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P U B L I S H E R ’ S L E T T E R

By John R. MacArthur

8 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 2013

PUBLISHER’S LETTER 7

W hen I began my tenure as publisher

of Harper’s Magazine  nearly thirty

years ago, my biggest challenge—or

so I thought at the time—was to get

advertising agencies to pay more attention

to the celebrated journal of

American ideas and literature entrusted

to my care. Harper’s  had tens of

thousands of loyal readers but not

many loyal advertisers, so my task

seemed clear. Fawning over salesmen

rubbed against my political grain, but

those days were dominated by the

free-market dogma of the Reagan Administration,

and I fell prey to some of

the president’s most simpleminded

thinking. If advertisers didn’t sufficiently

admire serious readers of the

Harper’s  variety, then it was my job to

persuade Madison Avenue and its clients

that I was serious about their

concerns—about selling their products

to my readers.

And oh how we sold! For twenty

years, editor Lewis Lapham and I crisscrossed

the country in pursuit of what

everyone else in our business was after:

glossy, high-pro_le consumer and corporate

advertising. Armed with our

good name—Harper’s,  after all, was

deeply enmeshed in America’s cultural

and historical fabric—we maneuvered

our way into company dining rooms

from Wall Street to Rockefeller Center,

from Louisville to St. Louis, from

Boise to Palo Alto. We engaged our

hosts in discussions of the political and

literary issues of the day, but to better

impress them we also invoked our af-

_nity with the advertising world, presenting

as evidence the brief stint on

the Harper’s  board of the legendary adman

William J. Bernbach, as well as

our own very slick house ad produced

by the renowned firm of Scali,

McCabe, Sloves. It didn’t hurt our

cause that my late father, Roderick,

was something of an advertising genius.

I spoke the language of the advertising

trade because, along with

journalism and politics, I’d absorbed it

nearly every day of my childhood at

the kitchen table. It also didn’t hurt

that Lewis Lapham and I were

spawned by the very business establishment

we criticized in nearly every

issue of America’s oldest continuously

published monthly.

Current readers may be surprised

to learn that we were largely successful

in our efforts: many corporations

encouraged their ad agencies

to take a fresh look at Harper’s Magazine,

 and the ads began to roll in.

For my part, I was astonished that

most of the CEOs we met, though

nearly all Republicans, were barely

ideological and almost never objected

to the subversive, sometimes

overtly anticapitalist articles that

appeared in our pages. As our advertising

revenue grew, I rarely worried

about reprisals for anything we published.

Indeed, one of the most

stinging critiques I ever heard of

George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion

of Iraq came from the chairman

of a major American oil company

over lunch at his headquarters in

Houston. For many of these men,

and for their more liberal-minded

advisers, Harper’s  and its brand of

open-minded, freewheeling discourse

were automatically worthy of

their backing.

But as the magazine’s bottom line

improved through the dot-com boom

that ended in 2000 and the anti-Bush

boom that ended in 2009, something

crucial seemed to be missing from

our “marketing equation.” In all my

scurrying back and forth between

Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, and

New York, I never considered a fundamental

question: Why did a magazine

of ideas, criticism, and reporting

need to serve as a sales medium between

advertisers and readers; why

should advertising be our principal

means of support? Not that I didn’t

want advertising or have respect for

our advertisers, some of whom were

genuinely civic-minded. But wasn’t

the truly important compact—really

the only relationship that mattered—

between reader and writer or, to some

extent, reader, writer, and editor?

Harper’s  is published _rst and foremost

to be read. If the magazine

functions as an intermediary, it is between

the creative imagination of the

_ction writer or essayist and the creative

spirit of the sensitive reader; between

the inquiring mind of the

journalist and the engaged mind of

the alert, occasionally outraged citizen.

This compact now needs to be

stated forcefully and in unmistakable

terms. A s it happens, recent technology

has brutally pressed my question

about the appropriate connection

between reader, writer, and

advertiser on every publisher in our

increasingly wired-up world. I was

immediately suspicious of the Internet

being touted, in the late 1990s,

as a miraculously ef_cient publishing

platform because of the Web’s

capacity for massive copyright violation.

But what disturbed me more as

a publisher and a writer was the

ugly commodification of writing

itself—the renaming of prose and

poetry as something called “content.”

