Friday, May 15, 2009, 12:11 PM
Music, Atlanta, Stop the Presses
By Kevin Moreau
Paste magazine: Don't stop the presses
Another grim indicator of the recession’s impact on print media: On May 14, Decatur-based Paste magazine, dedicated to highlighting “signs of life in music, film and culture,” asked its readers for help in weathering a particularly rough economic patch.
(Full disclosure: I contributed a handful of CD reviews to Paste back in 2004 and 2005. I also interviewed some of the folks there for a Sunday Paper article on the magazine’s Rock N Reel festival a few years back, and have maintained a friendly, if infrequent, relationship with the magazine since.)
To compensate for dwindling ad revenues, Paste has cut costs (including, according to local blogger Tessa Horehled at Drive a Faster Car, implementing 20 percent pay cuts), and predicts it will “emerge in good shape” in the long run. In the meantime, however, it finds itself “critically low on cash.” To make it through this short-term crisis, staffers have launched a “Campaign to Save Paste,” asking readers for a one-time cash donation.
While such direct appeals are commonplace in the world of nonprofits and independent media outlets like college radio stations, public television and National Public Radio, they’re more rare, but not entirely without precedent, in the for-profit arena.
In the ’70s, Ted Turner famously asked viewers in Charlotte, N.C., for contributions to his struggling television station there, reportedly reaping $25,000 in donations. According to Patrick Parsons’ book “Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television,” Turner later repaid every donor at 6 percent interest.
More recently, in April of 2002, Marietta-based Top Shelf Productions issued a plea for help via e-mail after its graphic novel distributor filed for Chapter 11, owing the specialty comic book publisher more than $100,000, enough to send the small company into bankruptcy itself.
In the e-mail, publisher Chris Staros asked supporters to order books from Top Shelf’s Web site in a last-ditch effort to ward off disaster. By the end of the day, Staros had received more than 200 phone orders and more than 850 e-mail and online orders, saving the company from collapse.
I believe readers responded to Top Shelf, and will respond to Paste, because both offer a uniqueness of content and perspective, and that people are willing to support such publications, even (and especially) given an Internet that constantly recycles and regurgitates information from somewhere else.
I encourage you to visit Paste’s Web site (www.pastemagazine.com) and make a donation if you’re so inclined. Even more so, I encourage you to continue to support those publishers and publications (including, yes, The Sunday Paper) that offer content you can’t find anywhere else.
These are the kinds of print outlets I believe will survive, and even thrive, in the new media landscape. We'll keep doing our part here at SP, eschewing nationally syndicated content to deliver voices, viewpoints and stories that are uniquely ours.
Meanwhile, if you're interested, my friend Matthew Ryan has posted a heartfelt call to arms for valuable print journalism here. It's worth a read.
Peace, and rock on.
As a product of the digital age I must say that the stimulus overload in all areas of journalism, television, computers and everything in between has made it difficult to find quality or even relate to a publication.
I have spent many years in the Matrix but I think I am part of a growing group of people that find keeping up with the internet is an exercise in futility. It's like a second job or third in my case.
I think twitter is going to be the demise of social networking. It requires you to be connected 24/7 to have a clue what is going on and if you tune out even for a second you have to sift through mountains of crap to find your way back in. It lacks relevance and if you are like me you want a history of the good parts, forget trying to find the day you had an awesome tweet session with somebody.
I feel like I have gone full circle and have been spit out on the other side. I find myself reaching for a paper because I know the information in it has been reviewed or at least thought about. The paper doesn't vibrate in my pocket or ding or scroll past me a million miles an hour. It sits there waiting for me to take it in.
Maybe I'm just getting old but I think you guys are on to something.
I like seeing the comic revival and I hope they make it back into the paper. We could use some new super heroes.
Let's retire Family Circle and Garfield and whoever. How bout some Political cartoonists that make you cringe. Crazy Covers that people hold on to (yall got that covered)
Absent all that I just hope you guys stay the course while all the crap sinks to the bottom of the barrel where it belongs. There is a calm in the way you have been writing about the fallout in your own industry that breeds confidence in this reader. The News is the News and you are all over it.
Turner
Monday, May 18, 2009 at 2:07 AM