Those familiar with glossy nine-dollar magazines might think they know what to expect by now: hundreds of pages featuring cadaverous European models draped in preposterous clothes and posed in surreal lighting, all presented with an editorial attitude that falls somewhere between the court of the Sun King and a Chelsea heroin rave.
Experiences with that standard model make it all the more startling and disorienting to open the premiere issue of Need, an elegantly designed magazine devoted not to sybaritic excesses but to the Samaritan ethic. Published from a Northeast Minneapolis home, this periodical apparently intends to glamorize—or at least place an artful halo around—people and organizations responding to human crises like disease, famine, and warfare.
Need, which launched a few weeks ago in a press run of 25,000, has to be one of the classiest if most improbable labors of love we’ve encountered in a long time. After all, run-of-the-mill publications from charitable organizations barely qualify as pamphlets. Printed on borrowed dimes and filled with artless photos of doctors, nurses, patients, and donors, their sole purpose is clearly to coax contributions. And that haphazard production quality can be perversely reassuring; doesn’t it imply that whatever money the organization manages to shake loose from donors is actually going to the cause in question—African victims of AIDS, Sudanese victims of civil war, Malaysian victims of tsunamis, Pakistani victims of earthquakes, whomever—and not toward home-office frills?
But Kelly and Stephanie Kinnunen see it differently. The thirty-nine-year-old husband-and-wife team publish Need. “What we’ve learned,” Ms. Kinnunen recently explained, “is that charities that put out low-quality materials don’t get as good a response as the few that are providing something better.”
More to the point, Need isn’t a charitable organization; it’s a magazine about charitable organizations and the people whose energies sustain them. The cover shot on the winter 2006 issue is a poignant close-up of a bright-eyed Afghani schoolboy in a yellow cap, clutching his pencil. It, and an interior series of photographs from Afghanistan, were provided gratis by veteran Magnum photographer Steve McCurry, who’s been shooting in that country since 1979.
At least in its initial stages, all of Need’s contributors are working pro bono. “Eventually, we hope to offer our writers and photographers some sort of compensation,” Kinnunen said, “but we’ve been pleased at the response we’ve gotten from people like Steve McCurry.”
The magazine’s first-rate design is the work of another fledgling company, Fusion Hill, also located in Northeast. Cofounder Kasey Worrell Hatzung said her thirteen-person company is on board for at least the next three issues, partly because she and business partner Kerry Sarnoski are simpatico with the Need mission and partly because an “image-driven” magazine like Need is a terrific calling card for their careers.
Included in the premiere issue are a piece on the American Refugee Committee’s work in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami and a series of before-and-after photos of people with cleft palates and massive tumors who have been treated aboard the mercy ship Anastasis. While it’s a bit strange to see the cruelly impoverished and disfigured displayed with the same aesthetic sheen as international clothes horses, on the other hand—why not?
“It is a really well-done magazine,” said Therese Gales of the Twin Cities-based American Refugee Committee. “We like that it treats the people who have suffered in these faraway disasters like actual individuals. That’s very important in terms of making an audience respond.”
What is perhaps more difficult is to look at a magazine with the coffee-table manners of Need without running the basic expenses—chief among them, the costs of a lovely, lustrous paper stock and top-notch printing—in your head. Conceived as a quarterly, Need’s first issue was produced, said Kinnunen, on a budget of “about $50,000. Maybe a little more.” She also admitted they sold “only $4,200 in ads” for their inaugural issue and that she and her husband have pretty much “maxed out our credit cards.”
Need Communications, Inc., originally hoped to be a nonprofit. But the Kinnunens were quickly confronted with an inescapable irony: In order to tell, in a compelling and artful style, stories about the people and agencies they wanted to help, they would have to compete against those very same people and agencies for donor dollars. So for now, Need is a for-profit corporation—at least in the eyes of the IRS. Even Kinnunen conceded, “We’ll probably never turn a profit.”
Now that, folks, is what you call charitable giving.
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