Life of an editor, partial.

I have been poetry editor for a once-revered and hopefully-to-be-revered-again literary journal at my home institution, and it's been a full-immersion baptism. Our editor, and by proxy the genre editors, have been saddled with cleaning up a big stinking rotten mess left by the previous editor. This mess has taken many forms.

1. Previous contributors have emailed us to say they haven't been paid (it's a paying mag).
2. Previous contributors haven't been notified their work was accepted; in some cases the issue went to press and got sent to subscribers before contributors knew anything.
3. Unresponded-to manuscripts have been found on shelves, in desk drawers, on tops of desks--some going back two years.
4. The previous editor didn't put out issues on the regular four-a-year schedule. The last two years he served as editor, exactly two issues went to press. Of those issues, it's not really known how many were mailed to subscribers, or if they were mailed at all. This also creates havoc for library subscription services who are paying for four issues a year; they've had a litany of unkind words for us.
5. Average response times went way way up (see #3). Our current standing in Duotrope's Digest is as one of the most "slothful" mags out there.
6. Sixty-some uncashed checks were found in a desk upon the new editorship's assuming of the office suite. These were entry fee checks sent in by entrants for our nonfiction contest, left in an envelope to rot. Not only were checks not cashed, no winners were announced for the contest that year. This constitutes fraud and is criminally punishable.
7. For at least two months, the previous editor went on a book tour/extended vacation and took no vacation leave and did no work for the mag. (I should mention he is staff and not faculty.)
8. The last 4-5 issues are rife with typos--just shameful, embarrassing, developmental-level typos.

The previous editor is currently working at the home institution in a PR position. Rumor is he will be let go soon because of the discovery of all of the above. By all accounts he is a friendly and outgoing guy; I only met him once years ago at a restaurant, and only tangentially as others were in our party. But I believe our new editor when she says he is a conniving scoundrel.

My theory? When the mag lost its managing editor in '08 or '09, no one was hired in her place. Lacking savvy or interest in the business end, the previous editor just let that part go and ran the mag the way he wanted to--i.e. a party of one. Previous contributing editors have said he was erratic at best and neglectful at worst when it came to circulating mss's and deciding content.

We are working to correct all of the above. In many ways, we are burning the old and building again, which may be the best way to look at the whole mess. Granted, I haven't seen the mess that up close; but I know it's hard to do the job you were hired to do when you're covering for a neglectful predecessor.