When we started The Progressive Populist 12 years ago the Web was in its infancy. We started it as a monthly tabloid in 1995 with less than $60,000 in capital and switched to twice-monthly in 1999, but I didn't draw a salary for seven years. (We expected it to be profitable within two years.) We had one advantage, that my brothers operate a twice-weekly newspaper in northwest Iowa so they were able to handle the printing and circulation, so we maintained low overhead.
If you're not familiar with The Progressive Populist, we run syndicated columnists such as Jim Hightower, Amy Goodman, Ralph Nader and Alex Cockburn (the columns The Nation doesn't run), as well as other freelancers and guest-writing economists such as Mark Weisbrot, Dean Baker and Max Sawicky. We do publish a bunch of good writers but we don't spend a lot of money. (However, the Economist historically has been a tight-fisted publication, too. If I'm not mistaken, one of the reasons they don't give bylines is that they used "stringers" who are employed by other publications.)
While the Populist is doing well today, I don't know nowadays if I would try to start a print publication on my own, because of the increasing difficulty of getting people to pay for something, most of which they can get on the Web for free. I do think it would be worthwhile for the AFL-CIO or some other institution to support a weekly left version of the Economist, but I think the The American Prospect, which started out as a fortnightly, was an attempt to do something like that, until they throttled back to monthly publication.
Time Warner and Bush's Postal Regulatory Commission did combine to screw independent publishers -- and I appreciate The Nation leading the fight for independent publishers. Our new rates are about 32 cents to mail a 24-page tabloid at the periodical rate, which is about a 25% increase. Bulk mail rates to send out sample copies went up 37%, to about 44 cents. Our printing costs are about 20 cents a copy, for a 24-paid tabloid with four-color art on 4 pages.
As for how much it would cost to do it right, I agree with Doug that $750,000 to $1 million a year would get a new publication started. Building circulation is painfully slow, and you would not get the serious attention of advertisers probably until you were over 300,000 circulation, but if the AFL-CIO would just let you send it to its members for the first couple years, you could claim a circulation base up to 15 million. That would be the third-largest magazine in the country, behind the AARP publications. It would cost a lot to print and mail each issue to millions of people, but you ought to be able to sell ads to pay the bills with that kind of base.
-- Jim Cullen
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