Decline of the Print Media Re: Boring Lefties

[jbrown72073 at cs.com]

>Around 1910 there was a weekly magazine in this country called Appeal 
to Reason. Can anyone guess its paid circulation? 700,000, with a 
readership of four million.  Think about that, and about the US 
population in 1910. What were the conditions then, and what are the 
conditions now?  In particular, why are our print media so enfeebled 
and impoverished? The Nation is the premier Left magazine, and its 
circulation is 100,000; The Progressive has 30,000, Z magazine has 
20,000. If you add up the circulation of our entire print media 
today, we don't even approach a quarter of what Appeal To Reason had 
90 years ago. And you don't have to go back 90 years. Just go back to 
George Seldes, the legendary radical journalist. He had a wonderful 
newsletter call In Fact. When he stopped publishing in 1947, it had 
150,000 paid subscribers. 

Max Elbaum was just here talking about War Times (those crazy kids, starting a paper these days) and he said that when they decided to crank that up, the post 9-11 problem seemed to be that one group of people--the hooked-in news junkies--were receiving 20 substantive emails a day about Afghanistan, etc., but the vast majority weren't getting anything but TV news or NPR--so they decided there's still an audience for hand-distributed print media.  

I had to agree since the local monthly I co-edit with a humble circulation of 5,000 has been flying out of the racks the last three issues--we can't keep up.  (All three had Iraq war cover stories). From conversations, I've found people are hungry for real news and want better sources on the war. Take my word for it, our prose is not that scintillating, although we do try to not just address other lefties.  And the paper does have a lifelong ban on the word 'plight,' which can't hurt.

Jenny Brown