The $750,000 Question

Out of the blue, I got a wonderful offer of help regarding the advertising in SHM.

So far, the magazine's team has been made up of my deep supply of words and energy, and my husband's typesetting and layout genius. In terms of the business aspect of the thing, both of us have some basic rough knowledge. We know not to overextend ourselves -- the magazine is a quarterly because between his full-time job and my homeschooling and occasional teaching gigs, that's all we can do right now. It costs what it does because I'm willing to be broke but don't have the money to go into debt.

Our new staff member is someone well acquainted with the business and advertising world, and willing -- happy, even -- to work within the mag's strict advertising deadlines. She liked the looks of the site (and this blog) and almost cried when she saw a copy of the magazine in person. Plus she's really nice, patient, and upbeat; whereas my husband is by turns mildly acidic and affably morose, and I'm obsessively energetic when it comes to deadline writing and researching the hell out of any given subject, but also given to fits of brooding and ranting. So this new addition lends some emotional balance to a mix that was riding perilously close to something right out of Wuthering Heights.

We haven't had a lot of ads in SHM so far because, ironically, the advertisements are critically important to the magazine. Readers have actually been happy to see them -- because they're the right kind of ads. I got the most wonderful fan letter the other day from someone who was excited about being able to see advertisements for products that she knew she could trust -- that is, that wouldn't let her down by looking terrific and promising the moon but then come along with some religious agenda or assume she belonged to a particular belief system.

I priced the magazine on the assumption that, because suitable advertisers would be difficult to find and even more difficult to tempt until our circulation numbers went up, we would be fairly ad-free for a while. Any advertisements we managed to get would be considered a happy windfall, rather than a necessary part of the budget.

So far, it's worked. I'm not rich, but I'm not losing money and we're gaining new readers almost every day. I even considered the idea of having the magazine be ad-free, like The Sun; but our readers want ads, if they're from the right advertisers.

Our wonderful new family member, Gail, has been busy getting the word out about SHM; and yesterday, she found someone who wanted to buy a back-cover advertisement at our new rates. It was a company called Paradigm Accelerated Curriculum.

Right off the bat, I was worried. I already knew how hard it was to get just plain religiously-neutral educational materials for homeschoolers; if there was a completely neutral homeschooling curriculum out there, I sure hadn't heard about it.

I went to take a look at the company's site. I didn't get a great vibe from it; but I reminded myself that I didn't have to love the site. I just had to be sure that their product was religiously neutral.

I clicked on the "mission statement." A little pompous, but not a peep about religion.

But my alarms were still ringing, albeit quietly.

I went to the page about the founder. Several paragraphs about him. Nothing religious except the bare mention of the church he belongs to, and only because it was one organization of many with which he'd worked.

Still nothing that violated our advertising policy. Still not liking it. And no, this isn't the hindsight talking, because I remember saying out loud that I must be being paranoid.

They had sample curricula available for review. I downloaded the first bit of "Basic Science Mysteries." And -- hey, look! Turns out I'm not paranoid!

It was a chapter about basic health. Physical health is important, of course; but so is emotional health. And spiritual health. I wasn't completely sure about what that last one meant until they defined it for me:

"Spiritual health involves your belief system and includes practice of the U.S. National [sic] motto, 'In God We Trust.'" Also, it turns out that people who pray and go to church regularly are better off in every way than those of us who don't.

So much for religiously neutral.

Then I took a look at the sample biology lesson.

I really would have been ready to disqualify them for using the word "tenent" (which isn't actually a word at all; a "tenant," with an "a", is someone who rents lodgings) when they meant "tenet." It wasn't just a typo, either; they used it twice, including once in the special vocabulary sidebar. I know I'm showing my true colors as Professor Nerdetta at the Institute of Nerdology by saying this, but that's the kind of thing that keeps me up nights. Screaming.

So is having a big photograph of Hitler on the page about Darwin.

Well, of course. I mean, you can't have a discussion of the merits of Darwin's writing without a headshot of the big H superimposed over a picture of prisoners in a concentration camp. Can you?

Turns out, you can. And so far as I know, many of my readers would prefer to.

So I called Gail, our hard-working advertising specialist, and apologized for all the work and time she'd put into getting an advertisement that I wouldn't be able to accept. She was totally cool with it, especially after she heard the specifics.

We had a great conversation about what the guy over at PAC was like on the phone. He loved the copy of the magazine Gail had sent him, she reported. He didn't even ask about our circ numbers when he said he wanted a back cover ad.

That and some of the stuff she saw on the site -- she hadn't seen the things I had -- set off a few alarms of her own. She asked him flat-out if this was a religious curriculum.

His answer?

"Why, we've used this in public schools!"

I don't to offend any of my terrific readers (and writers); but I think maybe the fact that this company is apparently based in Texas might have something to do with that.

