The Writer Goes Nebulous

What has happened or is happening to a century-plus old magazine? It's...unclear.

I may have earned the dubius distinction of being the last editor-in-chief of a magazine that started back in 1880s.

The magazine may come back to life…it’s hard to tell. What I can tell you is the remaining staff at Madavor Media have just been let go, myself included. There were only six of us left after about eight months of constant layoffs.

I’ve been on a roller coaster ride with magazines before. Now that I think of it, even before Facebook and Google started sweeping up most of the advertising dollars that have traditionally fueled the print magazine business, magazines tended to have bumpy rides.

My first full-time position on a magazine staff was in 1996 in San Francisco. I was hired as an assistant editor. Day one I learned the mag was owened by a company in Brussels. Which was weird enough.

The design staff for the magazine was in Belgium, which meant that each month the San Francisco editors would bundle up a package with photo slides and a diskette with articles and FedEx it halfway around the world. (Sending high res digital scans of the images via the internet just wasn’t a viable option back in the days of dial-up connection). Our designer spoke French and we spoke English, so my first experience in magazine production was unique.

In my first year on the job, the owner of the magazine was so excited about the emergence of the internet that he hired (in San Francisco) a team of salesmen (no women) to sell ads for the website we were building. He was about 10 years ahead of schedule on that one. The company swiftly began to flatline. When the sales guys couldn’t ring up significant ad sales for our new website (if any..I can’t recall), they were fired one by one — notified by a fax from the Brussels office. I sat right next to the office fax machine and the stress it triggered every time a fax start churning through its printer.

More and more of the SF staff either quit or were fired. I’d been there about a year when the only ones left in the sprawling office on 2nd and Mission were me, another editor, one last sales guy, and a production coordinator. There were fifteen or so empty desks with virus-ridden Macintosh computers that could have been in an Apple museum.

They looked like this one…but were smudged and barely worked.

Funny thing though: The magazine (Triathlete Magazine) survived all the turmoil and eventually started generating more than a million a year in revenue. Circa 2005, we had enough ad revenue to drive 300-plus page issues.

I left the magazine in early 2012 (at that time I was editorial director) and it was still profitable. But it was about a year ago I heard they were effectively out of print and had converted to a digital publication.

I’ve had my share of experiences in the magazine world, but by far the strangest has been with The Writer. When I started, it was great. I was concerned about the revenue (not many ads in the mag) but I was eager to see if we could develop alternative revenue streams to help the mag both survive and hopefully thrive.

But six weeks into my new job, I received a text message that ownership of the company (Madavor) had changed hands. BeBop was the new owner, and an immediate look into who and what they were was disconcerting. Then came two weeks with no communication from the new owners, and then both people and publications started being purged. Every couple of weeks — when we felt like layoffs might be cooling off — more would get fired. Or another Madavor publication would vanish.

It was in April we were told to stop working on the magazines (!?!) and start thinking about a streaming TV channel. We found this perplexing (as you might imagine). because we knew we had to fulfil our production and printing committments, and we didn’t know a thing about TV. More people got laid off. Then we were told to put together a film festival (?). Then the film festival was cancelled. Then we were told to take our magazine content and turn the actual pages into the visual content for TV shows — and have the articles read by an artificial intelligence actor. We were asked what we thought of that idea. “I think it sounds painful,” I said.

We were down to about seven or eight people at this point. This was in July. Then the hammer came down — all magazine production except for Jazz Times came to an end.

They launched the channels (and if you subscribe to The Writer, you probably received an email about this) and then let the remaining staff go. To the end, I figured that they would either sell The Writer or at least do something with it rather than let it die, but I was wrong. As I write these words, there’s no clear future for the magazine. I feel any potential buyers (myself included) would have reservations about making the purchase given the many legal problems Madavor seems to be embroiled in. A new buyer (if it’s for sale) will need to go in knowing there is a lot to untangle with the financials.

Those of us left at the end have all strengthened our bonds as co-workers and friends. And several of us are working to build a new magazine for writers — with the mission of supporting writers of all levels and backgrounds. With the rise of AI and considering those of who believe in and want to stay grounded in the written word, I feel especially committed to continuing the spirit of The Writer. Whether we build a community of three thousand or three hundred or three million or three, I believe it will be worth it.

That’s the story. I’m jumping back into my own writing now, and look forward to seeing you all in the Slack channel.