Enough with this "labour of love" stuff

Once and for all, says Nicole Cohen, the alternative magazine press and alternative media in general need to dispatch -- or at least confront -- the idea of such activity being a "labour of love".

In a long and thoughtful article in Briarpatch's June/July issue, Cohen, who until recently was co-editor of Shameless magazine, says that non-mainstream magazines are often launched on the strength of an idea borne along on a wave of volunteer enthusiasm and only after the first issue(s) do they crash into the realities of funding, particularly paying for staff labour and overheads. (The article expands on a similar one in which Cohen was quoted by Dale Duncan Cohen wrote in January in eye weekly.)

Currently, when independent and alternative media appeal to readers and supporters for donations, the appeal is rarely framed in terms of the work involved in producing the publication. Surprisingly, Shameless readers often assumed we had full-time, paid staff. Adopting more transparent business processes so that the community can see how much money comes in and what the true cost of each issue is may help generate support in areas where it’s needed most.

Cohen says she and her co-editor Melinda Mattos essentially were exhausted by several years of producing the activist, feminist magazine for teens and recently they handed the magazine off to a new team. She recalls when the notion of unpaid work began to pall.

It was a Sunday last fall, and I was lugging heavy boxes of magazines to a literary festival, where I would spend the next several hours selling back issues and explaining Shameless’ mandate to hundreds of people before packing everything up and hauling it home in the rain. I would then spend the evening replying to Shameless-related e-mail, working on the next issue, and neglecting other parts of my life that needed attending to. Working after-hours for no pay was becoming exhausting.

After four years of planning, launching, and producing nine issues of the magazine on a tiny budget, Shameless had begun to feel more like work than a hobby, activism, or even, as I had so often referred to the magazine, a “labour of love.”

I often recognize this overwork and exhaustion in other alternative media producers who juggle multiple jobs to work on projects they care deeply about. And since my co-editor and I decided to pass Shameless on to new editors with more energy and time to spare, I’ve been thinking about the concept of a “labour of love,” and the problems that such a romanticization of real, often difficult, work creates in our efforts to build a sustainable alternative media movement in Canada.

Well worth a read.

[Earlier posts about Shameless here and here]