The day the magazine died
The effects of the complex newsstand industry continue to warp the indie publishing scene as heavy-hitter Punk Planet is forced to close its doors
By Laura Leebove
Published: September 4th, 2007 | 12:50pm
When I walk into the Punk Planet magazine office in late July 2007, it looks like it was hit by a mild tornado. Located on the second floor of a huge warehouse in northern Chicago, there are cardboard boxes scattered everywhere — boxes on shelves holding back issues of the magazine, and boxes on the floor, presumably holding tons of little things that have accumulated in the time the staff has spent there.
The place is filled with character, sporting a weathered couch, U.S. Postal Service bins packed with CDs, and a note on the laser printer that reads “Don’t fuck with this tray. It will only break your heart.” A bulletin board on the wall is nearly empty, and about a week after my visit, the rest of the place will be empty too.
Punk Planet is the latest in the string of indie publications that folded after their distributor, Indy Press Newsstand Services — a sector of the nonprofit Independent Press Association — shut down in spring 2006. The IPA itself announced its bankruptcy in January 2007. Some publications, like Bitch and Mother Jones, made it through the wreck. Others, like Clamor, Kitchen Sink, and as of June, Punk Planet, were able to stay afloat for a while, but eventually had to call it quits.
RIPP
Founded by Dan Sinker in 1994, the bimonthly magazine’s content could never be thrown into a single genre. “We were a music magazine, we were a political magazine, we were an instructional magazine. We were 18 different kinds of magazines folded into a single issue,” Sinker says. “And I think that’s one thing that our readers really connected with was, ‘Hey, here’s a magazine that doesn’t oversimplify my life,’ which I think most independent magazines nowadays don’t do, and definitely mainstream publications don’t do.”
Punk Planet also was founded on the idea of supporting independent culture, which it adhered to until its end. “We decided very, very early on — you know, first issue — to not really define what punk was, but to really define it along the lines of what’s big media and what’s independent media,” co-editor and co-publisher Anne Elizabeth Moore says in the kitchen of her Chicago apartment. “And once that decision was made, the decision to support independent media was really easy.”
That early choice meant not writing about artists on major labels or taking advertisements from large corporations. It also meant reviewing every CD that came through the office, so long as it was not released by or affiliated with a major label, which totaled more than 500 CDs per issue. “That one decision to remove ourselves from the corporate world ended up dictating the entire tone and history and content of the magazine and also sort of paved the way for the entire culture to follow and also be a model for living a non-corporate lifestyle,” Moore says.
Sinker says he can’t be the one to determine his magazine’s impact on the punk scene, but he knows that the staff was involved in moving punk forward by introducing more than just music. And a lot of that had to do with not worrying about whether things were “punky-sounding or fit the musical genre of punk or the fashion of punk,” Moore says. “It just opened up the debate in a really interesting way and that’s a void that’s not gonna be filled anytime soon.”
WHEN DISTRIBUTION GOES WRONG
When Richard Landry, the former executive director of the Independent Press Association, sent an e-mail to IPA members in October 2005 saying that the association was having cash-flow problems, Sinker replied, “Richard, I fully believe that you’ve just written the letter that will kill Punk Planet.” When the IPA announced its bankruptcy less than a year and a half later, Sinker knew it was only a matter of time, and the association left Punk Planet worse off than it first appeared. “We thought we could hold on longer than we did,” he says, “but when the dust cleared from their bankruptcy, we realized that not only had they fucked us over monetarily for a year and a half; they had also done the worst fucking job of actually distributing the magazine that anyone could possibly do.”
The Punk Planet staff did everything possible to fight the situation, including asking readers for help and holding benefit concerts, which minimized the magazine’s debt. Had Punk Planet not paid off its debt at that point, Sinker says the magazine would’ve folded in December 2005. “The problem,” he says, “was that the IPA kept promising that the turn was just about to come and everything was gonna be fine. It turned out to not be true. If there was a mistake we made, it was believing those assholes.” Sinker says he still has not received a settlement check.
Distribution has plagued most independent magazines, but the IPNS/IPA situation has proved to be the most detrimental. The best and most in-depth explanation of Indy Press Newsstand Services shutting down is Ryan Blitstein’s story published in SF Weekly on June 14, 2006.
Clamor, another magazine hurt by the IPNS crash, folded in December 2006, just before the IPA announced its bankruptcy. The quarterly magazine — founded in 1999 by Jen Angel and Jason Kucsma in Bowling Green, Ohio — was about radical culture and politics with a strong focus on social justice. In “Seven Years of Clamor: Challenges, successes, and reflections,” Angel writes that one of the biggest problems with the IPA was that it relied on the conventional magazine-distribution model. What this means is that more magazines were printed than the number sold, the purpose being so bookstores would always have copies in stock. With the use of this model, which is utilized by most publications, tons of unsold magazines get thrown out every issue.