Suddenly, my colleagues and

competitors were reducing wellwrought

sentences and stories to the

level of screws and bolts. Not only

was “content” an empty and offensive

word, but my fellow publishers

also proposed to give it away free in

the quest for more advertising. Instead

of honoring the reader, writer,

and editor, this new approach to the

publishing business insulted them,

both by devaluing their work and by

feeding it—with little or no

remuneration—to search engines,

which in turn feed information to

advertising agencies (and, as it turns

out, the government).

The result, as anyone with even a

passing interest can observe, has

been catastrophic: massive layoffs of

editorial employees; the collapse of

major publications; the impoverishment

of writers; the alarming decline

of editorial standards for accuracy,

grammar, and coherent thought;

and the dumbing down of journalism

across the board. Great American

publishing institutions such as the

Washington Post and the Boston

Globe have been placed on the auction

block for a fraction of their

former value. Meanwhile, the advertisers

themselves have _ed traditional

publications for the allegedly

greener pastures of social media and

Google. Paradoxically, the more

advertisers demanded eyeballs and

clicks, the more writing the publishers

gave away, and the less advertisers

advertised. We know what

happens to lemmings—thanks to

YouTube you can watch it in graphic

detail any time of the day or

night—so I decided early on I

wouldn’t join in the frenzy of free

content. From the launching of our

website in 2003, we at Harper’s insisted

that subscribers continue to

pay to read our well-written, factchecked,

scrupulously edited, and

extremely entertaining paragraphs.

When the magazine became fully

accessible online, our paywall remained

_rm. We are pleased to be

able to offer the magazine in a digital

format, but what we won’t do is

give in to the free-content “logic” of

so many publications. Tellingly, very

few subscribers have complained,

and we are still in business, having

conceded nothing in the quality of

our character or, dare I

say, our content. Paywalls are now being erected everywhere.

Even the champion blogger

Andrew Sullivan is asking his readers

to pay twenty dollars a year for unlimited

access to his work. But as with

global warming, so much damage has

already been done to the literary and

journalistic atmosphere that I’m

afraid we’re approaching a point of no

return. I can’t quite believe my ears at

the nonsense still being peddled by

the advocates of free content. Who

needs fact-checkers when we have

crowdsourcing to correct the record?

Why doesn’t Harper’s give away a particularly

good investigative piece

(such as Ted Conover’s powerful undercover

report in May on an industrial

slaughterhouse) so that more

people will read it?

Because good publishing, good editing,

and good writing cost money,

and publishers, editors, and writers

have to earn a living. We are proud

that we can send a photographer to

Iran for a couple of weeks and then

deliver the resulting images to readers

in our September issue through the

mail on good paper and over the Internet

in high resolution for computer

screens and tablets. This photographer,

who requested anonymity,

risked arrest and prison to take excellent

pictures—as do other photographers

such as Samuel James—for the

bene_t of Harper’s and you. The censors

in Tehran are surely upset.

Shouldn’t Anonymous be paid for

this courage and skill? Shouldn’t

Harper’s be compensated for sending

Anonymous into the _eld? All told,

the photo essay cost us about $25,000,

including printing, paper, and mailing.

It is unreasonable to expect that

an advertiser would directly sponsor

such daring photography. It is wishful

thinking to believe that parasitic

Google, now bloated with billions of

dollars’ worth of what I consider pirated

property, will ever willingly pay

Harper’s, or Anonymous, anything at

all for the right to distribute Anonymous’s

pictures (although it’s worth

noting that the German government

is _ghting Google on behalf of German

publishers and writers over this

very point). We cannot even count

on America’s enlightened public libraries

to help foot the bill for Anonymous.

I recently found myself in the

Lenox, Massachusetts, public library,

where Harper’s Magazine is currently

unavailable. When our circulation director

complained that the magazine

that published Edith Wharton’s short

stories, many written just down the

road at the Mount, deserved pride of

place in the library’s periodicals section,

she was told that budget cuts

had made it impossible for the library

to pay for a subscription.

We, however, _nd it logical to trust

that 150,000 discriminating Harper’s

subscribers, tens of thousands of

newsstand buyers, and thousands of

on-screen readers will _nd it in their

interest to pay substantially more for

a magazine that publishes such outstanding

material. This seems as evident

to me today as my conceptually

flawed advertising model did thirty

years ago. And I’m beginning to sense

a turning of the tide, in the quantity

of new subscribers—many of them

signing up through our website—and

in the supportive emails and letters we

receive every day that praise the careful

editing and lively writing

that go into every issue. It has been a trying decade for publishers

and writers all over the world,

and our challenges can sometimes

seem overwhelming. In the United

States, unfortunately, the bankrupting

of journalists and authors has

been matched by an impoverished debate

about how to sustain a high standard

of publishing and writing. Until

recently, the rush to appear modern,

the peer pressure to accept the inevitability

of print’s demise, and the supposed

virtues of writing for free have

dominated what passes for a discussion.

