Hot, Hot, Yoga
A true essay
For a time in the early 2000s I ran a liberal monthly rag in my hometown in Kansas. Despite being filled with local reporting, provocative opinions, poetry, art and music, it was spectacularly unsuccessful at making money. Despite the local liberal rabble-rousers’ vocal insistence they very much wanted a “progressive” alternative to the local conservative daily, they didn’t seem to have much cash to pay for it. Then again, perhaps the fault was mine, and I didn’t give the people what they wanted, so to speak, though I felt pulled in a thousand different directions all the time. In addition to being hardworking and earnest, our progressive community here didn’t want to settle for less, and they demanded more and more coverage and more pages we couldn’t really afford to provide.
Still, it was a valuable experience — I learned my sensibilities are almost all Liberal Arts and almost no Business, which is a bad combination for a publisher. I also learned I was a coward when it came to certain things — selling ads, for instance, which is the bread-and-butter of any news outlet. Writing news stories that irked the local establishment? No problem. Trying to be a real businesswoman? Somehow I didn’t have the stomach for it.
The publication did, however, have a core base of advertisers we appreciated very much. One of those advertisers was a hot yoga…
