Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough | The New York Times, Dec. 3, 2022
ioi_ab's bookmarks 2022-12-05
Summary:
"...Many literary magazines, like The Paris Review and The Drift, operate as nonprofits. With backing from a foundation and a private donor, The Dial announced itself as a new, nonprofit literary magazine last week. And, as their names suggest, publications like The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review, and The Kenyon Review are backed by universities or tied to university presses.
Journals exclusively funded by corporations, benefactors or universities will always be “deeply vulnerable to someone’s final decision,” Freeman said.
Earlier this year The Believer, a small but respected literary magazine, was sold by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to a company that hoped to make money on the site by posting content intended to draw clicks and online ads. The magazine had not been self-sustaining, but it had an outsize influence in the literary world. The Believer Festival, for example, helped to turn Las Vegas into an unlikely literary hub.
After much uproar in the literary world, The Believer was sold back to its original publisher, McSweeney’s, and scheduled to relaunch this month in San Francisco.
One funding alternative, Freeman said, could be a “communitarian” model where editors are small-scale investors, raise money collectively and develop a self-sustaining financial structure. The long-running short story magazine One Story is an example..."