Requiem for a magazine

At the end of this month the magazine that I helped start 18 years ago will cease publication. It has been a slow death--the magazine has been on life support for months as the publisher tried to transition from a print and web-based publication, to web only.

I helped create this magazine in my Rolla, Missouri days when my friend Wayne decided to continue to publish a newsletter to the fans of his public radio bluegrass program. The local public radio affiliate had decided that they didn't want the expense of sending out a monthly newsletter to the faithful listeners of "Bluegrass for a Saturday Night," so Wayne took the mailing list, and on his own dime began publishing a newsletter. At first it was just that...a locally-driven eight-page newsletter about upcoming concerts and festivals, with a "top 20" list of most requested songs from his show, and a couple of brief articles about bluegrass artists. I did the layout for free for him because I was using a university-owned computer and didn't feel right about charging him for a couple hours of my time every month.

Soon though, Wayne realized there was a market out there for 'grassers who wanted news in a magazine format. So a magazine was born. It took a while to get traction, but as it did it became more and more fun to design. Even though bluegrass music has a very specific fan base--and a lot of people react with actual revulsion at the thought of having to listen to a bluegrass song--it was something I personally enjoyed, so getting to read the articles, and design around some of the artists I had heard was a nice diversion for me to other design work I was doing at the time.

A few short years after we kicked it off, we had a simple monthly magazine with an average of 48 pages, a color cover, and a partial color layout inside. And the feedback we were getting from the 'grass world was positive. At the time there was only one other major publication devoted to bluegrass music, and it had stagnated in its design...locked into a grid they had designed in the early 80s and hadn't veered off of since. Fans began to notice that our magazine had a newer look...a fresher approach. We began to feel our oats about where this could go.

In the next few years both Wayne and I went through divorces from our first spouses, married new spouses, and I moved away from Rolla, so the production of the magazine became a long-distance project. But as email and the internet had become something you could have in your home, and not just in a university or corporate setting, and with the help of FedEx, we made it work. As time went by, and web speed became much faster we were eventually able to even drop the FedEx part of it and do the entire thing entirely by email and internet. At one point Wayne and his new bride, Deb, who also was heavily involved in the magazine, got the idea to produce a magazine-sponsored awards show in Nashville. We only had one, but that one was a blast. We had it at the Ryman, and some of the top names in bluegrass, including Ricky Skaggs, were there.

The magazine continued to improve from a design standpoint, with more advertising revenue making it possible to do more color sections, and the overall product was much improved from our early days. We heard rumors that the other 'grass magazine was trying to copy our format to keep up with us.

But the very thing that made our long-distance production possible was also the thing that ultimately contributed to the demise of the magazine...the internet. As more and more people began using the internet it became possible to access the same information our subscribers were getting in each issue--information about festivals, new CD releases, etc--with just a few clicks on the computer. Also, each band now has their own website, and each record company has plenty of information about their star performers, including concert schedules, upcoming releases, and biographical background to satisfy the heartiest of bluegrass fans. And, as napster and itunes became common ways to download music, record companies had to revise how they advertised their products and artists, and that ultimately altered the ad revenue our magazine could count on.

And the last year of economic downturn was the final blow. If there were an autopsy performed it would indicate that the magazine died from a poor economy, and a changing world of publishing. The high cost of paper (printing paper); a reduction of advertising budget for many festivals, string and instrument companies, and the blossoming of the downloaded music industry all were part of the demise. In spite of the hundreds of specialty magazines you see on shelves at bookstores and newsstands, it is hard to get a magazine started, and maintain it's subscription base. Advertisers want to see how many people are actually reading a publication before they commit ad dollars to it, and if you can't maintain a high enough subscription base you can't get ads. In a poor economy it is especially difficult to get that ad revenue.

There was a brief attempt at resurrecting the magazine as an "e-zine" online, but because none of us actually knew much about production in the virtual world (we are all old printing press veterans) our enthusiasm for it dwindled.

But I am proud that we made it what it was, and kept it going for as long as we did. We published this thing through divorce, marriage, the births of my children, and their grandchildren, through a parade of associate writers and editors, and through the good graces of the bluegrass community.