You can take the editor out of the NFP

The objective of the intro to magazine publishing class I’m taking is—unsurprisingly—to launch one’s own magazine. The online lectures are targeted toward creating a for-profit magazine, one supported not only by single-copy sales, subscriptions, and advertising, but also by product tie-ins and “advertorials,” in short, a magazine like most of the dwindling pool you see, and sometimes buy, at your newsstand. The introductory course lecture insists that while these are dark times for the magazine industry all is not gloom. Out of crisis comes opportunity—for that sighted entrepreneur with a brilliant and ruthless new business model.

So naturally I chose to start a Socialist magazine on the model of the Masses, or the Anvil, or the old Partisan Review. Worse, since I didn’t think such a venture could sustain itself in this day and age through sales and subs, I decided that Exposition magazine (I went meta) would be a not-for-profit, dependant upon institutional subventions and grants. One may be forgiven for concluding that I have learned absolutely nothing from personal experience (particularly given my guilty admiration for slick magazines that turn a profit). However, I worried the course would not be worth the tuition if I didn’t apply what I learned to something I might actually consider doing.

The instructor—whom we will call Steve (not his real name)—says that, thanks to the savage realities of the Great Recession, the editorial and business sides of magazines are closer than they ever have been, and I believe this is true. At TriQuarterly we didn’t necessarily think ourselves immune to economic reality, but rather believed that nurturing a literary culture that may not otherwise survive in a market subjugated to the bottom line was precisely the mission of a university-based literary magazine.

Cast to the barbarities of the market, one might conclude that magazines in this era cannot support themselves primarily on advertisement. Not necessarily true says Steve. Maxim once boasted a sell-through rate of 70%, thus inspiring a new maxim: it is not possible to support a magazine through advertising without feeling that one needs to take a shower at the end of the day.

When Margaret Anderson, the legendary editor of the Little Review, found—having embraced anarchism and published the likes of Emma Goldman and John Reed—that no one would advertize in her magazine, she began publishing brief inserts on pages where advertising would normally appear. Of this nature:

Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company ought to advertise something, though I don’t know just what. The man I interviewed made such a face when I told him we were radical that I haven’t had the courage to go back and pester him for the desired full-page. The Carson-Pirie attitude toward change of any sort is well-known—I think resent even having to keep pace with the change in fashions.

It may be worth a try. Steve also says publishers need to be open to profitable new models or perhaps not-for-profitable new models.