As someone who's considered launching a literary journal from time to time, who follows a number of them, and is generally active in Toronto's literary community, I have a thought on new journals.
When authors look to submit to a literary journal, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, poetry, a one-act play, or a photograph they took of their favourite peony, there are only three ways to tell whether a journal is worth the effort (and/or cost) to submit:
Past issues.
Ultimately, literary journals live and die on the content they produce. While this may seem obvious, it's not as simple as saying "this journal is a SF journal, and I write SF, so I should submit" or "this journal publishes stories about the Pacific Northwest, and I write stories set there, so I should submit". Everything from the typical word count (which is often different from the maximum word count on Submittable) to the author bio format play into whether a submission is the right fit for that particular journal. There's also the niggling background question, constantly out there, as to whether any given literary journal is publishing material that is good.
The submitter's question here, that the journal has to answer, is: Do I want my story to be one of these stories?
Aesthetic.
Website design, layout and visuals are even more important in the artistic (including literary) world than anywhere else. A website like Pro Football Reference or Basketball Reference doesn't need to look good because it's an aggregation of data meant to be used by sports analysts, bettors and fans. That said, the Flash attack approach of a website like NBA.com is enough to crash a laptop. I've used sports websites here to avoid drawing attention to any particular literary journal. A good literary journal website, in its layout and its art, will draw in the reader. An additional stylistic point: typos look especially bad when you're telling your prospective authors to submit their best, most edited, work.
Self-plug time: my website, Matthew Gordon Books, is a good example of the balance between stripped-down and spiffed-up.
The submitter's question here, that the journal has to answer, is: Do I want my story to look like one of these stories?
Masthead.
The editor(s) of a literary journal are presumably living people, not bots. Their names should be on the website, either under a Masthead heading or on the submission page. Being able to Google the editor(s) allows a prospective author, or even a prospective reader (literary journals get purchased sometimes!), to see what else the editor has written and what else the author likes. For example, if I were listed on a masthead somewhere, you could quickly see, from my Quora posts and from my short story "The Aviary", that I like experimental, punchy fiction that gets straight to the point and is at or under 1,000 words. My educational and professional backgrounds are also easy to find if you dig a little. If you graduated from my alma mater, tell me that!
The submitter's question here, that the journal has to answer, is: Do I want my story to be published by these people?
The above three criteria are especially important when a literary journal is either set to release its first issue, requires payment along with submissions, or especially both.
If you have no past issue to show, and no one can tell who you are, yet you are expecting money along with submissions... I can't imagine who would even fork over $5 because some unknown person might publish a literary journal at some point. You can buy a sandwich for that.
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