This times it’s TRIQUARTERLY, to my mind one of the nation’s premier literary journals. Northwestern University has announced that the Spring 2010 issue will be the last with the current distinguished editor, Susan Firestone Hahn, and the print journal will cease publication entirely. It will be revived, sort of, in an electronic format, edited by the graduate creative writing program at Northwestern. The quality, the creativity, the national significance will surely be gone for good. It’s very sad, and continues the momentum of recent dire news for literary magazines. Two other examples are THE SOUTHERN REVIEW and THE NEW ENGLAND REVIEW, both of which face major financial challenges.
Tyler Meier, KR’s managing editor, has only just returned from an important conference in New York led by JSTOR, the online organization that has digitized many scholarly and creative journals. It’s an important initiative, and KR is glad to be part of it. But apparently many librarians also attended the conference, and they bore a chilling messaget: that institutions are being forced to slash subscriptions to magazines and journals.
This is a critical bit of news. Institutions are precious subscribers. In the past they have renewed almost automatically, saving huge expense in renewal efforts, and they often pay at a higher rate than individual subscribers. For many journals–and KR has a higher number of library subscriptions than many–this is yet another financial shock.