February 18, 2002

It's MBF's 100th issue! Quick, do the math---at four issues a year, that means MBF has been around for 25 years, covering all the news and info on Davy, Micky, Mike, and Peter. Thanks to the Monkees and all their fans for a terrific 25 years!

Instead of celebrating and looking ahead to MBF's future, I'm deeply saddened to announce that Monkee Business will cease publication following the June 2002 issue. June 2002 will mark exactly 25 years since MBF's first issue appeared.

The reasons behind this decision are many and varied. Perhaps the most critical is that the printed fan publication in general has been replaced by the Internet, and MBF must surrender to the times and the advancing technology. With each issue, MBF loses more and more subscribers to the Internet, where information is essentially free and is updated way more frequently than four times a year. Although I feel badly that I'm depriving Monkees fans of one of their sources of Monkees news, I feel the worst for the MBF readers who do not have Internet access---and I know there are many, they've told me so, repeatedly!---and I apologize for any inconvenience or hardship MBF's closure may cause. I only acquired Internet access myself in 1999, but it was immediately obvious that MBF was rapidly becoming outmoded, while at the same time it still had a few things going for it that could not be found on the Internet. I continued to publish MBF as long as I could in part because I could not find an Internet substitute for the detail that MBF always brought to each issue. Even three years later, the Internet still fails to go very far beyond the headlines and tourdate lists and frequently fails to distinguish fact from opinion. I find it interesting that no one wants to write an article for MBF on Monkees resources on the Internet, although I've asked several people to do so over the course of the last two years.

Another reason for MBF's demise is that MBF has been losing money for years, and at last I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel. MBF postponed raising rates for years, trying to use the surplus from the healthy years in the '80s to keep the publication affordable for fans. I waited too long to raise rates, and, as MBF lost subscribers to the Internet, everything became exponentially more expensive to produce, as fewer and fewer copies were involved. After all, how much can one realistically charge for a non-color, non-glossy magazine? I was ready to shut the doors in 1999, but MBF had only enough cash to keep itself going one issue at a time, not enough to pay out refunds for all its subscribers. I thought I would have enough in personal savings to afford the whole going-out-of-business process in 2000, but then my 1987 Plymouth Voyager with 218,000 miles on it suddenly died and had to be replaced. It was meant to be, I suppose, because there was an exciting and fun tour to cover in 2001, and now I can say forever that I published MBF for a full 25 years!

When Wayne Gretzky retired from the NHL, he cited "mental fatigue" as one of his reasons for leaving, and so do I. My family and friends had been encouraging me to close down MBF for the last five to ten years. They saw the extreme pressure I put on myself to produce each issue, they saw the hassles I went through trying to get news from uncooperative sources, they saw mean-spirited news sources purposely withhold key information until after I'd gone to press, they saw that I didn't get anything out of MBF but personal satisfaction (and, more and more often, not even that). They saw what the readers don't see, that each issue takes a full month to publish, that during every February, May, August, and November, I chain myself to the computer and phone for the entire month. I can't go anywhere or make any plans during those months, and I've missed so many Monkees events that fell during those months and other fun events and, gosh, even important stuff on TV---MBF has been around so long that television's Sweeps Month was only Sweeps Week when we started! Even the reader input that was always so much a part of Monkee Business has become unreliable---Monkees fans find it simpler to self-publish their photos and concert reviews on the Internet themselves and rarely think of submitting material to MBF, making it even harder to produce a quality publication.

Of course, it is very difficult to give up something that's been so much a part of my life for 25 years. There have been many fun times and great people, and I will miss those. But this is definitely the time to retire. Not only has MBF reached a 25-year milestone, but there have been many other major changes in a very short time on the Monkees scene. Peter Tork walked away from the Monkees tour. Harold Bronson was let go from Rhino Entertainment. Even the Trenton post office where I conducted so much of the business of Monkee Business was closed after the anthrax contamination here---and is still closed, a fact which remains disorienting and disheartening. All the signs point to the conclusion that now is the time to go.

So, what's next? The March 2002 issue is issue #100 of Monkee Business. The June issue will be the final publication of MBF and will be a combination of a regular issue and a retrospective of our 25 years and 100 issues.

Maggie McManus
editor/publisher
Monkee Business Fanzine