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

[Jeffrey Fisher]

On 8/23/07, J Cullen <jcullen at austin.rr.com> wrote:
>
> >On Mon, 20 Aug 2007, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> >
> >>  On the upside, if you only want it to be online, that's relatively
> cheap.
> >
> >If you want to pay decent writers decently -- and you're going to have to
> >to attract them -- and train and pay skilled editors to edit them, that's
> >going to cost just as much running a magazine like the Nation and
> probably
> >more.  What you save on paper you'll be spending on quality.  The
> >economist is better than most magazines because they spend a lot more on
> >those things.  And a well made, well-maintained website costs money too.
> >As would a skilled publicist, since the whole point of such a venture
> >would be to make ideas known outside the circle that already discusses
> it.
> >
> >In short, quality and influence costs money.
> >
> >Michael
>
> 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.
> <snip>
>
> 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.

Very interesting. Thanks, Jim.

Pointing to the AFL-CIO is especially intriguing. I just don't know if they
could get away with turning people like us loose. But maybe they could, if
we're targeting what I think we're targeting.

j