IPC closes Shoot magazine
I remember buying this for 25p when I was a schoolkid, when it was cut and pasted together and every box had a drop shadow and every footballer had a nickname. Not like now. Now they just have surnames…
Another great loss: IPC has announced that it’s closing down Shoot after forty years of history. It had just been switched from a monthly to a weekly to compete with the other magazines in the market: Match of the Day, Match and Kick!
Sales were just over 35,000, compared with Match’s 113,049 (a year-on-year fall of 13%) and Kick! (62,290, growth of 24% year on year).
So, it was only given four months as a weekly to try and compete. Maybe it was dropping the exclamation mark. Or that schoolkids are a bit more sophisticated than is reflected by the Shoot brand. Compare with Kick! or Match.
Media’s blind eye to advertising
Yesterday I wrote about protests by publishers and car manufacturers against plans by the EU to introduce compulsory rules governing pollution info on car advertising. In last night’s 7pm Channel Four flagship news programme, the producers covered the story (good) but relegated it to the ‘And Finally…’ slot (bad) generally reserved for the more lighthearted story of the day.
I want to pick up on this, because news media play an important role in developing the public’s broader understanding of political and health issues.
Is Climate Change a serious issue or not?
Serious political and health issues are well covered, in general, by C4. And, just like smoking (the example C4 used as a parallel), climate change is both a political and health issue. So why the almost clownish approach? Watch it for yourself:
By relegating the story to the lighter-hearted final slot, through its ordering of scenes and interviews, by its very headline (’Driven to Distraction by Brussels’) and therefore by its emphasis on certain aspects of the story, the importance of the issue was downplayed. If this health threat concerned fire hazards in toys or flooding in the home counties, would it have be covered in the same way?
Media’s blind eye to advertising
No. And the reason is, I feel, the fact that advertising came into the mix. This report provides what I see as an example of the ‘institutional blind eye’ from which media suffers in relation to advertising. Generally this comes, in relation to climate change, in the form of charges of hypocrisy levelled at writing articles criticising government and business, but accepting advertising money from polluting products (airlines, car manufacturers etc). MediaLens picked up on this. For the Guardian, Monbiot and the readers’ editor responded.
But last night was interesting in that the turn of this blind eye became in many ways more subtle, challenging and, I feel, dangerous. The relationship moved beyond one of reliance, to one of defense: that is, this report, this news piece, made advertising the hero, in exactly the same way the car is made the hero by advertising. Read more
Ad agencies say adverts don’t work: believe them?
What do you think of this advert?*
Now, does it conform to what you would consider responsible advertising? Does it (thanks Leo Hickman) meet Advertising Standards Authority’s code of practice section 2.2. “All marketing communications should be prepared with a sense of responsibility to consumers and to society.” Well, yes, unfortunately it probably does, unless you’re progressive enough to read ‘environment’ every time you read ‘consumer’ or ’society’.
If you’ve got this far (and deniers will have clicked away, well, three seconds ago). you might agree with me (and George Marshall. Thanks George) that car manufacturers and advertisers are, in fact, not taking the issue of climate change seriously.
Well, this morning they are. But not as you’d hope. As reported in The Guardian, magazines publishers and TV, print and media executives are today to protest against EU plans to introduce large and, importantly, compulsory warnings about CO2 emissions on car advertising. They fear that:
As a packet of cigarettes carries a mandatory health warning, a Mercedes C-class advert may be forced to carry a climate hazard alert within months. Manufacturers would be forced to stop supplying pollution information in barely readable small print at the bottom of ads.
Some quotes from the protesters:
“The massed ranks of the media are up in arms,” said Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council. “This will not achieve the goal,” said David Mahon of the European Federation of Magazine Publishers.
So, rather than reflect on their contribution to environmental sensibility, car manufacturers and publishers are concerned that their creative and commercial rights are being attacked by EU lawmakers. Germany, in particular, despite its green credentials, feels targeted. The UK is joining in, as “car companies supply about 10% of ad revenue and are threatening to halt magazine advertising if forced to make loud statements about pollution.”
However, perhaps the most interesting defence against the plan is that “the ad agencies argue their work has a minimal role in persuading people to buy a new car.” As the Guardian points out, as the Independent did back in May, if that’s the case, why do car companies spend so much money on them? Read more
The cultural economy of the luxury brand
Yesterday I looked at the copy content in the launch of Standpoint, the new politics/business monthly magazine edited by former Telegraph associate editor Daniel Johnson, with launch articles from a number of neocon names and Telegraph writers that did nothing to support Johnson’s claim that it is a magazine of both the Left and Right.
