A recent article in The New York Times referred to The Atlantic magazine as “a tiny enterprise.” It only had $32 million in revenue last year. And that is tiny, as “compared with vast corporate magazine empires like Time Inc. and Condé Nast.”
But The Atlantic’s “tiny” revenue is ten times as large as BAR’s. In some respects, however, we can be compared to The Atlantic. Like The Atlantic, BAR enjoys a certain “intellectual cachet.” We are also like The Atlantic in another respect: “What it enjoyed in prestige it lacked in business success,” according to The New York Times article. For a decade The Atlantic lost money. In one year it lost $4.5 million. After that, the losses grew to $7 million.
Fortunately, in that respect, too, The Atlantic has surpassed us. Our losses have been far less—but still, they are losses. (NB: This year The Atlantic turned a profit—“from your mouth to God’s ears.”)
The entire magazine world is suffering financial distress. The smaller the magazine, the more difficult it has become to make ends meet. BAR, with its circulation of nearly 150,000, is the world’s largest magazine devoted to Biblical archaeology. Much of our success is attributable to the fact that our articles are written most of the time not by staff writers but by the world’s most distinguished scholars writing in clearly understandable language.
But in the bigger world, if The Atlantic, with its nearly half-million subscribers, is “tiny,” we are exiguous. We are a big fish in a very small fishbowl.
We all remember that line of Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” That is not exactly the case with BAR. More accurately, we have depended on the kindness of friends. It is to them—to all of you—that we can attribute our continued ability to provide the most exciting Biblical archaeology magazine in the world.
Many of our readers have contributed generously to our appeals for help—in amounts that their circumstances permit. Fortunately, we also have some special friends who make more substantial gifts for which we are especially grateful.
Recently, we have established a new program that promises to sustain the magazine in a major way. Several people have offered to support the cost of specific articles with gifts of between $5,000 and $10,000. This covers the cost of staff research and editing, color and black-and-white illustrations, design, printing and paper. We are acknowledging these supporters in the margin of the article that they have made possible.
If you can support such an article, please let me hear from you. Write or e-mail me (hshanks@bib-arch.org) at the magazine. Or if you know someone I should contact, just let me know. All gifts to BAR are tax deductible; we are a nondenominational, charitable, educational organization recognized by the Internal Revenue Service.
Whether your gifts are large or small, we are deeply grateful to all of you, our friends, for your support. Please send us your check now or visit our Web site: You can even make your gift online. And you, too, will be acknowledged in the Honor Roll that we periodically publish in BAR. Many thanks to all of you.
A recent article in The New York Times referred to The Atlantic magazine as “a tiny enterprise.” It only had $32 million in revenue last year. And that is tiny, as “compared with vast corporate magazine empires like Time Inc. and Condé Nast.” But The Atlantic’s “tiny” revenue is ten times as large as BAR’s. In some respects, however, we can be compared to The Atlantic. Like The Atlantic, BAR enjoys a certain “intellectual cachet.” We are also like The Atlantic in another respect: “What it enjoyed in prestige it lacked in business success,” according to The New York […]
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