And you will know independent publishing by the trail of dead

HeartattaCk (closed)

I don't get it. I have been at this 19 years.
Never turned a profit once.
NOT ONCE!

Print runs of a few hundred or even a thousand are very different from print runs of 15,000 every other month and a staff of ten, you know? Technically, FoA made money last year, but it was so small an amount we didn't notice it until doing the books at the end of the year. It's not something we can afford to do full-time yet, even though we do - because Aaron, Kate and I are insane. I have a feeling you are in our boat. Or padded room, as it were.

Totally blanked it on HeartattaCk--added it to the list.

Alan, I totally get what you are saying.

But I have a difficult time downplaying what we do based simply on scale. The personal networks and extended information channels that zines create are the actual counter-weights to the disproportionate control authoritative business exerts over most infomatic systems.

In other words, I see the real power based in the small scale, for it is within the accessibility and direct lines of communication, inspiration, and production that we challenge the hegemony of the depersonalized mass media.

While the larger indies are important to the extent that they sneak past the front desk guards stationed in the lobby of dominant culture-capitalism, they quickly assimilate the business-model impersonalized distance that excludes more than it includes.

...Is actually going to continue as a bi-annual print publication, but bypass the newsstand distribution and switch to more of a long-form, "book-like" format, so...still in print technically, but in a much different form.

my understanding is that Herbivore's strategy is to publish books, not magazines. There are some fundamental differences in form there--I consider it the end of a print periodical, and a great one at that. They're also switching to a monthly web-based magazine.

yes yes yes

Rockrgrl -- end of '05.

It's getting quieter and quieter. So which other music mags are worth reading?

Dear subscribers, blog readers, and friends:

After over a decade of running Stay Free!, I'm sad to say that I've
decided to stop publishing the magazine. We're going to do one more
issue and then publish more or less exclusively on the web. There
are a number of reasons, but the over-arching theme is burnout --
burnout coupled with financial woes.

Selling ads has gotten all but impossible. Indie record labels and
small book publishers -- our bread and butter -- are in the toilet.
Ditto newsstand sales. No one goes to book stores looking for zines
anymore; the nerds are all online. And while I once welcomed the
challenge of making things work on a tight budget, I just can't bring
myself to beg another distributor to pay us the money they owe -- or
to beg more local stores to let us leave out free magazines.

Stay Free! has been the world to me; nearly every good friend of mine
I have I met through the zine. But I'm no longer a twentysomething
eager and willing to spend every waking moment working on projects. I
don't know when exactly I got sick of not having a personal life but
the weight of constantly working really took it's toll last year.
While Stay Free! shall continue on the web (ie the blog), there's not
going to be as much of it as there was a couple of years ago.

Obviously, there's the matter of owing subscribers for issues they'll
never receive. I'm going to look into handing that money to a similar
publication (Punk Planet? Mother Jones?), so you will get *something.*

The street date for the next and last issue -- architecture and
obsolescence -- is still up the air. I was hoping to have it out in
April or May, but that's looking unlikely at this point.

We are alternately considering publishing a "best of" in book form.
If any of you know publishers who'd be interested in working with us,
please let me know.

With much love and sincerest thanks for your support,

carrie

that one hurts. Stay Free was a magazine that I always looked up to.

Added it to the list. Also added LiP, which folded late last year.

Mismanagement and Incompetence

Satya magazine is calling it a day. They weren't a newsstand magazine, they did subscriptions and were free in NYC, and were at some animal rightsy type outlets around the country. They were doing some really amazing work and this is definitely a blow to the AR movment and the other social justice movements they reported on. They were a big presense and events around the country as well.

I'm not sure what I'm calling our new publishing model. We're doing two print editions a year that seem more like books to me, but we still have some partnerships with advertisers we dig. So maybe they are magazines? The content is more long form essay, theme based, kinds of stuff as opposed to what we were doing. Maybe it's a journal?

Then we're doing a monthly online edition for subscribers with new media stuff like films and music and forums and whatnot. That is going really well so far, one month in and we'll probably run 4 times the amount of content we were able to do with just print.

Anyhoo, I hope the body count gets no larger.

Added Satya Josh, thanks--and sorry to hear about it.

And let me just say for anyone that's curious about it, Herbivore's new online edition is amazing. Looks so good and reads even better.

I'm the editor of an independent zine in the UK - Black Velvet - and I know exactly how hard it is. One thing that annoys me is how many people scan articles online - so then others just don't bother ordering/buying a copy. Isn't there anything we can do to stop people scanning?

I've been publishing Black Velvet for 13 years and have never made a profit. Someone just emailed me who I hadn't heard from in a while and was like 'Are you able to do Black Velvet full time yet?' I'm like 'Damn, I wish!' Chance would be a fine thing. I totally sympathise and know what the defunct zines' editors went through. In the UK it's hard to even get or keep independent zines in stores. A few independent stores stock zines and are great, but even then, a bunch of them have closed down because they too couldn't survive. Major stores like Borders are harder to get into and I'm guessing then you'd have to sell a lot to stay there. At the moment I can afford to do what I do, but I can totally imagine at some point in the future maybe having to admit defeat and go online. I hope it doesn't happen for a long while though. It will be a sad day when it happens.

