A Sign of the Times

Dealbreaker reports that Trader Monthly has shut down. I never read that publication very much but this portion of the publisher's farewell memo resonated with me a bit:

We are owed a substantial seven-figure sum by various advertisers and business partners, but as with everyone else in media, payments to us have slowed precipitously, which is turn has crippled our ability to pay our bills on time. This slowdown also led to the bank's decision not to continue to fund the working capital

Back in the early Eighties I worked for a little news service with the deceptive name of Network News Inc. When it went out of business a couple of recessions ago in 1983, that was precisely our situation: tons of receivables that people were not paying. (As a matter of fact, the primary debtor was United Press International, which just had gone out of business and wound up having the same bankruptcy trustee as NNI, and he cancelled UPI's debt, and I went pro se to the bankruptcy judge. . . well, it's a long story....)

Dealbreaker says "Randy's memo about the environment being 'too much to overcome' smacks of the same kind of BS that got him in trouble in the first place." True, but I think that's a little cruel. If people aren't paying their debts, what can you do? At least he doesn't have a sleazy bankruptcy trustee. Not yet, anyway.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.