I found out from this article in the NYT that The New Leader a stalwart publication of left-leaning political analysis is shutting down after 82 years of publication. The New Leader has published many of the great thinkers of 20th century including George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Bermingham Jail.”
No doubt it’s a tough time to publish a magazine borne of political climates of the past. But I was particularly taken by these three paragraphs about Myron Kolatch, the magazine’s editor since 1961…
Mr. Kolatch, 76, is a small, soft-spoken man with old-fashioned manners and the kind of mustache that leading men used to wear in the movies. He occupies what is surely the most antiseptic office in New York: no photographs, no rugs, not a sheet of paper out of place. And in all his years there Mr. Kolatch never got around to hanging pictures on the wall.
“Every day I walk in here and say, ‘These naked walls – something should be done about them,’ ” he said. “But I’m a perfectionist, and I’ve always worried that if I started obsessing about pictures, I’d never get the magazine out.”
It was a similar concern, he added, that contributed to what he regards as one of his great failings as an editor – his tardy embrace of the Internet. “I didn’t have the foresight to realize the importance of being there,” he said. “If you’re a magazine like ours, and you’re not there, you almost don’t exist. But I can’t do anything halfway. It’s just like the walls. I felt that if we were going do an Internet thing, it would have to be top-of-the-line, and we couldn’t afford that. We could barely afford the domain name.”
The New Leader has no Internet presence. None. This would have been excusable in 1998-9 when the first dot com boom probably seemed like a lot of empty hype. In 2006, it is inexcusable. I have worked for nonprofits, some in publishing, often headed by an Executive Director a generation or two removed from the coming of the Internet. All knew they needed to be online. When they didn’t have the money, they raised it. When they didn’t have the time, they farmed out the job to interns and young staffers who knew these things.
Often their first efforts weren’t perfect. Far from it. But they knew they had to be there. Because otherwise, like Mr. Kolatch pointed out, “you almost don’t exist.”
I had never heard of The New Leader before I read its obituary. I may not be its target demographic but at least it would have rung a bell had I seen it linked from someone’s blog or mentioned at Arts Journal. But that’s impossible if it’s not online itself.
I don’t like to rejoice in anyone’s failure. But I can’t say I’ll miss The New Leader because I never knew about it until now. Worse still, I can’t say I didn’t see this one coming.
