The Future of Alternative Press Review Is in Jeopardy
Press Action
Thursday, January 04, 2007
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/apr01042007/

Fifth Estate, The Match!, Anarchy, Kick It Over, Love and Rage, the Shadow, Slingshot, Ideas and Action, Black Flag, Social Anarchism, Our Generation and Freedom are just a few of the many classic anarchist publications that have opened our eyes over the past 40 years to the wonderful world of liberation. If I hadn’t come across a few of these publications as a young adult and if I hadn’t discovered the likes of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman, Malatesta, Dolgoff, Bookchin, et al., I think I’d still be stuck in some statist nightmare where, on the one side, the New Republic—or perhaps tilting as far out as Mother Jones and The Nation—and on the other, National Review represented the boundaries of my political education.

Luckily, I was able to escape from such strict ideological confines.

As things stand now, some of the anarchist publications mentioned above have come and gone, while others have survived the digital revolution and continue to make their way into the hands of cranky old revolutionaries and wide-eyed insurrectionists.

Alternative Press Review may be a young gun compared to Fifth Estate and The Match! And it may not define itself as an anarchist magazine, preferring instead to operate as a fellow traveler in the anarchist scene. But you can rest assured the bulk of its articles are slanted toward the notion that there’s no government like no government.

And, when you sit down to read an issue of Alternative Press Review, its articles — like those in any self-proclaimed anarchist publication — remind you there remains a way to look at the world around us that doesn’t involve relinquishing our freedom, bombing others to smithereens or just basically destroying the planet.

But putting together an issue of APR requires a lot of hard work. Perhaps more vital than the long hours required of the people who operate the magazine — Thomas Wheeler and Jason McQuinn — is the amount of money needed to get the magazine printed and mailed to subscribers and distributed to newsstands.

Right now, APR is in a serious financial pinch. Tower Records, one of APR’s distributors, went bankrupt and the magazine lost all the money that it was owed by Tower. Then Clamor magazine went belly up and its InfoSHOPdirect online store was seized by itsbank. APR was owed thousands of dollars in sales and subscription orders, money that APR will never see.

APR needs some major financial help if it’s to continue publishing. As Jason McQuinn aptly describes it, APR is “one of the very few places where people can read such consistently high quality liberatory writing anywhere in the North American media.”

Here’s how to keep the APR project going. Send donations by mail to: Alternative Press Review, PO Box 6245, Arlington, VA 22206. Or visit APR’s Web site at http://www.altpr.org and donate online.