Independent Magazines and the Power of Connection

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It was uncanny! It was profound! It was weird. That Christmastime I sent twenty of my friends in the States gift subscriptions. Eric Utne himself sent me a thank you note -- and an Utne Reader T-shirt. As far as I knew, no one had ever sent 20 gift subscriptions of Newsweek all at one time; I'm virtually certain that if they did, the editor-in-chief did not send a personal thank you.

Scroll forward a couple years to 1991 and, with the helpful gleanings from Utne in the back of my head, I took the plunge, moving from Newsweek International to Mother Jones. Reentry -- HK to the US, Newsweek to MoJo -- was strange and challenging in many ways, but I've come to believe that the biggest challenge was unlearning the practices of big publishing. It's not that what I learned at Newsweek was wrong; they -- we -- were good at what we did. But the relationship with the Mother Jones audience was different, often night and day different, in ways that had profound implications for how I thought about "the business" of non-profit Mother Jones.

I remember, for instance, being puzzled when MoJo subscribers who were suffering seemingly random small abuses from our fulfillment company -- the kinds of slights that I knew from Newsweek experience just happen when you're dealing with a sizeable file -- would send long, impassioned letters about their subscription problems. They sounded hurt sometimes (Mom, how could you do this to me??), off-the-charts offended and ferocious others. My initial take was, in effect, "Jesus, for $12 a year, what do you expect?" It just didn't make financial sense to spend extra to provide Cadillac, hand-tooled service when we were charging Chevy rates. And I should know, dammit, I have an MBA.

But slowly I started to put the pieces together that their expectations of this relationship were different, and that had an upside as well. Not long after I got to Mother Jones, the folks in circulation had organized some evenings when all of us on staff called subscribers and former subscribers to try to understand, first hand, more about some renewal problems we were seeing. So one evening I called a fellow at home at around 8 pm -- it's a completely cold call -- and he answers with what feels to me like daggers in his voice -- cold, sharp, palpable hostility -- until, that is, I introduce myself as being from Mother Jones. "Oh," he says, brightening right up, "I thought for a minute you were some telemarketer. I'm happy to talk with Mother Jones." Out of the blue one day, I got a thank you letter from a woman who was a librarian in Brownsville, Texas, writing just to say, in response probably to some piece of direct mail with my signature on it, that Mother Jones was her lifeline, a touchstone for her self and her values in a town that was often hostile to them. The picture was getting clearer.

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