Going Into Publishing

I've wanted to write about my years in the right wing press and have struggled with where to even begin.

K.C. Jones was an alternative tabloid newspaper published for roughly seven years in the 1990s. At its peak it was a weekly, though most of that time it was a monthly, modeled off the Pitch and Riverfront Times but with a decidedly conservative/libertarian editorial perspective. The Village Voice but with William F. Buckley as editor.

I worked there literally instead of going to college. It did function as a university for me in several ways: I learned a lot, including my trade; I formed lifelong friendships; I had a lot of fun and to top it all off, I got paid almost as much as a student.

My ambition was to be a writer, and I published a lot with Nadler Publishing, but that's not what I got paid for. Initially, my main contribution was distributing papers (all our publications were free, advertiser supported, we put them under the Thrifty Nickel's racks, on cigarette machines, etc.) and helping as I could with layout.

I wasn't even computer literate, but there was more work than Rich Nadler, our editor in chief, could manage by himself. I was given a stack of folders with ads to go in the upcoming issue, an IBM 8088 computer with a 10 MB hard drive running a program called PublishIt! 2.0 and told to see what I could figure out.

I say I wasn't computer literate, actually every chance I got to get my hands on a computer, I did so in my teens. A girlfriend's dad had a Mac with music composition software I played with. Another friend's dad was an IT guy back before there was a term for it, and I messed around on that family's Commodore 128. I transcribed a four part harmony arrangement of the head to Cherokee on that primitive PC.

But when I needed a computer for school, I got a Brother 'word processor' typewriter. It got me by, the internet was just a few academics, this was 1986. So in 1990, when I was sitting down to an already obsolete PC (Rich had the big horse, a 286, that's a few generations before Pentiums—the plains were black with buffalo and generic cigarettes were less than $10 for a carton) in 1990, it wasn't like I'd never hacked anything out on a computer.

So I hacked out those ads. It came somewhat naturally to me, though the ads I came up with were graphic abortions. The fonts had to be generated one at a time per size and stored on that wee little hard drive, so you picked fonts based on what you had that fit the space you were working with. Couple that with the fact that I've never taken a design class, those were some horsey-ass ads.

I have a partial archive of the K.C. Jones to this day. A flooded basement claimed some of it, and nobody has the second issue unless Rich's widow has a copy somewhere. I don't know if she's a hoarder, I know Rich was, so there's a good chance a complete archive exists, but mine is probably the second most complete to that. It's a trip opening it up, seeing my columns, all the crazy contributors we had.

Anyway, these colorful characters and crazy situations, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters have nothing on the Nadler Publishing show. But to write a fully cohesive, biographically accurate history of the company would be impossible even for me. I was there for most of it, but I didn't take notes and it's been a long time. I think I'm going to try writing anecdotes as short stories. Maybe I can put together a short story collection, which would allow me to change names to protect the, well, the guilty. I'm sure most of it is beyond the statute of limitations, but changing some names and dates would be polite. I don't have a way to contact some of the people (or even know for sure if they're still alive) because just to give one example, Pat McWilliams who wrote the Slings & Arrows column, was such a luddite that Rich took his column as dictation over the phone because he couldn't get Pat to type it into a computer himself. I don't know that I'll be outing Pat with anything, but he's not the sort of cat you can friend on Facebook and he's probably out there somewhere.

Anyway, I think a working title for the book would be something like You Can Always Go Into Publishing, because 'going into publishing' is B-school slang for failure, and somehow the K.C. Jones managed to be a failing publication for seven years. This was an 'entertainment' tabloid that ran cover stories about abortion from a pro-life perspective. One of the last covers advocated "If you want to save the planet BURN OIL!" This was the only local publication that has ever truly championed the free market, even has the free market did its best to snuff it out of existence.