When the world ends someone better tell the computers or they’ll go on talking to each other forever. Ask Kylie Loynd at the Polishing Stone, a tiny quarterly in Snohomish, Washington, who received an e-mail in mid-January that began, “Dear Kylie, Did you know that your membership with the Independent Press Association will expire 02/14/2007? Here’s a reminder of the benefits of membership.”
National distribution had been every indie publisher’s nightmare, with newsstand revenues dribbling rather than gushing in. Bringing distribution in-house would be IPA’s most important service. The renamed Indy Press Newstand Services could mind the pipeline. As things turned out, it could even borrow from IPA to give publishers waiting for those revenues the short-term loans they needed to put out their next issues.
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But Smith wasn’t buying the idea that nonprofits “should stick to advocacy and soup kitchens.” Indie magazines, “no matter how left-wing, are fundamentally entrepreneurial entities.” What they, and all nonprofits, need to focus on, he argued, is “hiring true believers and then making damn sure that they get the training they need.”
Clamor, a quarterly based in Toledo, Ohio, is not only going under but threatening to take kindred spirits with it–indie zines such as Left Turn, Spread, Critical Moment, and Faesthetic and the book Vegan Freak that piggybacked on Clamor’s order-processing capacity.
