Magazines fight back
Posted on Jan 15 2007 | Tagged as: Raggy Dolls
How far is political journalism to blame for public cynicism and disengagement? Can longer-form magazine journalism reverse the decline in public interest in politics? Does the internet open up the possibility of better and more varied political debate? Where will magazines and magazine journalists fit in a multimedia and highly competitive world?
BBC Magazines’ next major launch will be a politics and current affairs publication, in development under the working title News Brief.
If it avoids the licence fee controversy that eventually caused the closure of their last news weekly, the Listener, in 1991, the new magazine will be seen as just as trustworthy as its highly respected parent company – an advantage in a world where political journalists are only marginally more trusted than the politicians they’re supposed to be holding to account.
Michael Bywater, a former Independent on Sunday columnist and Cambridge University classics teacher, believes this mistrust not to be due to political journalism per se but to the negative image that a certain type of reporter gives of the industry as a whole – to a failure of language that describes the ‘good guys’ and the bad in the same terms: ‘journalists’.
“Eventually, like ‘men’ in extreme feminist discourse of the 1980s, the words take on their negative connotation almost exclusively,” he says. “I spend much of my time in journalism and the words ‘Press’ and ‘media’, even to me, carry the second-order signification of a cynical wet-lipped sleazebag destitute of moral sensibility, of a narrow-eyed and decontextualised opportunist.”
Magazines, however, aren’t dealt as harsh a hand as newspapers. By being aimed at a tightly defined readership and engendering a sense of community within it, magazines enhance psychological “familiarity effects”. People and things – and publications – familiar to a person become liked to a greater degree than those which are unfamiliar – and trusted more.
But this bonding with the reader is a double-edged sword: there is a danger of simply pandering to readers’ point of view and actually discouraging debate and re-evaluation of prejudices.
The New Statesman – a flagship example of magazines’ comeback, having reached a 25-year sales high following last year’s redesign and relaunch – provides a pertinent illustration.
Responding to an Economist feature suggesting that Fair Trade foods might perpetuate poverty, the New Statesman’s Christmas issue answered: “What rot. When the champions of wealthy corporate concerns express dismay at the way you are spending your money, you can be sure you must be doing something right.”
That’s an argument, is it?
They fare little better on the web. At the time of writing, political editor Martin Bright’s blog has attracted just three comments across 10 posts, and the magazine’s columns a maximum of three each – in Kira Cochrane’s case, zero. By way of comparison, Cochrane’s three posts on the Guardian’s group blog, Comment Is Free, have 200 comments between them.
Comment Is Free stands out over most group blogs in that it has contributors of every stripe imaginable, representing a broad spectrum of opinion. They’ve gone out of their way to avoid the community model that usually applies even more to the web than it does to magazines (whether by chance or intent, site editor Georgina Henry has no prior experience of working in either medium).
However, most group blogs – both those belonging to magazines and the best of the amateur sites – follow the form of either having writers who come from the same point of view or who want to talk to the same audience. Debate is more often than not light, or provided by intentionally contrarian ‘trolls’, deliberately provoking the majority of the readership.
It’s a more extreme version of magazines’ reinforcement of pre-existing attitudes. As the disillusionment with newspaper journalism has led a substantial part of the readership to feed their interest in politics from magazines and the internet, the public may be better informed than ever, but it does little to improve the level of political debate.
Overt agendas are precisely what have opened a gap for News Brief. As it’s the BBC, it’s necessarily politically neutral overall. Former New Statesman editor and media columnist Peter Wilby believes this neutrality will mean that the new launch isn’t a major threat to his old magazine, instead providing a non-partisan publication sitting in between right- and left-wing ones.
“It would certainly mark a BBC weekly out very clearly from the New Statesman or the Spectator and, in the days of the Listener this was widely regarded as a very reasonable triumvirate,” he says. “But I’d guess The Week would have cause for complaint.”
News Brief’s target audience will be those who don’t want to know what the point of view on a particular topic will be before they’ve even read the article – additional magazine readers, some ‘defecting’ from mistrusted newspapers but not other magazines.
So the good news for magazine journalists and publishers is that they can thrive simply by doing what they’ve always done: giving the reader what he wants. But improving political engagement? “It’ll take more than a few magazines,” says Wilby.
(Feature written for the Reporters and the Reported course that forms part of the Diploma at Cardiff University. I did interview Peter Wilby, but I pinched that Michael Bywater quote from his blog.)