Friday, October 28th, 2005

Alt-Media: The Other Shoe Drops…

Peter Scholtes talks about the Punk Planet magazine and the impending end of Big Top Distributors, the largest remaining distributor of independent magazines.

This is huge, and also hugely depressing. It hasn’t just been a bad week for Bush and for fans of big-money baseball (Go Shoeless Joe! Come on, smile, we need it…), but for alt-media all around. Peter reprints the heartbreaking letter. It begins:

“Hey there, Last Thursday we received some distressing news–the kind of news that made our very bones ache when we heard it; the kind of news that felt so significant we simply couldn’t function after it sank in. With a few days time and the ability to process it, we decided it’s news worth sharing: It was a letter from the president of the Independent Press Association, the not-for-profit organization that owns the company that distributes the majority of Punk Planet’s copies, BigTop Newsstand Services. The letter acknowledged the truth of a rumor that had been running through indie publishing circles for months now: the distributor was having cash flow problems…”

posted by Jeff Chang @ 2:56 pm | 0 Comments

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