These magazines have been largely supported by colleges, and with the rise of neoliberal academics, they’re being shut down. I wonder whether some of them might be able to pivot to the kind of crowd-funding model we use at Strange Horizons, and that has so ably come to support other sfnal lit. mags in the two decades since we started — Uncanny, for example.
(A quick Google search pulled up Uncanny’s 2022 drive, for example, where 1066 backers pledged $48,242: https://www.kickstarter.com/…/uncanny-magazine-year-8…)
Crowdfunding drives do take time and effort from *someone* to organize, as well as the knowledge of how to do them effectively. (I’d be happy to teach people!)
I don’t know what kind of budgets these magazines are used to running, but given that they subsist in part on volunteer grad student labor and often pay in copies, perhaps it wouldn’t be too difficult a transition? I’m not currently involved with running a department literary magazine, so I’d be interested in hearing more from those who are.
https://www.cnn.com/…/the-believer-literary…/index.html
(Via my colleague at UIC, Cris Mazza.)