In the competitive world of campus publishing, a group of publications are now playing nice.
Roughly 35 publications have formed an umbrella group that organizers say will address the challenges facing literary magazines, journals, and other periodicals on campus.
“We don’t really see the other publications as rivals, and we don’t see the administration as enemies,” said Samuel Kerbel, GS/JTS ’11 and editor in chief of The Current, a quarterly publication on current events and Jewish culture. “We’re trying to reach out and make connections.”
Kerbel said the idea for the InterPublication Alliance began when he and his friend Mark Hay, CC ’12 and editor in chief of the Columbia Political Review and Awaaz, a magazine about South Asian politics and culture, realized their organizations faced many of the same problems.
One concern was the lack of a clear way to distribute to students on campus, since the Columbia Daily Spectator and Tablet, a literary magazine, are the only two publications with their own racks.
“We get a lot of magazines and publications wantonly thrown away,” said Hay, a former Spectator columnist, adding that without specific places for each publication, the racks become a mess.
Other groups are still working to get their writing into print.
Lauren Argenti, CC ’12 and managing editor of NOW!HERE, a travel journal that publishes online only, said that her publication hopes to create a print supplement next semester because hard copies are more visible to students.
“It’s really hard to market a website on campus. ... If you see a sign that says go to nowhere.com, you’re not going to do it. We’re trying to get something in people’s hands so they can say, OK, this is what NOW!HERE is,” Argenti said.
Kerbel said that other publications were struggling to publish online at all. “Many have attempted to [create a website], but they haven’t been able to focus on it because they’re just trying to get that month’s issue out,” he said.
To help solve that, Hay said the alliance is looking into grant applications and fundraising to hire an outside web developer to build a central website that would link to every publication on campus.
It hasn’t been an easy couple of years for revenue raising, said Jon Hill, editor in chief of the Blue and White, which is part of the alliance.
“It’s been difficult for our publisher to sell ads,” Hill said. “Hopefully this will give us a better bargaining position with local businesses and national ad services.”
Members are also hoping that sharing information about finances and logistics will help ease that burden. Hay said he realized that CPR had been making less for ads and paying more for printing than other campus publications after speaking with other groups.
“We kinda get really raw deals,” he said of student publications. “With CPR, we did some poking around and found that it was costing other magazines several hundred dollars less to print their issues the exact same way than we were paying.”
Kerbel said that the members of the Student Governing Board, which funds most publications on campus, likes to see a completed issue before they give money to a new group.
“You can’t really print without money. It’s kind of a catch-22,” he said, adding that IPA hopes to give funding and guidance to start-ups.
Hay said that even though everyone is competing for the same readership and ad revenue, he thinks the increased cooperation will be useful.
“Efforts like this in the past have fallen flat,” he said. “Just the fact that everyone’s gotten together and agreed to start handling issues is a pretty tangible accomplishment for everyone.”
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