John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 16 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
That's the bad news. The good news is that a few others — like Countryside, Environmental Action, Not Man Apart, High Country News, Maine Times, Country Journal, Foxfire and Acres, U.S.A. — have come and stayed during the same period.
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PLOWBOY: But you're a lot bigger than any of those publications.
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yes, we're bigger than any others of the new crop of ecology and alternatives magazines that I know of. Which means that we probably get more attention than we deserve. Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better, you know. I'm not trying to argue size now anyway. What I want to point out is that hundreds of others have attempted to establish a periodical in our field since we've started, and only a handful have been successful.
PLOWBOY: Why?
SHUTTLEWORTH: I thought you'd never ask! Because too damn many people think that publishing a magazine is a lot of fun, that's why. And it's not. Not if you put out a good one. It's brutal, grinding, hard, damn work. There's a reason for calling a deadline a deadline. Every one dang near kills you!
Under the best of conditions — when you have a bankroll like that $1,300,000 I mentioned a little bit ago — the publishing business is a lot o f fun. So much fun that you get fat and careless and go down the tubes anyway.
And when you start with $1,500 the way we did, well, there's not one chance in 10,000 that you'll make it.
PLOWBOY: But Mother Earth News has made it.
SHUTTLEWORTH: Yes, and maybe now you know why I bored you with that long personal history. We've made it partly because of the things my folks did 35 or 40 years ago. We've made it partly because I'd been thinking about the philosophy of this magazine for 26 years before I ever began putting together the first issue. We've made it partly because I didn't know enough not to do things like work all day, all night, all day, all night and halfway through the third day to get an issue out. Sixty hours straight, after a solid two months of seven-days-week, 18-hours-a-day work.
Now the only reason I'm telling you this for print is because we have a steady stream of starry-eyed dreamers turning up on our doorstep. Dreamers who want to work on our "groovy" magazine, and who think that "work" consists of getting high and giving off good vibrations.
People with that attitude, as you might have guessed, don't last long around here. Even when I get too softhearted and hire one, as I frequently do, they don't last long. They can't take the pressure.
And this is a high-pressure business. Stewart Brand threw in the towel after three years the first time he published The Whole Earth Catalog. Tom Bell, the real driving force behind High Country News, joined that publication in 1970 and, although he's still publisher, hasn't taken an active day-to-day hand in its operation since moving to a small ranch in August 1974. Sam Love, one of the founders of Environmental Action in April of 1970, dropped almost completely out of working with that paper in November 1973. This business just burns you out. Uses you up.
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