I don’t watch much television these days, but “Modern Family” has turned me into a couch potato once again. This quirky and offbeat sitcom turns commonplace daily life into comic romp and holds up an embarrassingly familiar mirror while doing so.

In one episode, the awkward but lovable Phil Dunphy is hoping to get an iPad, which will be released on his birthday: “It’s like Steve Jobs and God got together to say: We love you, Phil.” His eager wife offers to get in line before the crack of dawn to purchase Phil’s coveted “doohickey,” to which Phil disparagingly replies, “Doohickey, Elly May?”

It’s hard to believe that the iPad was released a mere seven months ago and that we, like Phil Dunphy, have become frenetic early adopters. We’ve spent the summer beta testing software for creating interactive-publishing experiences. No one really knows how to measure the success of this new “doohickey” yet, but it’s already saturated the market more quickly than either the iPhone or the iPod. What is clear, however, is that the iPad’s early success is a watershed moment for the digital-media revolution.

Besides our early adoption of the iPad, we have also spent 2010 restructuring our company from a traditional publishing model into something more akin to a digital creative agency. The heart of publishing will always beat strongly at Journey, but 2010 marks the year we embraced new ways we can tell stories digitally.

And that’s not just on the iPad. By embracing media strategy and content strategy, we’re exploring the pros and cons of new media developments so that we can give our clients informed advice for their communication needs. That means we’re becoming media-agnostic: approaching each project without a commitment to any specific media, whether traditional print solutions, online browser experiences or immersive tablet applications.

After all, as much as we love technology — and we do — our real passion is bringing design vision and journalistic curiosity to storytelling. Just this fall we launched Story Matters — which you are reading right now — and it is quickly becoming our content and media playground, a place to experiment and to learn. Even to fail.

While we’re asking new questions, we’re also asking the same questions as when we began almost 20 years ago: Why do people love stories so much? Why does beauty fill us with such longing and hope? And how do these ideas connect us in community and make us more human?

That “Modern Family” episode ends with a euphoric Phil blowing out virtual birthday candles on a shiny new iPad. And we at Journey share Phil’s enthusiasm when he asks, “Who’s ready for the first day of the rest of their lives?”