UCA offers struggling magazine cash boost
Posted on Saturday, March 29, 2008
CONWAY — The Oxford American magazine — struggling to avoid closing a fourth, maybe a fifth time — got a $ 140, 000 cash offer Friday to help survive its latest financial crisis.
The University of Central Arkansas, where the prizewinning literary publication is based, agreed to a bailout about two months after an Oxford American employee was accused of embezzling tens of thousands of dollars.
The offer by UCA President Lu Hardin came one week after Marc Smirnoff, the magazine’s editor and founder, sent an email saying the publication’s “existence [was ] in jeopardy.” The e-mail, to the magazine’s board members, said a current cash-flow crisis “could single-handedly bring down the magazine.”
The Oxford American is noted for its annual Southern music issue, which includes a CD, and a food column by John T. Edge. It also has featured previously unpublished works by William Faulkner, including letters and portions of a screenplay.
The quarterly publication’s most recent issue focused on sports and featured a poem on baseball by John Updike along with articles on horse racing, cockfighting, chess and football concession food.
It is among several small, independent magazines struggling to stay afloat.
The e-mailed memo — signed by Smirnoff, publisher Ray Wittenberg and two others — reveals that the magazine did not even become aware of the thefts, which began as early as September 2007, until January of this year when a $ 25, 000 check to a printer bounced.
They wrote that “it was this bounced check that alerted us to the embezzlement.”
In an interview Friday, Smirnoff acknowledged the magazine’s management should have noticed the problem sooner.
“I think that was our great failure,” he said. “We made some accounting mistakes.... It was stupid of us.”
The proposed rescue by UCA is conditional. The Oxford American would have to repay the university within six months. The money could come from donations.
UCA also would assume control over the budget operations, “including all budgetary decisions, all personnel decisions, financial controls and procedures, and auditing,” said UCA spokesman Warwick Sabin, who serves on the magazine’s six-member board of directors, as does Hardin.
Sabin told fellow board members in an e-mail Friday that, under the plan, UCA would take possession of the magazine’s existing financial records, “and an overall operational review will take place immediately.”
Board Chairman Rex Nelson — who works for the Delta Regional Authority and is a former journalist and aide to ex-Gov. Mike Huckabee — suggested the panel meet Wednesday to consider the plan.
Smirnoff said in the interview he needs to study the offer.
“I want to be sure that the Oxford American can fulfill its end of the obligation,” he said.
Still, he said: “This magazine is not going to die. Its future has been in jeopardy three, four and now maybe five times, but... it also has sprung back to life that many times as well.... This magazine is going to survive and then thrive. One way or another we are all going to work out a strategy for that to happen in Conway, Ark., at UCA.”
Smirnoff said some details on Hardin’s proposal may need to be worked out.
“With every negotiation, there is tweaking,” he said. “I’ve learned this from playing fantasy baseball” for 20 years.
The magazine’s former office manager, Renae Maxwell, 42, of Sherwood, is awaiting trial after UCA police arrested her Feb. 5 on one count of theft greater than $ 2, 500 and one count of forgery.
Maxwell, who is free on bond, has an unlisted phone number. Her attorney, Lynn Plemmons of Conway, did not return calls seeking comment.
Police have said Maxwell took $ 30, 305. They said she forged her predecessor’s signature to checks ranging from about $ 800 to $ 2, 500.
Police are investigating to determine if Maxwell might have taken more, Prosecuting Attorney Marcus Vaden said Friday.
“I think it could be more than that,” Sabin said. “The latest we have heard is that it could be over $ 100, 000.”
Smirnoff said, however, that $ 30, 000 of that is not actually stolen money but is money Maxwell did not pay the Internal Revenue Service as she should have.
Hardin, who was in Texas on Friday, said the magazine is special.
“The Oxford American magazine is an exceptional publication that has won several National Magazine Awards, and UCA stands practically alone in having a magazine of this caliber produced on its campus,” he said in an e-mailed statement.
The magazine, which began in 1992 in Oxford, Miss., and which was once financed by the writer John Grisham, has won two National Magazine Awards in competition with such magazines as The New Yorker and National Geographic.
Despite its literary success and approximately 20, 000 current subscriptions, The Oxford American has repeatedly faltered financially, so many times that even Smirnoff was unsure whether to say it had previously shut down three times or four.
UCA acquired the magazine in May 2004 for $ 490, 000. The three-year agreement called for an initial $ 300, 000 payment followed by an additional $ 190, 000. At the time, Hardin said the goal was for the magazine to be selfsufficient and for UCA to recoup its investment.
Even though Sabin has been a faithful subscriber since he was a teenager in the 1990 s, he said: “I would have totally understood had [Hardin ] decided to pull the plug. I think a lot of people probably would have done that a long time ago considering the magazine’s track record. But I think supporting this kind of literary endeavor requires the kind of investment that most people are not willing to give.”
Indeed, fellow board member Nelson sent a March 13 e-mail to Sabin saying in part: “If the ‘crisis mode’ of doing business continues, I plan to end my involvement. Should UCA save the magazine one more time, I’ll commit at least six months of whatever you need and then evaluate the situation.”
The magazine’s struggles comes at a tough time for small, independent journals: Within the last year, at least two magazines on music and culture were forced to close because of money problems. Punk Planet closed last year. No Depression, an alternative country-music magazine, is folding with its May-June issue.
“All independent magazines are struggling right now,” said Kyla Fairchild of Seattle, copublisher of No Depression, an alternative-music magazine that got its name from an old Carter Family song.
Fairchild said she knew of four music magazines that have just recently announced they are going out of business.
Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, said Friday that smaller magazines “have the same problems that bigger magazines have except that their problems are bigger.”
“They don’t have an enormous infrastructure... that can absorb some of those costs,” from increased printing and mailing expenses, she said.
Further, she said, “when business is bad, people are not advertising as much, and they’re certainly not advertising as much in print magazines. They’re migrating to the Web.”
Still, Nelson said the failure of the smaller magazines does not suggest that “literature is dead or nobody is publishing good literature.”
Rather, “It just says that the experience of publishing a magazine is different — that what it takes to publish a magazine is definitely hurt by this economy.” The Oxford American is meeting its current payroll, but its long-term future is uncertain.
Observed Sabin: “Based on the history of the magazine, I think the long-term future of the magazine is always in peril.”
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