And We All Fall Down

By now, you've probably heard the news: America's biggest boutique magazine distributor closed its doors on December 27th. By no means a surprise, the closure of the Indy Press Newsstand Services (formerly known as Big Top) remains a big blow to independent periodicals in the US. A significant number of its former clients remain owed substantial sums of money - including my former magazine, Tikkun. While Tikkun will be fine (we left the IPA a year ago), it remains unclear whether many of its former clients are going to survive.

In the interim, the IPA's inability to pay its titles have resulted in the closure of a number of outstanding national magazines, including the award-winning Clamor, and the end of the print edition of one of America's best up-and-coming music publications, Grooves. (Interesting to note that in all of the online discussions of the IPA's closure, no one has said anything about this specific periodical's status.) One of the first  reported casualties of the IPA's financial misanthropy, Grooves stopped appearing on newsstands in 2005. In 2006, it relaunched as a web magazine.

As a publisher, the most important lesson I learned from the IPA debacle is how much it underlined the continuing crisis of professionalization in indie culture. For example, every time I'd go to the IPA's office to attend a sales meeting, I was continually reminded to be 'more professional' regarding design and editorial considerations. For a brief while, I found myself grateful for these talks. I already had a strong background in distribution, and had been hired in part to help shore up the business end of things.

But, as time wore on and the issue was increasingly invoked, I began to wonder whether the subject's continuous reappearance in our business discussions was symptomatic of something far more worrysome. When our regular sales statements and payments  eventually halted, and allegations of poor accounting and distro fee collections emerged, I finally understood what all of this talk about  being 'more professional' was all about. The IPA was failing to perform its most basic functions as a distributor. To put it bluntly, the company could barely tie its own shoelaces.

For any firm, administrative incompetence is always a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, such imperfections are common to many independent businesses, and have more often than not led to their downfall. What troubles me most is not the fact that the IPA was not an exception to the rule, but the cultural consequences of its failings. Through its mismanagement, the IPA put an entire wing of the American periodical business in crisis. Some would even go so far as to say that the IPA killed it. I'm not just talking about any community either. I'm speaking about the countless number of publications which grew up in the turn of the century indie publishing scene.

For the past thirty plus years, America has witnessed the growth of one of the most creative periodical industries in its history. Despite the fact that this business has weathered numerous ups and downs, it was not until the 'zine explosion of the 1990s that independent periodical publishing in the US fully flowered, creating numerous special interest political and cultural titles expressing the enormous ingenuity and literary talent of an entire generation of artists, writers and designers. Not only did this milieu produce something culturally valid; it also created a market, which despite its small size, was sustainable, significant, and most importantly, politically influential.

And that is precisely the problem. The IPA's ultimate crime was that it never took this milieu seriously enough to understand what it was putting at risk through its administrative incompetence. By failing to live up to its mandate to be a responsible "antidote to media monopoly," the IPA helped irreperably damage a counterculture that was a proven platform for distributing alternative information and ideas. That is a horrible legacy to be responsible for. But it is one which ought to serve as a burning reminder of why the left still has to learn how to do business properly.

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