At any rate, it was quite evasive of him not to give a straight yes or no answer.

Which makes PAC a Level Two Category of inappropriate SHM advertisers.

Level One Inappropriates are well-intentioned, sincere, and just plain don't understand why their products aren't something I'm looking for. They, in turn, fall into two categories.

The first group of these didn't read all the small print. They routinely make advertising inquiries to any magazine with the word "homeschooling" in the title. They don't notice the word secular, or maybe don't know what it means. Why not? We all have gaps in our vocabulary. For instance, I myself don't know what the word "avuncular" means. Never have.

Or, like a friend of mine at park day yesterday, they don't understand that someone would turn away an advertiser. (Boy, did we have a long talk about that one. Well, she's wealthy. The idea of being without money scares her. Whereas I've been broke for decades now, and know firsthand that it's not such a dreadful state at all, if you do it right.)

At any rate: there are some perfectly innocent companies whose products are religious in tone and who want to advertise with SHM. Some of them, as I said, don't get our policy; some understand it, but don't see why they could be seen as violating it.

It took me longer to figure that out. I mean, how can you think that your product is religiously neutral when it mentions Jesus right on the first page?

Two ways. First, there are people who live in areas where, as a homeschooler on a loop I'm on recently said, "religion is as natural as breathing." These people don't see themselves as especially religious, because everyone around them is at least as religious as they are, if not more so. When they sit down to gauge how religious in tone their materials are, they're not seeing all the times they mentioned Jesus; they're thinking of all the times they wanted to and didn't. So they're bewildered by the idea that their material could be inappropriate for a secular forum.

Both of these groups don't bother me, other than the twinge of regret I feel at having to turn away advertising revenue and any possible hurt feelings. What bothers me is the abovementioned Level Two offenders.

These people know jolly well that their materials aren't appropriate to or wanted by secular homeschoolers. I'd like to give them a smidgen of credit by thinking that they really are genuinely concerned about the eternal welfare of souls, but I'm having a hard time believing that a far more mischievous impulse isn't at play.

Look at the answer that guy at PAC gave to Gail. She asked him a direct, simple question. He gave her an answer that might have been the truth, but certainly wasn't the whole truth.

Did I miss that Ten Commandment about not bearing false witness; or is it one that you can get a special dispensation from upstairs to ignore, as long as you're doing it in a good cause?

I don't care that the answer he gave wasn't a strict falsehood. It wasn't an answer to the question that was asked -- but the speaker wanted very much for his listener to believe that it was. Sorry, but if that's honesty, I'm a triple-chocolate brownie.

What bothered me most about the whole conversation with Gail is that she praised me for my "integrity" in turning away this advertiser. The thing is, I don't know if saying "EEEWWWWWW!!" and pushing something away is integrity. Or, as I put it to my husband later that evening, I didn't think I deserved much credit for saying that I wouldn't put my stamp of approval on something I was repulsed by.

"Not for the kind of money he was offering, no," my husband said. "But let's say he decided to up his offer."

"Not enough money in the world," I said.

He loves playing devil's advocate. "Even if it was enough that you could lower the price of the magazine to nothing?" he asked. "And you told your subscribers, 'Hey, listen, this guy's financing the magazine now, and we only have to take one ad from him...'"

I decided that:

a. It would have to be at least $750,000;

b. I'd have to contact every subscriber or purchaser of the magazine, in advance, and ask if it was okay, explaining every detail of the transaction, and if even one person didn't like it, the deal was off;

c. Assuming that even after all that the deal went through, copies purchased by new subscribers would have to be accompanied by a warning sticker; and

d. The advertiser would have to be informed of all of this.

But even then it wouldn't be okay, I realized. The magazine's in paper form. Strangers could see it and not know the story of the ad.

"Besides," I concluded, bringing the conversation back to the planet we were all born on, "if I could ever really be tempted by any amount of money, all I'd have to do was remember that picture of the Holocaust victims. I'm not going to be one more person exploiting them."

My husband has some experience with Holocaust imagery, because of some work he did several years ago as part of a magazine assignment. When I briefly described the PAC picture in question, he knew exactly which one it was.

"That's the one Elie Wiesel sued PETA for using," he said. "And he won. He's in it, so he can have some say over how it's used."

Oh.

Whoa.

I've contacted the Elie Wiesel Foundation about the fact that this company is using this picture in such a context. I asked them if they could let me know what they think and if anything comes of it. I haven't heard back from them yet, but I feel better already.

In the meantime, I hope that PAC and everyone of their ilk knows that their money's no good here.
 
P.S. In the interest of your not having to take my word for it about the company I've been talking about, here's a link to their site:

http://www.pacworks.com/

Let me know if you think I've been quoting them out of context. And don't worry about going to check them out -- they don't make money from visitors, only from purchasers.