Advertising Corrupts

For more than 25 years, I worked as an editor at a monthly magazine. My entire salary was paid, ultimately, by advertisers. It would be churlish of me to bite the hand that fed me. And yet, the destructive effects of advertising are hard to ignore.

The difficulty is, when advertisers are spending thousands of dollars every month (or, if the ads are in a newspaper, every day), they start trying to throw their weight around. The idealistic view of advertising is that the advertiser buys page space in which to display their ad. The reality is that sooner or later most advertisers will start trying to influence the editorial content of the publication.

They may object loudly to a feature that has already been published, and pull their ads (temporarily or forever). More subtly, they may suggest features that they would like to see published, features in which their products are favorably highlighted. It’s also very standard in the music industry for editors to be provided with free software and even hardware, a topic that would take us far enough astray that I may explore it in a separate blog entry. (Full disclosure: I have certainly benefited, and very significantly, from this practice.)

Various publications handle these pressures in various ways. Or rather, various publishers handle them in various ways. Ultimately, it’s up to the person sitting behind the publisher’s desk to

The Future of Keyboard Magazine

Email arrived tonight from Ernie Rideout tonight saying he has been laid off as editor-in-chief of Keyboard. Without disparaging in any way the awesome talents and unflagging energy of Steve Fortner, Michael Gallant, and Debbie Greenberg, it’s not easy for me to see how they’re going to be able to keep the wheels turning with such a shrunken head count.

A bit of history: I was laid off from Keyboard in 2002, after 26 years on the editorial staff, so I have at least a vague idea both what it takes to produce a magazine and what may be going on behind the scenes in a publishing house of this sort. Personally, I was grateful to be out of there. It was already pretty much a pressure cooker ten years ago.

But we had more editorial staff than that in 1978. We had Tom Darter (editor), Dominic Milano (half-time editor, half-time art director), me, and Bob Doerschuk. That’s 3-1/2 editors. Today, Debbie is half-time Keyboard and half-time EQ, so they have 2-1/2 editors left.