Conscious Choice Publications: the Latest Victims of Changing Media Landscape

By Charles Shaw, Huffington Post. Posted April 8, 2009.

In June of 2006, CE rolled out their new look. To be fair, it was one of the few real accomplishments of the Miglino era, because the magazines looked great. But the new aesthetic was not without its problems. Roughly 75-80% of the readership (and a good portion of each market's advertisers) were woman age 40-55, mostly hippie-types, who reviled the succession of Cosmo-like waif models Miglino demanded be put on the covers. Miglino also ignored the cultural differences of the Chicago market and their readership, who were expecting green living and hard-hitting local politics, not pontificating gurus in flowing robes (Chicagoans leave their pontifications to their politicians).

And you probably could surmise that the Enlightenment Card was an unmitigated disaster, the laughing stock of a thousand conferences and happy hours. Not a day went by where I wouldn't hear about it from somebody, somewhere. It was so awful it was parodied in Adbusters; Miglino thought it was a compliment, and sent the clipping around to the whole company and all his friends.

I was hired in August of 2006 to take over Conscious Choice following the bitter and acrimonious departure/firing/job abandonment of my predecessor, Marla Donato, who, along with Common Ground editor Carl Nagin, defied Miglio's attempts to take over editorial. So they were moved out. By the time I came aboard, the editorial team that once had eight or ten editors now had five. A month later Seattle's Bob Condor quietly left. Three months after that the last of the Dragonfly Chiefs, Abigail Lewis, the co-founder of Whole Life Times, was fired.

By May of 2007, the company was again in crisis. Miglino had been cutting cutting cutting everywhere he could, but none of it worked. He fired Common Ground's new editor and their production manager, who was on maternity leave, and cut budgets and salaries by 15% company-wide, replacing the lost salary with worthless CE shares. He drove his sales reps like it was a Wall St. boiler room yet despite record sales numbers in April 2007 the situation was far graver than anyone knew.

Since he had taken over the company, Miglino had steadily and secretly been reducing the monthly circulation in each market without reporting it to the auditor (a Federal offense), so advertisers who, for example, thought they were buying into 50,000 magazines in San Francisco were actually getting substantially less.

Despite all of these cuts, the company still lost money every month. It all came to a head in July of 2007 when the printers informed us that they were owed $650,000, and would not ship our August issue until the bills were paid. For the second time in 18 months the company was facing total bankruptcy.

In the background, Miglino had furtively been negotiating a deal to have Gaiam, Inc., a publicly traded company that sold yoga products, buy a controlling share of CE--essentially, for Miglino's debt. Gaiam had just acquired the green-themed Lime Network, and Zaadz, a social networking site focusing on "spirituality and consciousness." Their plan was to add in the four CE magazines, and try to corner the emerging LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) media market.

At the eleventh hour, Miglino swooped in with another savior-type deal that would "ensure CE's long-term financial security." All it took for the deal to go through, Miglino told us in an "emergency conference call", was for each of the employees holding worthless CE shares to sign over to him the option rights to their new somewhat valuable shares of Gaiam common stock. This meant that only Miglino could sell the Gaiam stock, whenever he deemed it appropriate.

We signed the documents and collectively let out what we thought was a huge sigh of relief. A month later I went on vacation after wrapping up the September 2007 issues, and was fired while I was away (not by Miglino, by the way, he never did his own firing). Sadly, I had been the lone voice fighting for content that mattered, but with the Gaiam acquisition, daring and edgy content was the last thing a publicly traded company wanted. There were only two editors left--the only two not to challenge Miglino's authority--who remained until the company folded. Two editors for four magazines. But by this time, of course, there was very little local content in any of them. Predictably, the quality of the content took the expected nosedive into fluff, and out came the "Special Advertising Sections" in force.

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Charles Shaw, a Chicago-based writer, is a regular contributor to AlterNet. He is the former editorial director of the Conscious Choice publications and a contributor to Reality Sandwich. He is currently writing Exile Nation, a drug war memoir.

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