There’s only one independently owned business in town at which to find literally thousands of magazines on every topic from advertising to farming, poetry to economics.
With some 2,500 publications, including those printed monthly, quarterly and yearly, Magpies Newsstand Cafe’s magazine stock is unparalleled by any other area business. Hastings in Farmington comes close, but selection there is dwindling.
It all started on Dec. 31, 1989, when Magpies owner Tom Mulligan decided to leave Catalina Island for Durango.
Seeing that the city lacked a newsstand, Mulligan filled that void by opening Neon News in 1996 near Cold Stone Creamery in the 500 block of Main Avenue.
“I like information,” said Mulligan, 58, against a backdrop of racks and racks of his main product. “I believe magazines are very tough to beat as far as a news source. They get more in-depth than newspapers. I consider it the best form of current information.”
When the business moved into a new space at Seventh Street and Main Avenue in January 2000, it was a chance to shed the no-longer-fitting moniker chosen because of a business partnership that ultimately failed. Mulligan had teamed up with an artist who worked in neon colors, but the artist backed out of the deal just before the business opened.
Magazines combined with the newsstand’s pies for sale made wordplay out of the new name.
The wide selection is “a stab in the dark.” Popular reads like The New Yorker and Rolling Stone have a home alongside niche publications like Archive, which features ads from around the world. Titles rotate, disappear and reappear, contingent upon demand. A few local magazines and newspapers have a front-window spot, though High Country News has been out of stock for a year. Given the owners’ predilection for British journalism, Magpies also carries titles from outside the states.
“A lot of British magazines have an amazing method for putting them together,” Mulligan said. “There’s often more information packed into their publications, and I like their attitude about not paying attention to their advertisers. In terms of how-tos and news, they’re difficult to beat.”
Because of the bookkeeping complications that come with individual publishers supplying such a vast collection, Magpies gets shipments from a few national distributors. Trucks typically come in on Fridays with huge deliveries.
Perhaps surprisingly, Mulligan has always remained only a consumer. Enthusiasm for print news never inspired a journalism career.
“I think I had too much interest in seeing the world,” said Mulligan, who saw the ubiquitousness of newsstands in continents he traveled throughout his 20s, including Europe and Australia.
“I grew up in Southern California, which was not a place I saw myself staying,” he said. “It was a family of five kids, and with the affordability of education, I’m almost embarrassed to say there was little planning going on. I found I could get a job and move around with the idea that one day I could start my own business, which appealed more to me.”
He laughs. “Maybe I was misled.”
When Neon News opened, and for the next 10 years of business, print was still thriving. But the millennial shift toward online news consumption coupled with the 2008 recession, when impulse buys were at a marginal level, was a two-fold hit to print retailers. Magpies has not completely rebounded or returned to the exponential level of growth seen from 1996-2006, Mulligan said.
“You ask yourself if it’s worthwhile, but you keep going,” he said. “It’s probably driven by the dream of it working out, and the idea of what got you started, which is, ‘This is a good idea.’”
To combat the ups and downs of print sales, the newsstand markets food and other products. But despite having entered the irreversibly digital age of news, Mulligan touts the idea that content distributed by social media will always pale in comparison to the newspaper or magazine in front of you.
Given the volatility of print journalism, and therefore his business, does it irritate him to see people standing around reading without buying? No, but Mulligan said there’s a simple solution to lamenting the Death of Print.
“Newsstands are disappearing,” Mulligan said. “They’re nearly impossible to find with the decline of print and the economy affecting impulse buys. People complain about the decline of print, but the answer to fixing it is buying it.”
jpace@durangoherald.com
