CHRISTOPHER BOOKER writes: Although I never understood Mr. T. D.
Wel- don's absurd theory of Organic and Mechanical States when it was applied to political systems, I do understand it when it is applied to magazines. There are (outside the 'special-interest' market) two kinds of magazines, as there are two kinds of turtle soup—mock and real. Almost all the great, successful magazines—those with a distinctive enough personality to provide smart journalism with the 'sort of social shorthand whereby some-, one can be summed up as a 'typical New Yorker/ Playboy reader'—seem to be. started 'small,' on very little money, by one man or a small group of people whose personal and distinctive view of the world the magazine then reflects. Alniost cer- tainly, in its early days, the paper revolves round• some obstreperous or at least eccentric fulcrum-- such as :Ross of the Nei; Yorker or even Hugh Hefner. If the magazine makes its breakthrough it has created a whole new `style' and formula, which it can then sit back on, without any real change, for years.
So much for Real or Organic magazines which, because they bring colour into a drab world and can be put in lavatories to be read for years after- wards, are on the whole a Good Thing. Real Magazines are usually started by someone vaguely saying `Let's start a magazine'—although he is secretly not really at all vague about what sort of magazine it's going to be. Mechanical or `Boardroom' magazines, on the other hand, are usually started by a number of men sitting round a boardroom table all agreeing vociferously that, `there seems to be room mid-market for a new women's leisure newsweekly,' .without any real idea of .what they want at all. Before they can find out what they want, they must first get a market-research report as to what'their prospec- tive readers in the AB group want (although the one thing about magazine readers is that they don't -know what they want until they are given it); a fortune is spent on launching the new magazine and probably within a few years it quietly disappears. .As happens every few years, there is currently a flurry of new activity in the „magazine world. Magazines are far more responsive to social change than newspapers, and tend to appear and disappear in batches. Not many years ago, fo'r instance, the last such flurry produced Topic (the archetype of 'boardroom' magazines), Private Eye ('Real), the Sunday Times Colour Section, the now forgotten Weekly Post; both Town and Time and Tide were undergoing synthetic renaissance, and the revivified Queen was once again a `real' magazine, expressing the distinctive personality of a tight in-group round Jocelyn , Stevens.
The current flurry, starting as it did with the Observer and Telegraph colour magazines, is a more depressing affair. The ambitions of the boardroom seem to be the universal keynote. The winter saW no fewer than two dreary attempts to imitate the' already sufficiently synthetic Play- boy formula—and the curious, lavish Nova, yet anothei typical 'boardroom' formula Mow about this, CK? A cross beiween Elk and an Esquire-for-Women?'). There are rumours of yet another big 1PC venture later in the year, deal- ing with `leisure'; we shall see how that does.
The most interesting new project, on paper at least, and the only one promising any kind of new `style,' would seem to be the forthcoming re- shaping of the Taller under the title London Life —as a sort of cross between the New Yorker and What's On. Both of the 'two men most closely in- volved, Mark Boxer and Francis Wyndham, were part of the group that ran the Queen in its hey- day, and like anyone who has ever been part of such a group, are undoubtedly not a little nostalgic. London Life will therefore, no doubt, have a trifle of the old Queen flavour. Successful magazine formulae, however, arise out of nowhere and are rarely based on attempts to re- capture the past.
Previous page
