Fund Independent Media

Posted October 3rd, 2008 by Jen Angel

On Sept. 15, editors at Bitch Magazine announced that they needed to raise $40K in one month to survive a financial crisis.

It’s October – and where are they? Well, they met their goal in three days, and today the tally is at $55K. Thanks to everyone who has – and will continue to – support Bitch in these weeks.

Is this a victory? Yes and no. While Bitch has bested this latest challenge thanks to years of building a supportive community, they, like all magazines of their size, face a continued uphill battle. This is probably not the last emergency appeal we will see.

The past two years have seen many magazines closing their doors: LiP, Punk Planet, Kitchen Sink, and even online outlets like The NewStandard. The magazine that I co-founded in 1999, Clamor, folded in December of 2006. These magazines are not folding out of mismanagement or reckless risk-taking by their publishers. Collectively, independent publications face monumental challenges like the rising cost of postage (and a tiered rate structure that favors large-scale publishers), increased cost of paper, and the changing nature of readership as more people get their content – and community – online. Heck, even the New York Times with all of its capitalist brainpower can’t figure out how to get people to pay for online content. How can we expect magazines, websites, and other independent media outlets to have figured out how to “monetize” the Web?

And this begs the question: How can we, as consumers and producers, support this media and prevent these crises? What can we do that will allow media outlets to focus on making the content we know we can’t get anywhere else?

For starters, we can support Bitch and every other outlet we love — even if we can get their content for free online. And, we can give that support generously and unabashedly, not just now, but every time media outlets ask us for money.

Activist and media scholar Sut Jhally had this to say on the subject:

“Independent media have been severely under-funded relative to how much individuals give to the corporate media. If you have cable, and I include myself in this when I think about where I spend my money, my media money, if you have cable or satellite TV or a connection to the internet, you are directly funding corporate media. People think nothing of spending $100 or more a month on cable and the internet. And yet independent media has to beg to get a few scraps. I just did the math on this. It’s sometimes really good to fantasize—fantasy is always a prerequisite for social change—Let’s presume you could get a million people on the Left to take media issues seriously. That’s actually, given that MoveOn has three and a half million members and a lot of other sites have membership in the millions, that is not an unreasonable thing. Let’s say you could get a million people to rethink their media consumption and their media expenditures. Let’s say you could get a million people to spend $100 a month on independent media. If you don’t have a calculator, I’ll do the math for you. That is 1.2 billion dollars. If we act together and if we make the media something that is central to how we think about politics, think of what that would make possible, and how we would aid progressive forces in this country. Why don’t we do that? Because media issues are still seen as secondary.”

I think I’m going to go right now and renew my subscriptions to Bitch, make/shift, Left Turn, Yes!, and The Sun. And the next time my public radio station comes begging, I will give money then, too. Because independent media is important to me, and I hope it is to you, too.

- Jen Angel is the former publisher of Clamor Magazine. She blogs on media and activism at jenangel.wordpress.com.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 at 9:53 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.