Love, Chicago, a zine dedicated to local indie/DIY artists and businesses, is relaunching our Web site, www.lovechicago.org, which will totally replace the print version, which debuted in '05.

We hope to have it updated by May with all-new content from our tattoo ish.

With overwhelming print costs and lackluster distribution options, going online as an e-zine was the obvious option and we couldn’t be more excited about its potential. Online makes sense for DIYs, I think, because it's cheap to operate, free to users, updated more frequently and a no-brainer to distribute.

So while our print version is dead for now, the Web is our new frontier.

And Amplifier's gone (this sure didn't help the magazine's cause.)

can't say that one's a shocker. Still, he made a bad move born from desperation.

for everyone who isn't among the few folks in the know, labels consistently pitch ad purchasing against coverage, but when it goes the other way (mags saying "hey, we're dying here, throw us a bone") everyone acts shocked. i don't agree with it--it's not ethical journalism, it's payola in print. i don't like reading that exchange, and don't think it was handled properly at all, but what the fuck--i've spent years spending money and covering tons of releases for labels that won't even dignify me with a response to my emails; they'd prefer to ignore me and sic their pack of outsourced PR wolves on me. i'm getting tired of it. everyone is getting tired of it. the only mid-size indie mags making it are turning into 90-page stacks of one-sheets.

and dan, you can add both "big wheel" and "under the volcano" to that list. big wheel went out a few months ago, actually, and under the volcano just released their 96th and final issue.

"the only mid-size indie mags making it are turning into 90-page stacks of one-sheets."

God, how depressingly true.

It's hard for the independent music and publishing communities to retain credibility as being any different from the major label/mainstream media systems when the editorial in the mid-size indie mags is virtually identical every month, with an alarming percentage of mags running cover stories of the same damned artist any particular month. Do you mean to tell me, that with thousands of CD's released any month, and the millions of bands active at any given time, that only the same 5-10 seen in all the major indie music mags have done anything of note during any particular month? And that those writers of the mags just happened to perfectly paraphrase the artist's one sheet?

hey, i'm new here. my name is justin, i publish a zine/mag from philly called wonka vision.

just a few more RIP zines to add:
Law of Inertia (now Reignition Recordings)
Rockpile (closed)
Hanging Like A Hex (putting out their FINAL issue this summer)

i've been having this conversation seemingly every day regarding zines fading away, labels spending their money elsewhere, etc.

just as some background: i started wonka in my bedroom when i was seventeen and have been publishing for ten years come this summer. i've been doing it full time now for five years, breaking even and at this point paying our employees [something] each issue. for 37 issues now i have made it a point to stay away from the typical music mag template and in the past two years, we've cut our music section in half as it now encompasses maybe 25% of the book. this wasn't intentional and only happened through natural progression and evolution of the magazine and it's staff's interests. whether it was an entire issue on toys, film, politics, or a band we love like waxwing, who has probably not sold more than 10K records, we have evolved and let our interest in photography and various forms of art steal the spotlight from the music zine we began as.

moving into 2007 we've had to conciously gravitate back towards music and while this isn't an unatural move by any means whatsoever, [14 of our 37 covers have bands on them] it's becoming more and more apparent that the rules have changed and to stay in print these days we are competing against pay-to-play online sites. huh?

jackson, check mate. it's the ETERNAL struggle of art vs. business when you [like myself] are attempting to fufill a life-long dream with your magazine. more and more every single issue labels are subtley pulling the pay-to-play card and over the years i've REFUSED to play it. we feature bands BECAUSE WE LOVE THEM. we review records because we want to. i've had some labels mince words as of late and basically say "do a feature, get our money". THIS DID NOT HAPPEN 3, 4, & 5 YEARS AGO.

now as you said jackson, let's flip it around. sometime last year, i sent out a press release, an open-letter to record labels and publicists announcing that our record review section would encompass our advertisers records as a direct means of supporting them. a thank you for supporting us if you will. oddly enough, the same folks who had NO PROBLEM telling me they needed a feature in order to spend money on an ad, were now the same people complaining when announced this.

the bottom line is this...it's becoming increasingly difficult to be an independent magazine publisher who doesn't have some major label budget backing them up. the facts are utterly disenchanting; in 1994 there were 355 magazine wholesalers and 180,000 retailers who carried publications. in 2004 these numbers have declined to, 115 mag wholesalers and 125,000 retailers. this is a 69% loss in wholesale and a 31% loss in retail.

it's getting cold out there.

Thanks for the additions to the list and for the insight.

Has just "suspended publication":
http://www.cherrylane.com/wwr/index.asp

added them too. This list is getting WAY TOO LONG folks!

