How to start a magazine

In 1999, three aging Gen Xers decided after ingesting mass quantities of caffeine and sugar that they would start a magazine. The X’s in question were Francine Medina, assistant lifestyle editor, Roby Alampay, investigative reporter, and myself, a columnist. We had all been working at Today (a now-extinct newspaper) for five years, and we needed new territory to map out.

Now every journalist wants to start a magazine, even if pundits have long declared that “Print is dead.” We all knew what sort of publication we wanted. Roby wanted a magazine that would do in-depth reports on current social and political affairs. Francine wanted a showcase for independent new artists, photographers, and designers. I wanted something good to read. We agreed that our ideas could coexist in a single magazine. Roby, who had previously published a university paper called Kampus, already had a name for it: Pepe, after national hero Jose Rizal.

We also agreed that the three of us could work together without generating a body count. Francine is very nice and soft-spoken, which conceals the fact that she is very intense. When she loses her temper once a year, it is recorded by astronomers as a solar flare. Roby has 10,000 things going at the same time, and gets very intense, until he forgets them. What he needs is someone to follow him around, taking notes. I am a raving megalomaniac, that is to say intense. Whatever came of our collaboration, it would not be boring.

After that meeting, we went back to whatever we were doing. Francine was promoted to lifestyle editor, Roby went to Columbia University for his master’s in journalism, and I got a fellowship at Yale for my essay on how Pinoys would achieve world domination. We produced a few hundred more pages of newsprint between us. Every so often one of us would bring up the magazine idea, and we would make more plans.

Two years later, there was a boom in magazine publishing — a new one seemed to get launched every month — and we thought it was time to start making good on our threat. First we would need a financier, and as anyone in publishing will tell you, putting out a magazine takes patience and a bottomless wallet. It would take at least two years for a magazine to generate enough advertising to pay for itself. Retail is wonderful — it’s proof of the existence of an audience — but it’s advertising revenues that keep a magazine alive long enough to turn a profit. Yes, I know what “revenue” means; I’m not a complete financial retard.

The usual thing would’ve been to pitch our concept to an existing publishing company. However, I was fanatical about independence: the thought that the money guys would dictate the content and direction of our magazine made me reach for my sword. Our ideal publisher would be someone whose tastes in reading were similar to ours, who would give us the funds, and basically leave us alone. Did such a person exist, and did we know him or her?

A couple of years earlier, at a forum, I had met our future publisher. He not only read a lot of books, including novels, he also watched too many movies and downloaded music from the Internet. Excellent qualifications for a publisher, I thought, even if I distinctly recall that his cellphone ringtone was Livin’ La Vida Loca by Ricky Martin.

So I e-mailed him: “Hypothetical question. If someone were to start a magazine, which I’m not saying I am, and the magazine were to cover everything from politics to entertainment, but the articles were actually fun to read, funny but serious, and instead of graphics run amuck there would be excellent photography… I forget the question. No, here it is: Would you be the slightest bit interested in this magazine?”

Yes, this was a strange note, cleverly designed to repel anyone who did not get it. Conversely, anyone who received such a strange note and did not have me remanded to a mental institution was the right publisher.

We hunkered down to what we expected would be a long wait. The following day, I received a reply and an appointment schedule.

By the way, I’d thought of a name for the magazine: Flip. It means “go nuts,” “to turn the page” and is also slang for Filipino. There were mixed reactions to the name Flip: someone noted that it meant “sira-ulo” and someone else said it was a derogatory term, the brown version of the N-word. To the first we said, “Yes, that’s what we mean; we’re taking an ironic tone.” To the second we said, “We’re appropriating the term; we’re taking an ironic tone.”

On March 13, 2001, Francine and I showed up at our future publisher’s office to make a pitch. He listened politely, asked some questions, then said he’d think about it. The fact that we were not laughed out of the building was an encouraging omen. He said, “Do you have a business plan?’

I said, “Of course!” As Francine and I left the building, I asked her, “What’s a business plan?”

That’s when we decided that we needed a supervising adult, someone with business experience and organizational skills, someone who could produce a business plan. I immediately thought of Mario Taguiwalo, a consultant to the World Health Organization, a part-time actor in films, and an acting workshop coach famed for his ability to get inside people’s heads. True, he had co-written the school hymn of my alma mater, the Philippine Science High School, and caused irreversible damage to my psyche (“The crests and troughs of the sea of life that flows...”), but he also has an interpretative dance based on Heisenberg’s theory of indeterminacy. Mario helped us flesh out the concept for Flip, and he did the initial number-crunching.

Next, the business plan was distributed to a list of potential investors. Shortly after that, Goran Ivanisevic finally won Wimbledon on his third trip to the finals. Another omen. Then there was a longish lull as we waited for the potential investors to make up their minds about leaping off the cliff with us.

In the meantime I assembled a pool of writers — the easiest and most pleasant task. I say “I” and not “we” because I was a total fascist when it came to the people whose bylines I wanted in Flip: many of them were not professional writers, but using a potent mixture of flattery, emotional blackmail and the ironclad promise that they would have total editorial freedom, I got them to meet their deadlines.

By July 2002, we had raised about a third of the capital we needed to keep Flip running long enough to sustain itself. Maybe we should’ve waited until we had all the required funds. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so gung-ho. Maybe we should’ve been cautious and conservative. There, coffee just spurted out of my nose. Flip was never about being cautious and conservative. It was about taking a leap and trusting that good writing was its own excuse for being. Look, we just wanted something to read. On that score, I think we hit our target.

Flip published eight issues from August 2002 to April 2003. The Flip Reader, a sort of greatest hits anthology of pieces from the magazine, will be published in September.