Sinker says IPNS and the IPA shutting down left magazines to work with distributors that don’t understand how to deal with small publications, which, like Angel suggests, results in too many copies of each magazine. “You will eat that paper for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for months and months and months, and they don’t care. They don’t care that they’re essentially putting you out of business by placing print orders that are five times higher than they should be,” Sinker says. “Because that’s just their way of doing things. The types of publications that they are comfortable distributing are OK selling 25 percent of what they actually print. That’s not a model that works for publications like ours.”
In her report, Angel also says that most indie mags don’t have much, if any, extra money, so losing even $500 can be fatal to the business. In the case of IPNS and the IPA, publications lost thousands of dollars. “The lack of a safety net keeps magazines constantly in crisis mode, meaning they spend their time putting out fires instead of innovating or looking forward,” she writes. “As a community, this means we need to step up and support independent media outlets even when they are not in crisis, so they can develop a cushion that will allow them to better deal with short-term problems.”
Magazines that never worked with the IPA have also taken a hit, including Verbicide, a quarterly magazine that, like Punk Planet, covers a wide range of topics, including music, comics, politics, and fiction writing. In the beginning, founder, editor, and co-publisher Jackson Ellis worked with more than 10 individual distros to get Verbicide into stores — the same way Venus Zine and Punk Planet started out — before contracting with Disticor Magazine Distribution Services. Once Indy Press folded, the company's clients were offered new contracts with Disticor, a Canadian-based outfit that handles transactions among all the smaller distribution accounts.
However, Ellis says in August 2007 that he recently told Disticor he would end his relationship with the company. “They don’t help me promote it, they don’t come up with new ideas for me, they don’t pitch me to places. They just collect an order and collect money, and they don’t send me any money,” he says. “I just basically told them, I’m spending more money sending them magazines than I’m even getting back, I mean that’s how bad it’s gotten.” Disticor manages the distribution of more than 600 magazines, including largely circulated publications like Anthem and Mother Jones. As is commonplace in the business world, distribution agencies tend to put more time into the largest publications because they bring in more revenue, instead of smaller magazines such as Verbicide.
Ellis says there are a handful of distros that are easier to work with. “They’re honest, very responsive if you have any questions, or if you want to know how sales are going or if you have any ideas for promoting it,” he says. “But most of them, you’re just a number. You’re just a client that they don’t ever meet face to face, they don’t ever have to deal with beyond a few e-mails, and that’s a problem.”
MAKING COMPROMISES: A LOOK AT INDIE PRESS NOW
Moore says there are a ton of things that could’ve saved Punk Planet, but they all would’ve destroyed the principles the magazine was founded on, and they all involved taking money from big corporations. “And since that’s the one concession we were unable and uninterested in making, Punk Planet’s gone,” she says. However, many independent publications do use money from large corporations — usually in the form of advertising — in order to stay afloat.
Verbicide, for example, depends solely on ad revenue. The magazine is given out for free as of its most recent issue, fall 2007, though it previously was part retail. “You can’t have any pride in this game,” Ellis says. “You can’t be too proud to make concessions to survive, because if you do, you’re just gonna be throwing thousands of dollars down the toilet, and it’s gonna catch up to you eventually.” Even with money coming in from advertising — which Ellis says takes hard work and persistence to get — he also cuts down on printing costs by not using glossy paper. “Advertising is just something I do,” he says. “Instead of driven by joy, it’s driven by fear. It’s driven by the fear that if I don’t do this, if I don’t make enough money … Verbicide’s gonna be one more magazine six feet under.”
Ellis says independent publishers’ hopes to stay out of the corporate world makes running a magazine difficult. “As far as us mid-sized magazines … we’re sort of caught in this limbo,” he says. “I think we’re the ones that are in trouble, and that’s why Punk Planet has gone out of business and why so many of us are struggling because we’ve got this project that needs to be run like a capitalist endeavor, but we’re trying to run it outside of that realm. And sometimes those two elements don’t mix very well.”
From a reader’s standpoint, Angel says, it’s hard to tell if a magazine is financially stable because the publication’s internal struggles aren’t obvious to consumers. “Every magazine, from small ones like Bitch to big ones like Mother Jones and Utne [Reader], are affected by things like the rise in postal costs, lower subscription and advertising revenue, and other general trends in the industry, and they each have their own ways of dealing with those complexities,” she says.
“It’s a lot of work. It’s really heartbreaking, you’ll have a lot of nervous breakdowns, lose your social life, but that’s OK,” Ellis says. “If you’re doing what you love, you can’t deny that, and if it’s not something you’re into, then don’t do it.”
