Don't you just love it when Republicans speak of death, destruction, and destitution as a "win-win" situation? They're so good at it, it just comes naturally to them. The important point of the MJ story:

That's a tradition that goes back to the origins of the nation. The founding fathers saw the press as the lifeblood of democracy—only informed voters could compose a true democracy, they believed—and thus created a postal system that gave favorable rates to small periodicals. (George Washington actually supported mailing newspapers for free.) For 200 years, small periodicals and journals of opinion were given special treatment.

The 2007 rate hikes, which went into effect this summer, changed that. Now, periodicals are still expected to cover attributable costs and pay no overhead, but because the cost of delivering mail has gone up, rates within the class have gone up as well. In advance of the rate hike, the Postal Service submitted a proposal to the Postal Regulatory Commission that would have raised the rates in the class more or less evenly. The PRC rejected the proposal in favor of a rate package put forward by Time Warner that, unsurprisingly, hands small periodicals much steeper rate hikes than their large counterparts.

Small periodicals in some instances face a rate hike of up to 50 percent. An increase of that size is almost unbearable for periodicals that publish frequently, like the liberal Nation or the conservative National Review, both weeklies. For them, postal expenses make up a massive portion of their budgets. An increased cost of $500,000 per year, which is The Nation's estimate, would be devastating. (The rate hike is a smaller burden for Mother Jones, due to the fact that the magazine publishes six times a year. Nevertheless, Mother Jones opposed the rate hike earlier this year.)

This is a Bad Thing, for all the reasons listed above. And yet...I find myself having some confusing feelings. OTOH, I have friends who get paychecks from the organizations who put out some of these publications, and this hurts them. There are many, many talented political writers who do much better work than I ever will, and they deserve to be paid for that work. OTOH, is the death of the small publication inevitable? How much of a hypocrite am I, for lamenting the state of my friends' careers while offering up a blog that competes with them for reader attention, and does so for free? Should I rejoice that the ranks of underemployed, talented writers blogging for (almost) nothing will increase? Is this the start, along with the writers' strike, of a new age of "writer/activists" (because so many of us have nothing else to do with our time)?

And once again, I'm reminded of just how many (few) voices there are in the Village. I'm sorry to have to include decent people in that population, but they are part of that world. That world is one in which membership is carefully controlled, and certain lines are never crossed. It's not like the one most people live in, and most people don't read small publications about politics. Villagers do, and some of them have an overly magnified sense of the importance of what is said in them. TNR comes to mind- that ship should've sailed silently off into the sunset years ago (except for Stanley's movie reviews).

The Bush Boom has been good for no one worth less than 10m. It interests me when that reality strikes the Village; that doesn't happen often. Kudos to MJ for noticing (not that they wouldn't). We'll see which writers find positions with think tanks and other Swampland gravy trains, and which ones go into progressive advocacy or other careers. And which ones get picked up by entities like the Post. I don't mean to be overly gloomy on the future of small publications, I'm sure some will survive and even thrive despite this news. But two long term trends suggest the total number of small publications will continue to decline (declining "book" reading and increasing "new media" reading habits among Americans). As Serious publications are today more or less just pablum and propaganda, it will be fun to watch the inevitable reaction as truly creative people, and those who want to consume their work, find new "monetization" models in the face of predatory government like this.