> 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.
But printing and distribution aren't trivial costs. Many new magazines, and most alternative magazines, founder on the shoals of distro and printing.
Printing can be a more predictable cost. Costs will go up over time, but you generally know how much it will cost to print X number of copies with Y number of pages and that it will cost Z to print more copies. In recent years paper costs have increased, but generally paper costs don't go up overnight like gasoline prices.
For small alternative magazines, printing costs cna be a huge hurdle. I want to launch a new magazine and the main obstacle is finding several thousand dollars to pay for printing costs.
Printing costs may be a known quantity, but they can become as issue for even the best-run magazines. For example, the last issue of Punk Planet, which is ceasing publication, has an article about how the collapse of the IPA hurt small magazines like Bitch and Kitchen Sink. If your distributor isn't paying you, then you can get into trouble quickly with the printer.
Which leads us to distribution. This is a much tougher challenge for new magazines. If you want to get newstand distribution, you have to convice a distributor to carry your magazine so that the bookstore chains *may* carry it. There aren't many distributors out there and the alternative press can tell you horror stories about the collapse of distros like Fine Print, IPA, and Clamor. If you decide to go direct to bookstores, that's a time-consuming task. Another big unglamourous cost is fulfillment. This is one of those unpleasant tasks that major magazines outsource to fulfillment companies. Going to the post office, opening letters, doing data entry, taking phone calls, and going to the bank are time-consuming tasks involved with fulfillment. If you hire people to do this for you, there is another cost.
Alternative newspapers face a bigger headache: how to get frequent newspaper distributed to outlets around a city. One example of this being done successfully (as far as I know) is the NYC Independent. It's REALLY hard to find volunteers to drive around and drop off newspapers. So you'll have to pay a few hippies with vans to do this for you.
Yes, marketing and editorial product are expensive, even if you are doing an alternative magazine. The great thing about the Internet is that it has democratized writing and publishing, but you still have to pay for good writing. This is a fact that became obvious to me after years of being involved with alternative media, including Indymedia.
Infoshop News pays one writer to provide us with an investigative article each month. If I had more money, I'd pay more writers for content. We do get lots of excellent content contributed to us for free, but then we aren't Indymedia. The Indymedia project was supposed to revolutionize the left alternative media. It did to some extent, but most Indymedia sites are dominated by content that is of lower quality than blogs. The good ones have reporting, but most of that involves accounts of activist protests.
One of the amusing things about some of the bloggers sounding triumphant over the "old media" cutting back on staff and content is that the same bloggers will have no content to blog about. Most of them don't produce much of anything that is original and interesting.
People have come to expect everything on the web to be free, but this is an attitude that goes back to the 90s. I know I've been aware of this problem going back at least ten years. When I was working for Science magazine, this attitude was discussed in meetings. The magazine at that time was very nervous about putting it content on the web, even though access to most of the content requires a subscription. We got even more nervous when it came time to provide institutional access to the magazine. There were big questions about how to price institutional subscriptions. The association and magazine were very worried about subscribers dropping their subscriptions when they were able to get online access for free through their institution. From what I understand, after I left, the magazine did lose a substantial number of subscribers.
I see the flip side of this attitide at Infoshop News. It's gotten much harder to raise money from our readers, whose numbers have increased over the years. People really believe that if it is free to access, then it must cost nothing to produce. They think that because we don't have to pay printing and postage costs, then we don't need the money. They know that the project is run by volunteers, but they are hostile to the idea of donating to pay staff such as myself, or even writers who do investigative journalism.
This attitude coming from supposed comrades is probably the single most depressing thing I've ever experienced during my years of being involved with the left. I had assumed years ago that people would see the need for a quality independent news and information service and would support it. Over 90% of our readers never contribute anything financially to our project. This is probably similar to other progressive news sites, but I would think that even CounterPunch and Common Dreams have a better donation rate than we do.
But the attitude about everything being free is common across all Internet users. This attitude even manifested itself several years ago when the first "open" science journals were being started. Ironically, these open journals were started as an alternative to the price-gouging Elsevier print journals, but I hear lately that librarians are complaining about the costs of open access journals being passed on to libraries!
Some of those involved in the early stages of the open STM journals had this idea that the publication costs would be cheap, because you didn't have to pay for printing, postage and fulfillment. Well, guess what! Printing a journal involves many costs beyond paying the printer!
An alternative the The Economist sounds good to me.
Chuck0