The launch of Standpoint and its claims to bipartisan intellectual curiosity stirrred some thoughts around the rise of the “intellectual magazine” in the recent couple of years, and what this is saying about both the magazine market and the economic and political context in which magazines operate. My view is that the recent glut of “intellectual magazine” launches–such as Prospect, Monocle, The Economist’s Intellgent Life–is a battle for territory that has less to do with intelligence and more to do with economic prosperity and worldview dominance for its owners and advertisers. Which, of course, is nothing new in the media (see this overview), and thanks to Johnson, is neither hidden nor subtle in Standpoint’s stated goal:
to defend and celebrate Western civilisation.
That is, Johnson knows that in the time of the credit crunch, it’s not the lower and middle classes who prosper but the rich. So let’s create magazines for the ‘intellectual’ where ‘intellectual = rich, and politics = capital’.
It doesn’t take a great leap of intellect to work out that the magazines that are going to do best in this time are those that support this brand chain of command. Monocle goes from strength to strength on this model, as Vanity Fair expands across Europe, In the UK, Grazia grows onwards, and The Spectator has increased its sales, according to James Robinson reporting in The Observer, by
strengthening its financial coverage and introducing articles on luxury living, which attract a new set of advertisers.
But let’s begin with Standpoint. Read more
Men’s magazines: the intellectuals
As reported by The Observer on Sunday, today sees the launch of the much anticipated Standpoint, a new monthly magazine with a relatively unambiguous editorial position.
According to its editor, former Telegraph assoicate editor Daniel Johnson, Standpoint will “defend and celebrate Western Civilisation”. In an interview with the New Culture Forum, Johnson says that “I think there is a much larger constituency for a reassertion of western values such as free speech, the dignity of the individual and the rule of law than cynics on the Left or the Right suppose.”
Left and Right
Although he pairs cynics of the Left and Right together, for The Observer Johnson rejects the idea that Standpoint will be only for the Right. This, despite the fact that anticipation has been coming from and heralded from, specifically, the Right (for example). Indeed, Johnson suggests “the world’s changed beyond recognition. The old left/right categories don’t work any more.” As The Observer comments:
That is a familiar argument that has been played out endlessly in recent years, making unlikely allies of American neo-conservatives and European liberals, and it is a discussion that will continue on the pages of Standpoint.
Inside the magazine
So what will be on the pages of Standpoint? Will it deliver politically agnostic intellectual stimulation? Will it steal readers from The Spectator or, even the dwindling leftist magazine, the New Statesman? Johnson suggests writers such as Alain de Botton and Andrew Marr show the magazine reaches out to “anybody with an ounce of intellectual curiosity”. So who and what is in the launch issue? A sample:
- Alain de Botton on faith ["intellectual cotton candy", "a philosphical pub crawl" ]
- Jung Chang and Simon Sebag Montefiore on Mao and Stalin
- new poetry by Robert Conquest [Margaret Thatcher's speechwriter]
- Andrew Marr on the Telegraph cartoonist Matt
- Tim ‘vote UKIP’ Congdon on why we shouldn’t scapegoat the bankers [really?]
- Eton educated Telegraph columnist on Prospect’s 100 top public intellectuals
- Michael Burleigh on the war on terror [Telegraph writer, dislike for all things Islamic]
- Douglas Murray on censorship [author of Neoconservatism: Why We Need It]
- Alasdair Palmer on family courts [Better Rough Justice than another 9/11]
- Emanuele Ottolenghi on how Europe has betrayed Israel [and the Palestinians?]
So, that’s settled then: a balanced world view if ever I saw one.
Final word: will it survive?
Magforum has a great overview of the ‘intellectual’ business/politics market and the likelihood of survival for any new magazines entering the market. For Standpoint, both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ are in general agreement that Standpoint is coming along at the right time–the Cameron’s Conservative renaissance–and timing, as we know, is everything.
Well, not quite everything. What’s more interesting from The Observer article, although only touched on superficially, is the political economy (and economics) of the magazine: how ownership, control and advertising are the drivers of new magazine launches, of course, not the ‘intellectual curiosity’ of the readers. I’ll be looking at this tomorrow in the context of late capitalism’s rise of the luxury brand.
Esquire recreate cover from 1965
Have I said I love magazine covers? Esquire’s May 2008 magazine reimagines the 1965 cover that pictured Italian actress Virna Lisi, in town filming Assault on a Queen with Frank Sinatra. Shaving. In the magazine shoot, not the film.
The story in Esquire is told by the art director at the time, George Lois, who they say “created some of the most memorable covers in the magazine’s history”. Lois’s commentary is stark about the mercantile pressures he felt at the time (but got away from):
“The ad guys hated it. It was too edgy. They were worried about losing clients.”
In the recently released 2nd edition of The Magazine from Cover to Cover, Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel focus on the same point: “how much influence advertisers have on the editorial content and the variety of means by which they exert their power.” One of my Level 2 magazine journalism students who’s doing some good features is also doing some work experience with a magazine over in Liverpool. He had an eye-opener the other day, when
he sat in on his first editorial meeting. “Do the ad team always have control like that?!” he asked. Why, yes they do.
