by guest writer Robyn Crummer-Olson

On Monday, September 15, 2008 at 11:18 a.m., Debbie Rasmussen—publisher of the Portland magazine Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture—had to break some bad news via blog post: Bitch was in financial trouble and needed to raise $40,000 over the next month to publish the next issue.

On Thursday, September 18, 2008 at 4:47 p.m., Rasmussen’s blog post read, “We’ve made history together!” She published the day’s current fundraising totals as exceeding $46,000.

As an independent, nonprofit magazine, Bitch, and others like it, are an indicator species of the overall health of the print publishing environment. Larger publications have parent companies and reservoirs of resources to draw on when weathering these inhospitable market conditions.

Bitch does not. It relies heavily on the support of volunteers and donations from its supporters. As a nontraditional publishing model and a nonprofit magazine, Bitch constantly educates its community.
Rasmussen explains, “People think we’re a much bigger operation in terms of people and financial resources and so don’t realize that their support is critical.  It’s tough sometimes to keep getting the message out that we’re a community-supported publishing project.”

Announcements distributed via their website, e-mail, social networking sites, an article in the Willamette Week, and a video on YouTube quickly and inexpensively spread the word. Not only did Bitch receive generous monetary contributions, but also valuable feedback, in-kind donations, and offers of networking connections and volunteer hours.

In both her blog posts and an interview, Rasmussen describes the lure, uncertainty, and expense of a community-dependent print magazine evolving into newer media like the internet and radio. “We’ve been putting money into our website to develop more digitally, but the front-end costs there are significant,” Rasmussen explains, “so it’s really that we’re trying to evolve while our income is holding steady and even declining.”

As of today, September 23, 2008 at 10:43 a.m., Rasmussen estimates that the total funds are approaching, if not exceeding, $65,000.

Only another $15,000 and some volunteer elbow grease needed to help Bitch see another spring and to prove that this free-thinking, feminist species will evolve and survive.