From the MPLS Star Tribune

Pulse of the Twin Cities, a long-struggling alternative weekly, will stop publishing within the month, founder and publisher Ed Felien told the paper's staff Wednesday. Felien declined to offer details, saying, "I will write a statement in our [next] issue" -- Pulse's 10th anniversary edition.

"It's been a wonderful run; I've loved every minute of it and hated every minute of it," Felien said, adding that Pulse "has never been financially rumunerative."

A longtime community activist and former Minneapolis City Council member, he launched Pulse in 1997 after the Twin Cities Reader was shut down. It faced a firmly entrenched rival in City Pages as well as new competition from the likes of the Star Tribune's weekly tabloid Vita.mn. Southside Pride, Felien's 17-year-old publication, will continue to publish, and he suggested that Pulse might continue to appear online in some form.

Yeah, I think we're going to see a wave of city weeklies closing. They're ALL hurting--Craiglist has killed their cash cow.

Well,you know what we've gotta do...
Write our own online independent magazine.
Oh, my, what an idea.

Little Miss Disaster, Living so much faster.

status magazine (longtime indie mag based out of california, used to be tied into status inc record label) went out of business

This is a valid point, but I feel this argument has its natural limits. For me, it all comes down to geography. Your reasoning mostly holds true for zines and distros that have a sizable following that's concentrated within a particular region, especially where there's a relatively thriving independent culture to build on: southern California, or the Pacific Northwest, or the Tri-State area.

But if, like me, you're in a developing/Third World country, the financial cost of maintaining "direct lines of communication, inspiration, and production" is just too expensive, given the cost of postage/courier services, as well as international currency exchange rates. Even the surface mail option is pricy, relative to the lagtimes involved.

Complicating matters further, we don't have full access to PayPal in the Philippines (supposedly because of fears that it will be abused for money laundering purposes).

All of this means that...

For people in my situation, larger indies remain the most viable, accessible way of consuming North American (and to a certain extent, European) independent publications -- even if that means picking up remaindered copies at discount prices from specialized news-stands, several months after their initial release.

They may feel slightly more "impersonalized", in terms of format, but they don't feel nearly as hard to obtain as zines with smaller runs. (Besides, mags like Bitch, Bust, Venus, Adbusters, and indeed Punk Planet usually include personalized web-based contact info for individual contributors, who usually have their own blogs for more hands-on, first-person type content, anyway.)

And that's why I feel like this latest trend is just going to lead to more localized/regionalized (and therefore, less global) scope for independent culture.

The only possible good that I see coming out of this Ameri-centric wave of cancellations is that it will hopefully inspire a larger number of people to start medium-scale zines with the specific intent of building networks in previously disconnected geographical regions (in my case, South-East Asia).

And this is now becoming a real possibility, since punk/hardcore/indie bands from the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia are starting to tour together (albleit often with the support of major labels or corporate sponsors). Eventually, some of us will decide to make a concerted effort to document this, with a pan-regional mindset.

Now imagine that happening consistently in *every* region that has kids with the passion -- and disposable income -- to support it...

Ipis, good points made--I think that regional zines are still a real possibility, especially if you're able to piggyback onto touring bands like you propose.

I've (belatedly) added Status to the list, BTW.

Added Punk Planet. It's like I just carved my own tombstone.

Today Alternative Press Review announced that they're folding.

As an editor it is really sad to see so many zines that are closing down or that have closed down. Managing a zine, it is hard not to worry about the future for zines and print media. It really sucks that the internet has taken over not only our lives but they way of advertising etc. I always thought it was better to have something in my hands to keep for life then read sonmething on the internet only for it to be deleted a few months down the road. I wish more people would advertise in zines to keep them running so they wouldnt have to go to e-zines. Maybe one day things will change.

I'd like to add Hope magazine to the list, though it died a few years ago. That is so symbolic. Hope died. Instead of all the doom and gloom you get from other news sources, they reported the good stuff. Apparently, no one wanted to read that.
I was especially disappointed because I had just received a subscription as a graduation gift from my college (College of the Atlantic), along with the rest of the graduating class. After a few issues, I was hooked. I knew they were having financial woes, but I didn't expect it when I read this: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0910-03.htm
They replaced my subscription with Ode Magazine, which is also a great source of hope. But it's not the same thing.
This is all so depressing for me, because I own an independent bookstore. The store has been open for 12 years, but I just bought it in January. I knew the outlook was not good, but it is a constant struggle to stay open. And I've been watching my zine section shrink. The first issue of Punk Planet I read was #78. I just read my first - and apparently last - issue of Kitchen Sink. And just yesterday, a customer asked where Herbivore was, then today, I see their name on the list (kinda). I've heard about McSweeney's woes, too. I have a few loyal zine readers. But where are all the people who SHOULD be in my store reading them?!

skratch magazine is folding the print publication and going to be online only

i don't know if anyone checks this anymore, but Devil In The Woods (DIW) is no longer a print magazine, online only