At Wolf Moon Journal, we have made a rather sad decision. We have decided that the fall 2009 magazine will be the last print issue. This was not an easy decision to make. This is our seventh year, and we felt as though we had a real history. However, there were several factors that led to our decision. The first is an ever-declining number of subscriptions, which have taken a real dip in 2009, no doubt due to the recession. From spring until now, we have lost one-fourth of our subscriptions, and this is a first in Wolf Moon history. Always, our subscriptions have gone up. Not in a big way, but at least in a slow and steady way. With the declining numbers we have now, we asked ourselves if all the work involving print layout was a good use of our time. We came to the conclusion it was not because of a second reason—the decline of print journalism.

We old-timers remember fondly the heydays of magazines and newspapers, but with the rise of the Internet, those days are waning. We are not the only publication to decide to cease its print run, and much bigger players than Wolf Moon are struggling to stay afloat.

The third factor is the cost of printing and postage. For the past few years, both these costs have increased, yet we could not increase the price of the journal, which was already as high most people would be willing to pay. We had hoped that subscriptions would increase to the point where we could include ads, but that never happened, and the way things are going, this is unlikely to happen in the near future. With each issue, we would scrape together money for printing and postage, hoping to break even. Sometimes we did, and sometimes we didn’t, but every time it was a struggle.

To sum up, here are our reasons—declining subscriptions, time, the waning of print journalism, and money. 

We will still be continuing with this web magazine, and we will soon be posting new pieces on a monthly basis. We hope you will continue to read us online, and we thank our many subscribers who kept us going for the past seven years. As one poet put it, “Well, you had a good run with the print journal.” Yes, we did. Now onward with electronic publishing.