Other than perhaps the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, there were few places as despondent on election night as the Manhattan offices of The Nation, the 146-year-old journal of fiery leftist opinion.
A group of about 15 writers, editors and interns sat around a conference table and watched the results as they drowned their sorrows in bottles of Trader Joe’s red wine. Even the friendly voices on MSNBC proved little solace as the numbers rolled in, confirming a Republican resurgence across the country.
These are difficult times at The Nation, and not just because liberals are in retreat. Lately the magazine has suffered a one-two punch. On top of political malaise, it faces the economic pressures that political journals often confront when the party in power is on their side.
In the words of Victor Navasky, a father figure at the magazine who served as its editor and publisher before retiring several years ago, what is good for the nation is bad for The Nation.
So as liberal politics flourished in the waning years of George W. Bush’s presidency and reached an apotheosis with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, The Nation’s fortunes started to skid. Couple that with a recession as well as the worst advertising market in decades, and things started to look bleak.
Continue reading the main storyAs of Nov. 8, ad pages were down 5 percent compared with last year. Though advertising accounts for just a tenth of revenue, the number is still striking considering how brutal 2009 was for the advertising market. Traffic to TheNation.com has also declined recently. And since 2008, the magazine has run an operating deficit of about $500,000 a year.
Despite all the gloom, could last week’s Democratic pummeling actually have a silver lining for The Nation, once home to writers like Henry James, Ezra Pound, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and even Yeats? Katrina vanden Heuvel, the magazine’s editor and publisher, did not have to think long about that question.
“If you can’t expose the hypocrisy of this new group of Republicans, then we’re not doing our job. And I mean that,” she said in an interview from her office on election night as she sipped a glass of Champagne, defiant as Democratic losses piled up and the mood around her darkened.
“I mean you’ve got a lot to work with,” she said. “You’ve got a Tea Party caucus in the Senate, a Tea Party caucus in the House. So I think you have a lot of rich material.”
If history is any guide, Ms. vanden Heuvel could be proved right.
The Bush years were good — very good — to The Nation. After operating in the red almost every year since it was founded by abolitionists in 1865, the magazine turned a profit in 2003.
From 2001 to 2003, the magazine’s circulation leapt from 107,000 to 149,000 and kept growing. By 2006, it had reached its peak at 187,000.
The magazine’s most recent circulation report to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, however, showed significant decline. During the first half of the year, The Nation had 145,000 subscribers, who pay about $40 a year. It sold just 1,500 copies on the newsstand each week. Three years ago, newsstand sales were three times that.
Ms. vanden Heuvel (pronounced van-den-HOO-vul), who got her start at The Nation as an intern, is not naïve about the magazine’s struggles, and she acknowledged the difficulty opinion journals like hers have had breaking through in a marketplace jammed with newcomers on the left like Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo. But she remains confident about her magazine’s standing.
“The Nation — and I don’t love the word but I’ll use it — is a brand of 146-year standing. It conveys a sense of trust. This is an institution and a magazine and a cause,” she said.
There is no doubt about The Nation’s credibility as a leading institution on the left. But liberal Web sites like The Huffington Post now have vast followings of young people and a certain cool factor — something many advertisers value over intellectual prestige.
“The importance of being hot is very important to advertisers,” said Bill Falk, editor in chief of The Week, a magazine that aggregates news articles and opinion columns. “There are a lot of cool destinations on the left if you want to go there, and a lot of them are digital.”
The Nation, which Mr. Falk regularly excerpts, “sort of reads and feels like it is written by people on the left from the ’60s and the ’70s, whereas sites like the Daily Kos and Huffington Post skew much younger.”
The word “cause” is thrown around a lot at the magazine as a way of conveying that The Nation is not in it to make a profit. It is not a nonprofit institution like Mother Jones or The American Prospect, but its employees clearly have their sights set on something they feel is larger than profit.
“We’re as much of a cause as we are a business,” said Teresa Stack, the magazine’s president. “It is a passionate mission rather than a strict bottom-line managed business.”
For a magazine, The Nation has an unusual business model. Rather than relying heavily on advertising revenue, which now makes up only about 11 percent of the income, it depends mainly on subscriptions (about 60 percent of revenue) and fund-raising (about 25 percent).
The average donation is about $70 a year, with some donors sending in a little as a few dollars and others contributing thousands.
As the magazine started to face more financial pressure, it made a more aggressive push for donations and has enjoyed healthy growth in that part of its revenue, helping it balance out the loss of advertising and circulation.
A big moneymaker for The Nation in recent years has been its cruise, which people pay thousands of dollars to attend so they can listen to lions of the left like Ralph Nader speak as they sail along the Alaskan coast.
Ms. vanden Heuvel conceded that she borrowed the idea from her conservative rival, National Review. But she said the cruise now brings in about $200,000 each year.
(National Review appears to be doing quite well, having received a lift from conservative dismay over Democrats in power. Its subscriptions have increased from 150,000 in 2006 to nearly 200,000 this year. Newsstand sales have remained essentially flat for the last five years.)
The Nation has also been aggressive in the digital area, publishing on Kindle, Nook, e-reader and iPad and advertising heavily on MSNBC. Ms. Stack said circulation should post a gain for the second half of the year.
The Nation is also conscious about keeping its profile high. Its writers and editors are a regular presence on cable news shows. Christopher Hayes, the Washington editor and an occasional fill-in for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, said that because the magazine has to worry less about advertising dollars, it has been insulated from the changes the continuous news cycle has forced on other publications.
“We’re not chasing after clicks, we’re not running any celebrity pictures, we’re not trying to win the morning,” he said.
And Ms. vanden Heuvel is showing few signs of worry.
“Am I a believer that The Nation will survive another 150 years? Yes, I am,” she said. Then she paused as a pang of classic liberal anxiety hit her. “Unless there’s a nuclear war.”
An article on Monday about the magazine The Nation, using incorrect information from the Media Industry Newsletter, overstated the magazine’s loss of advertising pages so far this year. Advertising pages are down 5 percent, not 30 percent. And because of that incorrect information, the article erroneously attributed a distinction to the magazine. It is not the case that The Nation lost more pages of advertising this year than any other weekly magazine tracked by the newsletter.