I’m intrigued about the resonance that a magazine cover has when it pastiches, parodies, copies, morphs, etc, another image, either a previous magazine cover, or another famous marque or image. For example, the outcry over the recent Time Green cover and its pastiche of the famous Marines putting up the US flag at Iwo Jima.
Here, the two Esquire magazines are not so different: two women shaving, an image that was originally inspired by a 1965 article on the ‘masculinization of the American woman’. (Haven’t read the article).
There are a couple of obvious differences. Read more
Time goes green (or, in Europe, Brown)
The hymn-book of the Stetson-wearing businessman, Time magazine, has used its cover to make a loud pronouncement on climate change.
In its 84-year history, the newsweekly has only twice swapped its red border for another colour. Volume 171, No.17 has gone green for its April 28 issue, its third annual special environment issue.
The last time Time changed its famous border colour (the subject of many a semiotics class) was for 9/11, when the cover border went black. Time magazine is owned by CNN.
I’m fascinated by the power of magazine covers to make statements of such cultural force and meaning in such a small, relatively simple space.
In their new book The Magazine from Cover to Cover, Sammye Johnson and Patricia Prijatel,
suggest that a magazine “opens the world to us. It helps us build our foundation, our beliefs”, and that magazines “create the symbolic meaning that we use to interpret our world”. They rarely do this individually; it is a matter of millions of magazine covers and articles accumulating as forms or objects of the mediatised world. But sometimes–like Time this week–individual examples of the magazine genre remind us of their collective force as producers of cultural meaning.
And Steve Taylor, in his book 100 Years of Magazine Covers, suggests that (quoted from a book review by Jenny McKay, University of Stirling) “a magazine cover, by distilling the essence of a publication, is especially revealing. For Taylor, magazines and their covers
provide their readers with ‘the raw material of identity’ that we now no longer get
from traditional social and family institutions (p. 9).”
Before I get onto the actual images used, and the responses, why, you ask, can’t I buy this in the UK? Well, because Time Green is only for the US, Asia and the Pacific regions. Here in Europe, we get Time Brown:
Lucky us. Anyway, so, much of the reception to Time’s green cover is actually in response to the pastiche of the famous Iwo Jima image of marines putting up the American flag, which here has, of course, been replaced with a tree… Read more
Your views: teaching journalism at degree level
Q. What do you think are the benefits for new magazine journalists of a specific, skills-based vocational degree in journalism? (Add your comment below)
Having worked as a magazine journalist since 1994, both in print and online, and having now taught since 2005, I am passionate about making sure that our students get the best industry-relevant degree available.
There has been a credibility gap between academia and industry regarding the teaching of journalism. This is something that as a journalist, editor, managing editor and now academic, I want to do my best to address.
In September 2008 we are launching two new degree programmes aimed at training the next generation of magazine journalists.
Your feedback will be invaluable in helping ensure our students get the best possible degree. Thanks.
Take a look at the programme information for the undergraduate programme for more info, or get in touch, alex[dot]lockwood[at]sunderland.ac.uk
Reporting climate change - badly
The New Statesman magazine published an article by David Whitehouse on 19th Dec ‘Has Global Warming Stopped?’ which claimed that the science on CO2 emissions was wrong, and that the world was not heating up in the manner that we now, generally, understand. Whitehouse stated that, based on his analysis of the data:
Global warming has, temporarily or permanently, ceased. Temperatures across the world are not increasing as they should according to the fundamental theory behind global warming – the greenhouse effect. Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what or else we may spend hundreds of billions of pounds needlessly.
Over 600 people wrote in to complain about the veracity of the analysis, and established environmental journalists and campaigner Mark Lynas also responded, pointing out that: Read more
Baudrillard’s Postmodern Media Theory
Back in 2005 I wrote an article on hyperreality and arrogance for a website set up by some Masters-level peers at Oxford, where I used an old colleague’s arrogance as the example to explain Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, something I taught during Magazine Theory classes at Middlesex Uni. I was reminded of it tonight while reading Anais Nin’s diaries from 1935, when she meets her brother Thorvald off the boat at New York harbour. She interprets his hard outer shell as a cover for his sensitivity at meeting for the first time in ten years, but then says ‘but i always interpret people’s shells in this way, and many times I have been proved wrong’. She has got it wrong, she later admits. And I guess I’ve been wrong about this, too (whenever I say ‘I guess’ I know that I’m making it easier for myself to admit something), so I need to apologise to that old friend. Luckily he’s on Facebook. It is often the easiest way to interpret those who come across as offhand or not in tune with your own outward facing identity. I got it wrong over the last couple of days with a close friend, who I felt wasn’t giving me enough support over an issue. Sometimes picking up media theory and using it to analyse interpersonal relationships can be a tricky business. Read more
