Magazine pays off UCA debt

Oxford American owed $700,000 to allied university

CONWAY — After more than a decade, the Oxford American, a nonprofit literary magazine that explores Southern culture, has finally paid off the entire $700,000 debt it owed the University of Central Arkansas.

Since the debt began accumulating in 2004 and peaked in 2008, UCA has seen four presidents, and the nonprofit magazine has parted ways with its founding editor and has a new top editor and executive director.

The magazine and UCA have maintained a cooperative agreement despite the debt.

“The Oxford American magazine is lauded as one of the best literary publications in the nation,” UCA’s current president, Houston Davis, said in an email Monday. “It is a great partnership and a wonderful asset to UCA. We are currently working on an agreement that will extend our relationship into the future.”

The publication, which is based in Little Rock but has a small office at UCA, has also accomplished another feat even as magazine circulation levels have generally declined in recent years. It has reduced its debt from $1.2 million to zero, Ryan Harris, the quarterly publication’s executive director since late 2015, said Monday.

The final payment of $286,000 was made Friday by the Massey Family Charitable Foundation. Richard Massey serves on the magazine’s board of directors and was the one who made the first payment of $69,000 toward the UCA debt in October 2012.

The Oxford American has struggled financially over the years. It has shut down four times, not counting suspensions.

In an email, Massey described the award-winning magazine as once losing “several hundred thousand [dollars] a year” to now being “on solid financial footing.”

The magazine’s debt, paid back through the nonprofit UCA Foundation, had reached $700,000 in 2008, after the school lent the publication $150,000 to deal with financial problems created by a theft.

Despite changes in technology and circulation, the magazine has “finished the last two fiscal years in the black on a cash basis,” Harris said.

Harris said advertising and subscriber revenue “are roughly the same they’ve been over the last two to three years.” There are currently about 10,000 subscribers.

During that time, he said, “We have made some difficult decisions. … We had to get financially much more austere than we had been and tighten the belt quite a bit.”

Budget measures, he said, included eliminating some staff positions while some employees agreed to work for less than their jobs might have paid in the past.

The matter “came down to reducing our spending, renegotiating with key vendors,” focusing more on fundraising and expanding the magazine’s offerings from being solely a literary magazine to one also sponsoring special events such as guest musicians at South on Main in Little Rock and other places.

“We’re starting to get people to thinking about the Oxford American as more than a magazine, but as a concept, a nonprofit arts organization” that’s also about “empowering Southern artists and giving them a voice to be heard,” Harris said.

The magazine’s most recent annual agreement with UCA provided for $70,000 in both cash for such things as office supplies and in providing for a graduate assistant.

Former editor Marc Smirnoff founded the magazine in Oxford, Miss., in 1992. In July 2012, the publication’s board of directors fired Smirnoff and the managing editor, Carol Ann Fitzgerald, over allegations of wrongdoing, including sexual harassment. The publication later hired Roger Hodge, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine.

In October 2015, Eliza Borne became the Oxford American’s editor in chief.

Warwick Sabin, now a state legislator, was the magazine’s publisher from 2008 until 2013, when he resigned to take another position.