[lbo-talk] sketching an "anti-economist"

[Jeffrey Fisher]

On 8/21/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Aug 21, 2007, at 1:18 PM, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>
> > Oh, I agree, but as I just said in my response to Doug, better to
> > spend your
> > money on the writers (and editors) than on printing and distribution.
>
> Printing & distribution aren't that expensive. It's editorial product
> and marketing that are expensive. People have come to expect
> everything on the web to be free, which except for business
> journalism and porn, means downward pressures on quality.

Interesting. It  makes me wonder why, if the major American newsweeklies
are  spending so much money on product, they suck so bad. Is it that they
spend too much on marketing? And if it's not that expensive, I don't see any
good reason not to do a print weekly, if there's a market for it. OH, wait.
Maybe it's because they have no idea what they're doing.

In any case, unless I'm missing something, we're just back to what we sort
of agreed before: the trick is finding the money.

Could you guesstimate an annual budget for the kind of pub that would be
worth doing? I have a couple of ballpark figures in my head, but I was never
privy to the budgets of the ezines I worked for in the past (except that one
was very small and the other was pretty big).

j