Pacific Standard

» see psmag.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

pacific standard was the kind of nonprofit longform magazine that the american foundation-funded press tried to build at the end of the print era. honestly, it was not on my reading list at the time. by 2008 i was on a ttnet line in ankara reading turkish hardware forums and english tech blogs. a santa barbara magazine about social science reporting and inequality policy was not in my orbit. i learned about it on shutdown day in august 2019.

sara miller mccune founded sage publications in 1965 with her husband george and turned it into one of the largest academic journal publishers in the world. in 2008 she launched the magazine as miller-mccune, funded through her own social justice foundation rather than through sage's commercial side. the editorial pitch was social science reporting that read like a longform magazine instead of a journal. in 2012 the name changed to pacific standard. nicholas jackson came on as editor and built it into a publication that won national awards and ran writers who did not have many other places to put eight-thousand-word features.

the funding model was always one donor. in those days. that was the bet and that was the risk. across early 2019 sage publishing started signaling that it needed to focus its money on its core academic publishing business. by late july the foundation board was told there would be no more contributions. on 6 august the staff found out the magazine was closing.

~ the record ~

~ the fall ~

miller mccune had been retreating from active involvement for a couple of years before the end. the foundation she had built around the magazine ran on her continued backing. when she relinquished her board seat and the academic publisher decided the magazine was not central to its business, the math was over.

the staff had ten days to clean up. the final day for the website was 16 august 2019. there was no acquirer. there was no rescue. the archive went into a static read-only mode and stayed that way.

~ what got buried with it ~

but the nieman lab piece on the day after was the one that stuck. its headline was about living by the donor and dying by the donor. that was the one-line version of what the magazine had been and what had ended it. the nonprofit journalism debate had been about whether single-funder models could outlast the funder. pacific standard answered the question.

several of the editors and writers moved on to other places. some went into book contracts. some went into newsrooms that had survived the same decade by leaning on memberships and grants from multiple foundations rather than one. the structural lesson got absorbed by the next wave of nonprofit news outlets. the magazine itself just stopped.

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