In the United States, none of the five large publishing houses currently fund these outlets. The infrastructure supporting national literary magazines is crumbling, too: There are fewer newsstands, fewer bookstores that stock niche magazines, fewer advertisers willing to spend on print, and — in a world where information is increasingly siloed online — fewer people willing to subscribe.
Many literary magazines, like The Paris Review and The Drift, operate as nonprofits. Others, such as The Dial — which launched this week — are backed by foundations and private benefactors. And, as their names suggest, publications like The Yale Review, The Hopkins Review, and The Kenyon Review are backed by universities or tied to university presses.
Journals exclusively funded by corporations, benefactors or universities will always be “deeply vulnerable to someone’s final decision,” Freeman said.
Earlier this year The Believer, a small but respected literary magazine, was sold by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, to a company that hoped to make money on the site by posting content intended to draw clicks and online ads. The magazine had not been self-sustaining, but it had an outsize influence in the literary world. The Believer Festival, for example, helped to turn Las Vegas into an unlikely literary hub.
After much uproar in the literary world, The Believer was sold back to its original publisher, McSweeney’s, and scheduled to relaunch this month in San Francisco.
One funding alternative, Freeman said, could be a “communitarian” model where editors are small-scale investors, raise money collectively and develop a self-sustaining financial structure. The long-running short story magazine One Story is an example, he said.
However, it could take years for these self-described “little” magazines to reach a critical mass of readers, which could make them difficult to sustain without long-term backers, he said. It’s particularly challenging at a time when, he added, “we are impatient to digest information and meaning, because of the pace that we’re living at and the ways that our technology is slotting us into predetermined silos.”
