Teresa Stack is one of two women in key positions at The Nation Company, L.P., and its magazine The Nation: Stack is President, while Katrina vanden Heuvel is Editor and Publisher. Stack oversees the magazine's day-to-day business. 

The Nation, whose circulation now is about 185,000, started in 1865 with about 5,000, Stack estimates, noting that "most of those early subscribers and founders were associated with the abolitionist movement." Founded roughly three months after President Lincoln's assassination, The Nation was "always independent and non-partisan, infused with progressive values and at its beginning obviously very concerned with the terms of reconstruction," she added.

Stack describes the weekly's target audience as "engaged citizens looking for independent reporting on important issues often ignored by the mainstream media." Its readers, she says, "tend to be highly educated, very involved in their communities, big book readers and travelers who believe in progressive, liberal values, such as human rights, civil liberties and economic justice."
  
Q. Your website says the magazine has lost money for all of its 100-plus years. But how close has The Nation come to turning a profit?

A. While it’s difficult to verify precisely, there are some records that suggest the magazine may have made a little money during the World War II years. But we take a perverse sort of pride, I suppose, in this record—what other company on earth can claim unprofitability for 140-plus years? The fact is, no magazines in this category make money—we are all run more like a cause.

Someone once asked William Buckley why National Review didn’t make money and he replied, “You don’t expect the church to make money, do you?”

That said, The Nation has seen tremendous growth in the last six years, with our circulation more than doubling to over 180,000, and though we don’t like to brag about it, we have actually turned a small profit on a P/L basis for several years recently.

Q. Do you have a general profile of your 30,000 or so Nation Associates, those most committed readers who contribute money, PBS-style, to lessen the magazine's reliance on advertising support?

A. Nation Associates are magazine readers who donate money above and beyond the cost of their subscriptions. The program has been around since the 1960s, I believe, and the Associates are generally our most committed, long-term subscribers. As such, they tend to be older, with more disposable income, people who passionately share our sense of mission. Without their support, we could not pay our bills, nor do the kind of public outreach that helps spread our editorial message but that doesn’t generate any real income. We serve multiple bottom lines here.

Q. You sell a variety of merchandise with the magazine's name and logo. But do you worry that some other products you're selling—like the Mad Magazine "Worry" cover depicting President Bush as Alfred E. Neuman and the Dubya 'Pinocchio" t-shirt—will undercut your perception as being objective?

A. We never claim to be “objective.” That was a cover of the magazine you’re talking about, after all. We claim to be fair and honest and transparent about our core values. And we take great pains to ensure the factual accuracy of all of our reporting. We are, after all, a journal of opinion, and as such we come with a distinct point of view. 

Objectivity can be an illusion; most magazines and newspapers have a point of view; we’re just more up front about the values we hold dear and the lens through which we view the world. That said, all of our content is rigorously fact-checked and fully vetted. We believe in presenting our interpretation of the facts and what they mean, but facts are facts and we spend a lot of time and money getting things right. 

Q. To what do you attribute The Nation's longevity?