Dan Margolis on the job. PWW photo by Santi Suthinithet.
Can you have a business office without a business manager? No, and yes. The People’s Weekly World for the past few years had such a set-up, but no one on the editorial board would recommend it as a model.
While subscriptions were processed, and bills were paid by a part-time staff, there was no one paying attention to a plan to build the readership and business operations of the paper. That was until PWW editorial board member Dan Margolis stepped forward and volunteered for the job.
A tremendous reporter, Margolis has covered the New York beat along with the United Nations and international stories for the PWW since 2004. Margolis also handled subscriptions and subscriber issues part of the time, but his main assignment was writing. It was difficult for the editorial board to relieve such a weekly, deadline-oriented writer of those responsibilities, but it was a necessary step for this newspaper’s growth.
“We can have all the great, original coverage in the world,” Margolis said, “but if we don’t build the readership and subscriber base of the paper it won’t have the impact we want it to have.”
Margolis said the fact that 700 unionists and their families signed up to try the newspaper at the AFL-CIO Union Label Trades Show in Ohio is an indication that working people want to read about real stories, that deal with issues that they deal with everyday.
“The PWW won’t serve you the ‘infotainment’ or government packaged news releases that corporate-run newspapers do,” Margolis said. “Take the Iraq war. We showed from the start that the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ rationale was a lie See Tim Wheeler’s February 2003 article titled ‘Powell at UN caught in web of lies,’ for example. But the New York Times had to apologize for its role in reporting Bush administration propaganda during that same time.”
As PWW writers hone their journalistic skills and a larger network of writers is built, the newspaper “keeps getting better and better,” said Margolis, who has been a reader since the early 1990s.
Building the readership of any newspaper requires a multi-prong strategy and approach, Margolis said, from guaranteeing that the newspaper gets delivered in a timely fashion to marketing and advertising to raising money. “We have to make sure we give people an opportunity to contribute their time and dollars to this newspaper.”
“With this newspaper on your side, you can change your neighborhood, your workplace — and we hope transform this country — into a better, more just place. That’s the message we have to get out and why people should subscribe, and help build the paper themselves.”
