Goodbye to Pacific Standard

The news came out through Twitter a week or so ago: Pacific Standard was being killed by its owner.

Today is the final day, so this appeared in my email:


The magazine had already stopped publishing on its usual schedule, opting instead for an annual printed round-up and a full complement of web-based content. At the time of that announcment, I thought that didn't bode well for its future, but things seemed to be going ahead as promised.

The magazine was started in 2008, originally under a different name, with funding from a philanthropist who has the controlling interest in SAGE Publications Inc., publisher of academic journals and books. I have always described its purpose as translating (and sometimes synthesizing) academic work in the social sciences into good writing so it can reach a broader audience.

The philanthropist's Social Justice Foundation supported Pacific Standard consistently since its founding, and the foundation's board had recently approved the editor's 10-year plan to increase investigative reporting and had encouraged him to hire more full-time journalists. New people were hired as recently as three weeks ago, according to the Daily Beast.

The editor is looking for a new wealthy benefactor, contacting people like Oprah Winfrey and Tom Steyer. Its $3 million annual budget would be a clichéd drop in the bucket to either of them.

Again according to quotes in the Daily Beast story, it sounds as though the foundation itself is being shut down by SAGE, which "needs to focus investment on its core business of academic and professional publishing." Wah wah wah, SAGE — which gets almost all of the content it publishes for free because of the nature of publish-or-perish in academia — wants to keep more of its profits to itself. There's more going on here that's not being said.