What’s good for the nation is bad for The Nation.
No weekly magazine tracked by the Media Industry Newsletter has lost more pages of advertising this year than The Nation.
As of Nov. 8, ad pages were down 30 percent compared with last year’s figures, remarkable even though advertising accounts for only a 10th of the revenue. Traffic to TheNation.com has also declined recently. And since 2008, the magazine has run an operating deficit of about $500,000 a year.
The Nation has almost never turned a profit since it was introduced in 1865, but it did manage to be profitable at times during the Bush administration. Their problem over the last two years had been obvious. With the White House and Congress in the Democrats’ control, a lot of Democrats tuned out. Suddenly, reading about the latest travesty perpetrated by the right didn’t seem so urgent. This isn’t a problem unique to The Nation. Air America went out of business for good in January. Advertising on progressive blogs dried up after the 2006 elections. The Republicans have the House again, and they’re going to start acting very badly soon. I know, you thought they were already acting badly. Well, it’s all relative.
The main thing is that the more heat a media enterprise puts out, the more attention it gets, and the better it does in cool times. There hasn’t been a viable financial angle in backing the Democrats for a while. The best available strategy has been to blast them vehemently. It’s a bit of an upside down world where progressive media has a financial incentive to being in the minority. The same is true to a lesser extent for conservative media. But they enjoy wingnut welfare, so it doesn’t really matter to them.
In any case, you can create a niche audience by being level-headed, but you’ll probably go under.