1/ Ellip­sis, as described by founder and former editor-in-chief H. Perry Horton:

When we set out on our lit­er­ary adven­ture, we hoped that within a year we would be a hip new pub­li­ca­tion gar­ner­ing national atten­tion. We saw our­selves as a rival to McSweeney’s, a young, inno­v­a­tive jour­nal with pop­u­lar appeal out­side the usual lit­er­ary demographics….

We made room in the budget for small salaries so that cer­tain mem­bers of our staff—the man­ag­ing editor, graphic designer, and myself—could ded­i­cate them­selves fully to the project. We estab­lished a monthly print run to both max­i­mize the effec­tive­ness of the serial format and flood the mar­ket­place with our pres­ence. We went with a mag­a­zine design rather than a tra­di­tional journal—glossier pages, heav­ier paper, larger dimensions….

By the end of the volume—ten issues—none of us was on salary, our dead­lines had become murkier, and our print­ing costs were drain­ing us to the point that I had taken a part-​time job as a night jan­i­tor just to deposit my pay­checks in the press account.

2/ The Southamp­ton Review, as reported in this week’s New York Magazine:

[T]he journal’s publisher—SUNY pro­fes­sor Robert Reeves—also runs a hot-​ticket writer’s confab during which big-​time authors and play­wrights hole up for an eleven-day-long bac­cha­nal of din­ners and pool par­ties at the Meadow Lane estate of bil­lion­aires Robert and Laura Siller­man. The writerly mer­ry­mak­ing is inter­rupted only by the peri­odic dis­pens­ing of wisdom to book­ish young’uns who pay $2,050 to bask in so much erudition…. When Reeves hit up some of the retreat’s lec­tur­ers for jour­nal sub­mis­sions, not one refused—in fact, he had to split the Review into two volumes.