid out the interior pages; the most recent items I added always appeared first, so anyone who perused the magazine would see them.
It’s easy to come up with ideas for making this magazine-constructing tool more powerful — for instance, it might let you add feeds as well as individual items, so a magazine would update itself even if you ignored it. (Right now, a magazine stays frozen in time unless you update it.) Mike McCue, Flipboard’s co-founder and CEO, told me that the company is considering such features. It’s also working on a web-based, pro-level editor — which won’t be available to all users, at least at first — for manually rearranging the articles in a magazine.