Noah McCormack

The Baffler has named Noah McCormack its new publisher, the first since cutting ties with M.I.T. Press last year. McCormack joined The Baffler informally in 2012 and was named director of special projects last year. Both he and his father, Tin House publisher Win McCormack, have helped financially support The Baffler. The publication, based in Cambridge, Mass., is also in the process of hiring an assistant editor and signing a lease on office space in New York. It’s an impressive renaissance for the niche magazine, which was originally founded in 1988 but nearly went out of print in the early 2000s, only to be resurrected by John Summers in 2011. Summers, a former adjunct professor at Harvard, set up a nonprofit foundation that took ownership of the magazine in 2011 and began cobbling together the money to keep it in print. He reached out to wealthy donors, raised $20,000 on Kickstarter (which only came to $15,000 after fees and taxes, the subject of a later Baffler essay), and entered into a five-year, $500,000 deal with academic publisher M.I.T. Press, which agreed to front the money necessary to publish the magazine. Since then, the magazine has reliably published three issues per year. Things went south with the M.I.T. Press deal—The Baffler never made enough revenue to compensate M.I.T. Press for publishing costs, and the magazine said that the publisher should have done more to promote and distribute it, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education—and the two parted ways in November 2014.