By Michael Miner
“We were approaching this very conservatively, very carefully, very slowly. It wasn’t a dot-com operation. We started talking about it in January of ’99, and we’ve been working on it off and on for the last two years. What we wanted to do was fill a need we saw in journalism in Chicago by providing in-depth stories–readable, compelling stories about urban life–both journalistically and in fiction and essays. There are a lot of good stories that don’t get told or told well enough. There are things that make the evening news and you never hear of them again. We took a little bit of Harper’s and a little bit of Mother Jones and a little bit of the New Yorker, all with sort of a Chicago feel to it. Our emphasis was going to be very, very local. We felt there’s a lot of information out there but not a lot of comprehension.”
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“I had a four-person editorial staff and an office manager,” he told me. “I was getting ready to hire a publisher and an advertising director. I had some circulation folks lined up. We were about to go into design and start up in late spring or early summer. We were going to start slow, as a bimonthly with a circulation of about 10 or 15 thousand, highly targeted, and build. We were not shoveling buckets of money at this thing. If I learned anything at the Reporter it’s how to operate on a shoestring. We had given ourselves three years to build it.
“It’s sad. I think it’s a good idea, and I feel like I’ve been preparing most of my professional life to do it. I would like the opportunity to try it and see if people would want this kind of magazine. If it didn’t work out financially, so be it. But now I’m still wondering if it would work, so it’s sort of like a death in the family.”
Business hotshots get labeled reclusive if they never talk to you or me and not that often to anyone else. Steve Harris, founder and publisher of the niche magazine Online Investor, fits the bill. “Steve wouldn’t even return calls to people who wanted to give him something–like, ‘We want to put your magazine on our Web site and offer free subscriptions,’” says Jan Parr, who was Harris’s editor. She tells me her own face time with the boss was complicated by his unwillingness ever to take off his sunglasses.
Did he get that? “At times I did wonder,” says Parr.
Matanky’s views, clearly held and strongly stated, made his weekly something special among neighborhood papers, and his 6,000 to 7,000 readers were a loyal bunch. Unfortunately, the extremes of personality that serve an editor well can be disastrous to a publisher, who has to deal with, among others, advertisers. Matanky didn’t suffer fools gladly, and he had an expansive opinion of who the fools were. “People who have the title of editor and publisher are usually publishers who became editors out of necessity,” he told me last weekend. “A few of us did it the other way around. It’s a mistake. I’m an editor, not a businessman.”