“Is there a living to be made

when editors expect to get quality, ontime

copy for zero cents a word?”

asked Mark Kingwell two months ago

in these pages. Certainly not, unless

we lower our standards and rede_ne

the meaning of “good writing.”

Some voices of sanity, though,

have been heard in Europe, in England

most notably that of Tyler

Brûlé, editor in chief of Monocle and

PUBLISHER’S LETTER 9

Fast Lane columnist for the largely

paywalled and still pro_table Financial

Times. More compelling still has

been the experience of the French

publisher Laurent Beccaria, founder

of the book-publishing company Les

Arènes and a quarterly generalinterest

magazine called XXI (“Vingt

et un”). Together with his editor, Patrick

de Saint-Exupéry, Beccaria has

defied the conventional wisdom

about the free-content model and

turned XXI into the most dynamic,

and perhaps the most pro_table, new

magazine on the European scene.

Although it does have a website, you

cannot read XXI on a computer—

you must buy the print edition for

the equivalent of about twenty dollars

a copy at a bookstore or get it

through the mail. The quality of

XXI is guaranteed not by _ckle marketers

suffering from short attention

spans but by faithful readers whose

powers of concentration—whose appreciation

for the elegant sentence

and the hard-earned insight—have

survived the onslaught of the Web’s

unedited mediocrity.

This January, Beccaria and

Saint-Exupéry published a manifesto

in XXI that sought to reclaim the

journalistic territory conceded too

easily to online, unpaid, snippet journalism.

We’ve published an excerpt in

this month’s Readings section that I

believe speaks for itself; I urge you to

read it. Beccaria and Saint-Exupéry

offer many smart observations, but

this one seems paramount for my purposes

and for the continued health of

Harper’s Magazine:

Pompous phrases about the need “to

re invent the press’s economic model”

mask the reality: what has to be restored

is the exchange value between

news publications and their readers.

How many of us would agree to spend

two or three dollars for an espresso

downed in five minutes but would

balk at forking over the same for a

daily or weekly news organ as these

are currently conceived? To be useful,

desirable, and necessary—that’s the

only economic model worth considering.

It’s as old as the world, as old

as commerce.

Thus shall we proceed—in partnership

with advertisers who recognize

the pro_t in being associated with a

magazine of the highest editorial standards

and with our extraordinary,

paying readers. We are investing heavily

in reporting and photojournalism,

consistently running more pages than

we have in decades. Along the way

I’ve learned that to be “useful, desirable,

and necessary” is to serve the

reader and the writer, not the Internet,

or the consumer, or the lords of

merchandising. Harper’s Magazine is

not a cutting board for sausages sold at

a certain cost per thousand. It is,

among other things, what the late

New York senator Daniel Patrick

Moynihan called “the fulcrum of

American letters and public comment.”

It is a storehouse of the American

experience dating back 163 years,

including much of the country’s greatest

belles-lettres, journalism, and, increasingly,

art and photography. At our

best, we provoke that “zig-zag streak of

lightning through the brain” (a phrase

of Edward Grey’s quoted by Lord Asquith

to describe Winston Churchill)

when a reader’s mind is pierced by an

understanding or a realization that was

previously inaccessible.

But Harper’s is also an agreement

between reader, writer, and publisher

to reject spoon-fed, tailored solutions—

and that goes for the Internet publishing

model as much as it goes for invading

Iraq, democratizing Afghanistan,

and protecting the American population

from terrorists by warrantless

spying on every last one of us. With

your support, we’ll do better than just

survive; we’ll help bring the national

conversation back to a level of intelligence,

comprehension, and authenticity

that will make our readers and

contributors proud. A literary and political

conversation, I hope, in the

spirit of the great editor Maxwell Perkins,

who, feeling pressured to make

Ernest Hemingway conform to the

short-term exigencies and whims of the

marketplace, wrote to the author in

1935: “All You have to do is to follow

your own judgment, or instinct, + disregard

what is said, + convey the absolute

bottom quality of each person,

situation + thing. . . . I can get pretty

depressed but even at worst I still

believe—+ its written in all the past—

that the utterly real thing in writing is

the only thing that counts, + the whole

racket melts down before it.” n