An ode to Harper’s Magazine, and a plea to help save it

When I was growing up in West Virginia, pretty much the greatest weekend possible was convincing a parent to go on — or, at blessed 16, picking up my best friend and driving ourselves — an hour-plus trek to a Real City, with all the great suburban box store trappings we didn’t have. The most important of these was a Barnes and Noble, because there I could buy magazines, or what I thought of as “real magazines” — no pictures of celebrities, and lots of text.

I bought anything that looked interesting, and over time I found that I always wanted a few titles in particular. Later I would learn that they are the bastions of the best American long-form journalism, but at the time, they felt like letters secretly intended especially for me. Of course I knew magazines mean to have large audiences, preferably of people who had more money than most of the people I knew. But when I read them, they seemed like invitations to a big and marvelous world of things and ideas I’d sensed must be out there but couldn’t see from where I lived.

So I’m nostalgic about Harper’s Magazine, or at least I am now that I’m old enough to understand how naive I was then. I’m also fiercely loyal to Harper’s. My first actual journalism “job” was working on the Index there, as an intern. I know how much hard work goes into the publication, which is always what one learns when one is able to get on the inside of something.

I also learned how deeply the magazine reflects the idiosyncrasies of its talented staff. Every magazine has a personality, and usually you can feel it — as different as Susan Orlean and Malcolm Gladwell are as writers, a New Yorker article sounds like a New Yorker article, and you’d probably know it if you read it blind. Harper’s is one of the last places that feels to me not just to preserve but to celebrate voice. Every article in Harper’s has a personality, and at Harper’s, that personality seems to me to be a combination of the relationship between writer and editor. The magazine is held together not by a sense of “house voice” but by the subtle portrait that is many voices coming together, under careful curation.

Which is a long way of saying that the people behind Harper’s matter. When they change, the magazine changes. And at the moment, Harper’s is on the brink of drastic changes. Last year, five of its most senior editors left. This summer, those who remained unionized. Now, the publisher is trying to fire Ben Metcalf, the magazine’s literary editor and the guy who organized the union, and Ted Ross, who oversees the Index and is one of the few long-termers left. The publisher says the current editorial staff can “absorb” these two guys’ work. I’m not sure why he thinks that running a magazine is like running a factory.

The situation has gotten some press attention, and 84 writers (like Zadie Smith, Naomi Klein, Tom Bissell, Barbara Ehrenreich…) sent this letter to the publisher, asking among other things that he open up the Foundation that funds the magazine to other financial contributions. It doesn’t seem to have worked. (You can get more dirt on all this if you Google around.)

Without the editors I knew almost five years ago — many of whom are gone — it’s hard for me to imagine what the magazine feels like today. But I know that without Ben Metcalf and Ted Ross, I won’t recognize the magazine when it lands in my mailbox.

There are two things you can do to help: The easy, apolitical one is to subscribe. It’s so cheap it’s almost a civic sin not to. The better one is to make a pledge to Harper’s. Here’s why:

We have shown numerous means by which Harper’s Magazine might cut costs and increase revenue without laying off its most skilled and experienced editors, and in particular we have urged the magazine’s foundation to raise funds from outside sources. This possibility has been rejected by the labor lawyers representing John R. “Rick” MacArthur, our publisher. They argue that fund-raising takes time, and that there is no time to be wasted in reducing our editorial staff by two union members.

We wish to counter this argument by showing Rick MacArthur how much money can be raised in just a few days via the extraordinarily useful medium of the Internet. Please pledge what you can and pass this on, with the assurance that all funds promised here will be offered, in friendship, to the Harper’s Magazine Foundation. If the pledges we garner are refused by the foundation, your generosity will cost you absolutely nothing; if accepted, they will help to sustain America’s oldest, and finest, monthly.

The editors are organizing the pledge; if they succeed, it will show, among other things, that there are a lot of good people — and potential subscribers — who know that you don’t make magazines the same way you make cars. (Which is a good thing, because look what happened where they make all those cars…)

So if you have a few extra bucks, and you believe in good independent journalism, please sign the pledge.