Some truths about indie mags

Several indie magazine publishers in Toronto submitted to be interviewed for an excellent cover story in eye weekly that delivers some home truths, among them being how hard it is to make a living doing what they do.

The story is by eye columnist Dale Duncan, who was also one of the founders of Spacing. She talks with women who work as editors at Broken Pencil, the late Lola, Kiss Machine and Shameless. The quotes and information she elicited paints a somewhat gloomy picture.

For instance, she says of Spacing, where she is managing editor:

Our magazine may influence the mayor of Toronto, but it doesn't come close to paying my rent.

The article points out that fans of the magazines often assume they are much bigger and more substantial than they are, sometimes sending resumes in hopes of landing a paying job at a title at which they don't realize that the editors are unpaid.

“People definitely assume that we have an office,” says Melinda Mattos, who started [Shameless] magazine with Nicole Cohen in 2003. “I often jokingly refer to Shameless headquarters, but Shameless headquarters is wherever we happen to be sitting at the time.”

(Mattos and Cohen, by the way, still hold out some hope that someone else will take over running Shameless (see earlier post) so as not to let their readers down. Nevertheless, the spring issue of the magazine will be their last, after four years of slugging it out.)

While small, independent magazines punch above their weight, there is a fundamental problem, says Duncan:

The problem here is not necessarily that neither Spacing nor Shameless have office space, or that we aren't thrilled to be darlings of the press. It's that, like so many other seemingly successful independent magazines in Canada (see: Maisonneuve, This Magazine, Kiss Machine, Broken Pencil and the now defunct, but sorely missed Lola), there is a gap between how much we're loved and the financial support we receive in return for what we do. When publishing your own magazine takes up almost all your free time, the awards you receive, the readers you inspire and the influence you wield will only keep you going for so long. The issue here is sustainability – if you don't eventually receive a paycheque for your work, burnout sets in, and when that happens, magazines that fill those gaping holes left by mainstream media run the risk of extinction.

“Everyone talks about how important [independent media] is,” says Cohen, who recently started her PhD in communication and culture at York University. “They should also talk about how to support it.”

*(For those outside of Toronto, eye is a competitor to NOW magazine in the alternative weekly business; eye is owned by Torstar, the publishers of the Toronto Star. The irony of this story about struggling indies being published in eye is not lost on me -- DBS).