The news that Antioch College would close in 2008 had our phones ringing off the hook and our e-mail box overflowing with the same question: Would the Antioch Review, an independent literary magazine founded in 1941, be shut down too?

Fortunately the answer was “no.” It was a close call and a genuine scare since the magazine operates with a subsidy from Antioch University. In recent years, that subsidy ranged between $14,000 and $45,000.

This all raises a larger question pondered by a founding editor of the Review some years ago: “Television has already taken over vast areas of human communication which were once the province of print and it may be expected to take more: still it is doubtful if it can or should replace reading as a significant exercise. Publication itself appears more and more often as the result of large combinations of men and resources … in this new world can a small magazine of mature outlook but minimal resources sustain itself?”

That was in 1965 before cell phones, the Internet, and the dumbing down of American higher education. The publishing world has changed dramatically over the last 10 years with mergers, mega-buck contracts for celebrity books, and an emphasis on bottom-line values.

The literary landscape has changed so much that mid-list authors have trouble finding publishers, and the editors at the commercial houses double as publicists.

Though there has been a proliferation of MFA programs in creative writing.

The collapse of the book reviewing structure is emblematic of the technological and cultural changes that have occurred in America over the last couple of decades. These changes have led the National Book Critics Circle to launch an initiative to save book reviewing as a genre.

To be reviewed is to be noticed, for good or bad. These days, getting a review is a major deal.

Literary taste is all too often confined within the Bermuda Triangle of the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the Charlie Rose Show. In 2006, the New York Times list of “100 Notable Books” failed to contain a single book published by a university press. But those books can’t be all that bad.

Even further out on the margins are the independent literary magazines such as the Antioch Review. Some of these publications such as Tin House and the Paris Review are supported by wealthy patrons, by well-endowed universities like Yale University and University of Georgia, or are mom and pop operations started by young and energetic editors trying to capture a niche market.

Can they last? Can they find an honest and reliable distributor? Will they manage the cash flow? They remind one of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s comment about Brook Farm: “They look well in July. We shall see them in December.”

Literary magazines should not mimic the commercial presses even though they exist in a commercial world. Their existence depends on the patrimony of their patrons, their own sense of taste, and an editorial vision shaped by a literary past and a changing present.

In recent issues, the Antioch Review published essays on the politicalization of the Nobel Prize for Literature, an appreciation of the Negro writer — his preferred term — Albert Murray at 90, a look at contemporary Israeli poets, and 250 pages devoted to a special on “Memoirs True and False.”

The summer issue contains eight stories by authors that the Review has never published before — the pages are kept open for new voices.

Independent literary magazines are an important element in our literary culture because they are the testing ground for future writers, for material that is shunned by the commercial presses, and for astute cultural criticism. Support them before they disappear.

The Antioch Review has survived this sad moment, but in the long run it will only survive with an endowment larger than the one it has now.

In the meantime, the Review will continue to be published and to “freely serve the mind and heart of the free reader” as our advisory board member, Gordon Lish, said years ago.

Mr. Fogarty has been the editor of the Antioch Review for 30 years and is the John Dewey Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Antioch College.