An Offer I Can't Refuse

In yesterday's snail mail came an extraordinary offer from a magazine I respect and admire--Inc., the journal for entrepreneurs. It was one of those subscription offers we all get from time to time. But this one offered the lowest price I have ever seen for a mainstream business magazine: $5 for a year's subscription or $10 for three full years. The latter offer provides 30 issues of the magazine for 33 cents a copy, less than the cost to mail the magazine. Add in the costs of reporting, writing, editing, design, art, printing and paper, and it's not hard to see that Inc. is losing quite a bit of money on every issue it sells. My guess is that the cost to produce a single issue of Inc. is closer to $1.50 to $1.75. So Inc., which is owned by Mansueto Ventures, my former employer at Fast Company, is willing to take a loss of well over a dollar an issue to get me as a subscriber. And this is for an exceptional magazine of very high quality, smart writing, and attractive design.

Why? Largely because it's doing what almost all magazines do: it's trying to maintain a circulation or rate base that is higher than it's natural demand. By keeping its rate base at its current level, it can charge advertisers a higher price than it otherwise could. Inc. is hardly alone in playing this game. Pretty much every U.S. magazine has the same strategy. If you're the circulation director of a publication, you have a simple choice: pay large direct mail costs to get new subscribers who really want the magazine, or lower your subscription costs to a point where you're pretty much making an offer that is hard to refuse. Although I have never paid for a subscription to Inc., I'm filling out a check for $10 right now. As a magazine junkie and a new entrepreneur, I simply cannot refuse this offer. Inc., you got me.

How My Love Affair With Journalism Began

I know the precise moment when the love affair began.

I was all of 15 years old, a gawky office boy at my city’s morning daily, sitting in a cramped, dusty room on a stack of brittle, yellowing newspapers. The place smelled of newspaper ink and mould. It was the back issue room, a place that I often surrendered to fulfill some odd order for a newspaper containing a wanted wedding announcement or obituary. But when I stepped into that space, it was as if I had entered a time capsule. I pulled off the wooden shelves the massive black-bound books and stepped into a different world. I scanned the 48-point headlines and consumed the accounts of Charles Lindbergh’s non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927, Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. And suddenly, I fell in love with journalism, just sitting in that room, reading the first draft of history by some unknown AP reporter.

It was long before my first byline in the campus weekly, or the first time I had to fetch a roast beef on a roll for a city editor, certainly long before my first dispatch as a foreign correspondent in London, or the first cover story I reported and wrote for a major magazine. Or the first time I walked into a bookstore to see one of my books on the shelf. Just sitting alone in that back issue room of The Morning Call in Paterson, N.J., my mind buried in old newsprint on my lap, I fell in love with journalism. It has been a passionate affair that has lasted some 50 years--from newspapers to magazines, from print to online.