Mission Accomplished?

By almost any measure, DoubleTake has been a success. Its subscription base rose to 75,000, and at one point its readership was estimated at 200,000. It has also become an important resource in countless classrooms across the country. Coles attributes these achievements in part to the efforts of his design editor, Betsy Brandes. “To watch her work, connecting subject matter with the visual side, with the literary or the story-telling side—it’s an extraordinary privelege,” Coles says.

The magazine’s contributors also say they appreciate its attention to these issues. Bill Bamberger, a contributing photographer, says he “appreciated their soliticing my input in terms of layout and design…There are few publications out there today that are willing to feature photography in the way that photographers like to see their work represented: substantive essays, layouts where the image drives the layout.”

More important than its universally positive reception, Coles says, is the special issue DoubleTake published following the terrorist attacks in 2001, which represented the culmination of its mission. After its publication, Coles received a letter from a group of students in Tulsa, Oklahoma that “just made us feel that somehow that magazine had a purpose for a lot of people—not that we didn’t know that from earlier correspondance, but somehow, from far, distant Oklahoma, as Americans responding to an injury that really happened to the whole country…the response gave us a sense that here we are, and this is what we’re about.”

Indeed, in contrast with many media productions during that period—at first graced by the networks’ decision not to run ads, then vulgarized by their slick “Attack on America” graphics—DoubleTake was an ideal setting for personal accounts and photoessays that were, in Walker Percy’s terms, neither patronizing nor didactic.

But regarding its stated goal of reaching an audience beyond the intelligentsia, DoubleTake’s achievements are harder to quantify. Coles bases his claims in this area in part on the magazine’s location since 1999 in Davis Square, Somerville—a neighborhood that is, at least geographically, as close to Cambridge as it can be without actually being in Cambridge. He says the location is important because “people come from Somerville to our offices. They know that the magazine exists, and they tell us that their son or daughter has been reading it in school.

“When the news was in the papers about our financial trouble—boy, I’ll never forget it—a Somerville mother came into the office and gave us fifteen dollars in cash. I was overwhelmed. I just thought, ‘Whatever this magazine was about was that moment. Whatever it was about.’”

This local involvement is not limited to casual encounters. Once a week, Coles and Randy Testa, his former teaching fellow and a DoubleTake editor, hold a two-hour seminar for teachers and principals from public schools in the Boston area. Here, too, they stick to their message, teaching a reworked version of Coles’ Graduate School of Education course “Writers in the Classroom.” Much of the material also comes from Gen Ed 105. Testa explains, “I think the title of the overall corporation, DoubleTake Community Service Corporation, has for us a kind of goal in its title: We would like to be out there more and more within the community.”

To this end, the program will likely be extended to University of Massachusetts Boston in the coming months.

Mission, Interrupted

For DoubleTake to be a success, its editors would have to have achieved their goal of exposing people to its brand of journalism, thus “stirring them to think about others and to think about the world we live in.” In short, they needed not only to produce the right kind of content—which they clearly did—but also to establish a viable means for disseminating it. Not surprisingly, given their documentary, journalistic and academic credentials, the latter task has been a greater challenge.

Early in its history, DoubleTake had seemingly limitless financial backing from the Lyndhurst Foundation, on whose board Coles sat at the time. This backing later became a $10 million endowment situated at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.

Coles explains that in 1999 the Center decided to exercise its prerogative to terminate DoubleTake’s access to the money. “We were spending the capital down, in order to get the magazine available to people, to have a circulation drive, to reach out,” Coles says. “They said, if you’re going to spend the capital down, then you’re going to have to close the magazine.”

Coles’ subsequent decision to relocate the magazine inaugurated a period of piecemeal efforts to sustain the its viability. DoubleTake was saved first by federal legislation that granted eligible non-profit institutions some proceeds from the Department of Treasury’s coin sales, then by a series of smaller contributions and grants. Although publication continued until the summer of 2002, the subscription base by that time had dropped to 25,000, and some contributors had waited for over a year without receiving compensation. Their grievances began appearing in public fora, and the outcry reached a point where Coles and his colleagues were contributing their own money to cover the magazine’s debts. “We’re not exactly floating in dough as individuals,” he says, “but that’s what we were doing.”

Both of the DoubleTake contributors contacted for this story say they were paid for their work, though photographer Miriam Sushman says “it took a long time” and Bamberger says that he absorbed part of his fee. He would have donated his work if he could have, he says, because he could see that the magazine was struggling to cut costs. “The kind of documentary efforts that we all undertake are expensive and time-consuming, so of course particularly those people who aren’t salaried by a magazine or a university need those stipends to survive,” Bamberger says.