Behind the Scenes at your Magazine…

Dear Five Owls Friend,

In recent years, four of our “competitors” bit the dust: JOYS (Journal of Youth Services), the New Advocate, the Riverbank Review, and Signal. I can empathize.

The costs of keeping The Five Owls in print in the face of diminishing support from publishers, schools, and libraries has kept me in perpetual penury for the last seven years. The only thing that has kept The Five Owls in print through all these years has been our subsidization by partners: our printer, graphic designers, and other suppliers who have allowed us to pay as we could; a handful of “angels” who either contributed cash or, as advertisers, bought ads; a phalanx of librarians, volunteer writers and reviewers whose expert ideas, writing, and judgments provide the heart of our content and services; and frequent infusions of cash from me.

For years, foundation staffs, publishing people, and other potential supporters have urged me to “take The Five Owls electronic,” and shed the magazine as an artifact of the past. This I have resisted doing, in part because my late wife Holly created The Five Owls as a magazine by and for people who love the magic and beauty that can happen on (and through) the printed page. How pathetic would that have been, to publish a paean to print on something other than the printed page?

I was also dissuaded by the concern that academic contributors—a valued source of writers—would tell us Internet publishing does not cut it in their “publish or perish” world. I put off delivering our services via the Internet, too, because of advice that you, our reader, might not accept and support the move.

After eighteen years of publishing and repeated attempts to “break the code,” we never made a dime. One can only conclude that reading receives more lip service than real support by the economic powers-that-be in publishing and public education. Reading is a countercultural movement whose most loyal advocates, it seems, are likely to be as poor as I am. And yet, by now most of our readers are sophisticated computer users, and not Luddites as some have suggested.

I’ve concluded that the struggle to promote reading as a popular, culturally-embraced value requires guerrilla tactics better suited to present circumstances. Publishing via the Internet would allow us to stick to a more timely and regular schedule. It would allow us to better customize our content to more of your needs. And sending you PDF files would save us about $25,000 a year—money that we do not earn from operations, but must beg, borrow, and steal in order to keep the presses running.

There is no longer any choice but to publish the magazine electronically. Starting immediately, subscribers will begin receiving The Five Owls four times a year via e-mail and have access to a “subscribers only” section of the website. Our 4-color parent newsletter, which is supported by Scholastic, Inc., will continue being published and distributed to participating subscribers as before.

We have two issues of The Five Owls ready to e-mail to you as soon as we receive your e-mail address. For your convenience, we have included a coupon in this mailing so you can provide us with your e-mail address, as well as comments and suggestions. Please return this to us as soon as possible. In the meantime, we are resuming work to update our website so it will be ready to serve as a worthy portal to The Five Owls’ benefits and services in the very near future.

Sincerely yours,

Dan Dailey
Publisher