> Is that it? A measly $5000 a year plus change? If I were making
>$100,000 a year, as is, apparently, many a full prof., instead of the far
>smaller sum I actually earn (that I will not even mention what it is) I'd be
>happy to subsidize the whole operation myself. You could call it *Victor
>Grauer's Postmodern Culture*!!! Anyhow, as little as I make, if you asked
>me to contribute in order to keep it free, I'd probably plump for more than
>the price of a subscription, whereas now I refuse to subscribe at all on
>principle. Haven't you guys ever seen *It's A Wonderful Life*?
The costs of producing PMC are not large, it's true, but they total more
than that $5K--the Managing Ed. (esp. during the weeks leading up to an
issue) puts in more than 10 hrs. a week, and we usually lay on some additional
people, etc. etc.. With office expenses of the sort I mentioned before,
extra people, and so on the total is between $10K-$15K. And if you'd like
to kick
in for that, I could get used to Victor Grauer's PMC. Capra economics, on
the other hand, really don't seem like a realistic way to go--would you want
to be depending on the kindness of strangers if it were your hourly wage
that was at issue? Bear in mind, the Managing Editor (Sarah Wells, now) has
usually been a grad student or other part-time person, doing a lot of the
grunt work of producing the issue and managing the communications flow: the
editors, editorial board, authors, etc. contribute their time and effort as
expenditure without recompense--this $10-$15K, then, is a small part of the
expenditure that actually goes into producing the journal, most of which
already fits your Bataillian model. It just happens that this last part is
the nub that has to involve cash (Fed Ex doesn't do barter; the ME has rent
to pay, the phone company etc.), and I'd like to see a sustainable way of
producing that cash. Contributions doesn't strike me, at least, as it.
> As far as advertising is concerned, to be perfectly postmodern about
>it all, why are you turning up your nose? According to Marshall McLuhan
>advertising is good news and I'm sure Baudrillard would agree. It has
>enabled TV to shine like the sun, so why not PMC? You have a lot of readers
>and they must love to read so they must love to buy books. I doubt if
>amazon.com or Borders would lose any money if they paid PMC to add some
>links to its site. And there are probably a lot of those pay-per-view
>journals that might also like to post an ad and a link.
Advertising might be it, and nobody's turning up a nose--it may be that our
needs are small enough that even the imploding Web advertising market could
support them. Michael, do you have any comment on that?
John Unsworth / Director, IATH / Dept. of English
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http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/