IS ONLINE THE ANSWER?
Despite the troubles the indie print community experiences, Ellis says publishers shouldn’t be pitied too much, because the reason they’re in the industry to begin with is to put out a product that people will read and enjoy. “This is a business … and you’re gonna run into rough patches, and you have to keep reinventing yourself. You have to come up with new things editorially that are gonna set yourself away from the pack and make people pay attention to you.”
Some magazines are attempting to set themselves apart from others by publishing online. With lower production costs it seems to be a valid option, but will anyone care if print starts to die out? Alan Lastufka, founder and co-owner of zine distributor and indie media forum Fall of Autumn Press, says the Internet is an amazing tool for those who choose to use it. “I’ve collaborated with numerous people whose faces I’ve never seen,” he says. “But it is not the same as going out to a show and handing someone the latest issue of your zine, the one you just happened to have a single copy of in your tote or back pocket.”
Ellis also uses the Internet often, mostly for work duties, but if he wants to read a music magazine, he’ll go out and buy it, then save it to read again maybe years later. “Web sites … they’re here today, they’re gone tomorrow, and then you’ve forgotten about them,” he says, noting that even so, the Internet is important. “I think you have to balance it out. You have to do both. And that means more work for all of us.”
Though Sinker says the Web isn’t an ideal medium for lengthy stories like those that often ran in Punk Planet, people either starting or running indie magazines should “figure out how you’re going to transition online, and figure it out now. And good luck,” he says, laughing. “And hang on. People still like print. I mean, Jesus, ending Punk Planet has proven that — more people have written to us to say, ‘God, I loved the magazine’ in the last month than they did in the 13 years before that. People still love print. But that’s not enough. [Readers] need to be educated. They need to understand that this thing costs money.”
So what can the people who love print do to support the indie publishing community? Lastufka says any type of contribution helps. “Articles, artwork, money, time,” he says. “Whatever you can afford to give.” Ellis says he doesn’t think it’s really up to the readers to save indie publishing, but there are little things they can do to help. “Just by being readers, that’s doing enough,” he says. “Sharing it with your friends, getting more people involved.”
CAN PUNK PLANET LIVE ON?
Punk Planet utilized the Internet in a different way than most publications, by using punkplanet.com to connect people through blogs and chat forums. “Punk Planet was one of the only zines I’ve seen to successfully run an active online forum. Readers and contributors to the zine engaged in dialogue daily,” says Lastufka, who made a video eulogy for Sinker and Moore soon after they announced the magazine’s closing. Sinker says the site hasn’t featured the magazine’s content because he sees the Web as “working with the things the Internet is best at and print is weakest at, which is connecting people, allowing people to tell their own stories, and being a quick communication method.”
Punkplanet.com will still be a place for discussion even though the magazine’s print run is a thing of the past, and Sinker says there’s a good chance of magazine content eventually being published online. However, it won’t be the type of content that was in Punk Planet in terms of length because it’s hard to keep readers’ attention on the Internet. The book publishing arm, a part of Akashic Books in New York, will also stay up and running.
Moore says she still blogs on the Web site, but is mostly focusing on her book, Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity (The New Press), which will be released in fall 2007. The book sort of traces the history behind independent projects like Punk Planet and how corporations like Axe body spray, Sony, Nike, Tylenol, and Lucasfilm found a way to “have independent producers everywhere create all sorts of work for free, used it as marketing, screwed up our whole culture, and then sort of left it out to dry,” she says.
Sinker, on the other hand, is doing a yearlong fellowship at Stanford University, where he’ll study methods of independent publishing online. He says starting an online publication is “definitely in the cards” but another print magazine is not. A lot of the year, though, will be a chance for Sinker to catch his breath. “I’ve been doing this for 13 years, and that’s a really long time and really exhausting in the long run,” he says. “Being given this gift of a year without deadlines and a year without normal pressures, I’m gonna take advantage of it.”
The whole process of clearing everything out of the office and moving on is overwhelming, but Sinker says it’s cathartic too. “Anything you build is hard. Everything in this office, I built. I didn’t just build it figuratively, I built it fucking literally — with friends, with people that worked on the magazine at one point and don’t anymore and things like that — and that’s sad,” he says. “Taking all of that apart is hard, but at the same time, that’s life, you know. Life isn’t something that just stops at a point. Life keeps going, and it’s cyclical, and anything that’s put together comes apart eventually.”
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Top photo: Old-school issues of Punk Planet
Second photo: Dan Sinker, former publisher of Punk Planet, in his office shortly before the publication shut its office doors for good.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Laura Leebove is a frequent Venus Zine contributor and the features editor of The State News at Michigan State University. She can be reached at laura.leebove [at] gmail [dot] com.
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