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Jun 19, 2007 7:24 am US/Central
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'Punk Planet' Magazine Calls It Quits
13-Year-Old Magazine Has Put Out Final Issue
CHICAGO (STNG) ―
Punk Planet, the 13-year-old Chicago-based magazine that has covered music, culture and politics, has put its final issue in the mail.
The company will continue to publish books and maintain its Web site as a social networking site, but according to a letter on its Web site Monday, the magazine is history.
"We could blame the Internet," the letter stated. "We can blame educational and media systems that value magazines focused on consumerism over engaged dissent. And we can blame the popular but mistaken belief that punk died several years ago. But it is also true that great things end, and the best things end far too quickly."
The magazine, founded by publisher Daniel Sinker in 1994, had a circulation of 16,000, printed six times a year, according to its Web site. Chicago Sun-Times pop music critic Jim DeRogatis has called the magazine "indispensable reading for anyone and everyone who is at all interested in vital music that has yet to be co-opted, commodified, or covered to death in the mainstream press."
This January, the magazine's distributor, the Independent Press Association, ceased operations. In the letter released Monday, Punk Planet states, "the financial hit we took in October of 2005, when our newsstand distributor announced that it was in dire straits, was worse than we originally thought. As the dust began to clear from their January bankruptcy announcement, we began to realize that the magazine was left in significantly worse shape, distribution-wise, than they let on."
The company also cited the "stagnation that the independent record world is suffering," as well as "the loss of independent bookstores," as other contributing factors to the magazine's demise. "It was a situation that didn't have an exit strategy other then (sic), well, exiting."
Punk Planet's book division has published five titles, including Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned. Sinker also put together a collection of interviews that appeared in the magazine. He will remain with both the book division and Web site, according to the company.
(Source: Sun-Times News Group Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2006. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)