Is NOW! the Time for all good men?

Murray Sayle

I hope Sir James Goldsmith has sharp enough ears to pick out, from the chorus greeting his new magazine, the sincere welcome of an old-time, long distance travelling newsman. Like my colleagues who have already written on the subject I, too, really mean it (why do they have to keep saying that?) not because Sir James has offered me a full-time job, or because I ever had much to do with him, either for or 'against, but simply because I can't see how we can Possibly have too many wealthy men anxious to spend their money in Fleet Street.

All too often in the past we have seen the fortunes made in soap or dog food go down the traditional drains of drink, women and gambling. By spending it on journalists, layout men, printers and the rest, Sir James may in fact only be bringing middlemen into the process; and if he didn't know already, my friend Allan Hall's heartburning story (in the first NOW!) of a dinner for three Which cost £.750 will have alerted him to the fearful cost of modern newsgathering. That said, if Sir James is still game, and he really has a baron's bundle to play with, then I can't bring myself to fault his flattering Choice of the news industry. What disturbs me about Sir James's new venture is something quite different, the aspect, in fact, that he seems proudest of himself. 'Every time I walk down Fleet Street,' his advertising copywriter reports, 'I am amazed — as I'm sure you are too — that we are the only major country in the free world without its own weekly news magazine.' Amazed I am not. Glad I used to be. It is true that the news magazirie format is easy to recognise, and even easier to imitate, and so they flourish like weeds in various parts of the free world, wherever that might be. News magazines are not, however, a necessary and sufficient cause of national success; Japan is struggling towards industrial supremacy without one, for instance, while South Africa's To The Point has just laid one of the biggest eggs in the history of media manipulation and black Propaganda. Sir James is patriotically punting his millions on a specific British need for a news magazine. NOW! is clearly a pup out of L'Expres, from Sir James's own kennel, Which in turn shows a marked family like ness to Der Spiegel, which looks like a iTeutonic Newsweek, which is equallY obv ously a dead ringer for, and is extensively manned and womaned by dropouts from Time. The bloodlines, wherever we study them, lead unmistakably back to the Onlie Begetter, archetype and granddaddy of them all Sir James clearly wants to be the British version of Henry Luce, the most Powerful and successful publisher of the twentieth century, which means that he wants to control something like a fish and chips Time. But do we want to buy it? More specifically, as journalists, do we want to work for it? One way of deciding is to look at the fortunes of the original.

Like almost all successful proprietors Luce was not an innovator himself, but a shrewd commercialiser of other people's talents. The idea for Time originated not with Luce, but with his brilliant college chum Briton Hadden, who died tragically young, and whose name you can find on the top of Time's masthead to this day. Hadden and Luce came down from Yale in 1923, not in troubled times like our own, but into the shimmering lost world of raccoon-skin coats, Stutz Bearcats, bugle beds and hip flasks of bathtub gin (which Hadden drank while Luce studied the accounts.) Like most ideas which hit paydirt, Hadden's was obvious, once you thought of it. There is, to simplify heroically, and in appropriately Timely fashion, only one newspaper in the United States worth reading. The trouble is, it weighs five pounds on a representative day, it prints everything which comes over the wires, the kitchen sink y inclu, plus the immense output of its own garrulous correspondents, and you can only buy it in New York. Hadden reasoned that, -out in the Middle West, and even in the endless suburbs of New York, there were people who would like to know what was in the New York Times without actually wading through it. So, by rewriting it in a smart-Alec way that would impress farmers as big-city, sophisticated stuff, full of cute expressions like 'at week's end quipped he', 'Hunkered down in Harlem, tall, balding . ' and so on, Hadden calculated that he could tap an affluent audience interested in a quick back-and-sides over the events, national and international, of the week, which they could not find in their local newspapers, or hear over their scratchy, cat's-whisker crystal radios. The size of the new publication was governed, then and now, by the minimum U.S. postage rate for periodicals, fifteen cents, and the contents by what had already been printed in the New York Times, enriched by whatever scraps of local colour Lucemen could pick-up among New York's numerous ethnic bars and taxi-drivers. Neither of these parameters has changed much with the years. Lured by promises very like Sir James's, that they would be buying 'an essential briefing for any reader who aims to keep ahead of the diverse affairs of the world', and written in eccentric basic English at that, Hadden and Luce soon found an enthusiastic band of readers. They started with $86,000, which would barely pay salary and expenses for one of Sir James's thirstier journalists, and 12,000 subscribers, and had tripled both within the year.

As the business prospered, the young proprietors decided to put on a foreign service. This they did by nipping down to the transatlantic steamer terminal, collecting discarded copies of The Times and Le Monde, clipping them and feeding that, too, into the rewriting machine happily hunkered down in cubicles in a Manhattan basement, while the Charleston and the Suzie Q thundered overhead. As the paper attracted attention, handouts from embassies, government reports, clippings from further afield and practically anything that came in free, with writing on it, was fed into the machine.

Then Hadden died, in 1929, leaving Luce in sole beneficiary charge. In 1930 he founded Fortune, at a time, like today, when people were much concerned about their money. Then, some time in the early Thirties, Time engaged its first foreign correspondent. By this time, Luce employed the only group of people in the whole world who could speak and write Time-ese, and none of them fancied the lonely life on the road. So the correspondent was hired, not to write pieces to put into the paper but to supply newspaper clippings on stories the New York Times and the rest had not yet had time to cover.

Thus, by accident, Lucie made perhaps the greatest of all his technical innovations, fully comparable with Henry Ford's discovery that the skilled craft of making motorcars should be broken down into a series of simple operations which an illiterate immigrant or migrating dirt farmer could perform, the results being bolted together on an assembly line under skilled direction. By hiring people to submit, not finished reports, but research briefs, Luce made the same breakthrough for journalism.

In the process, he solved, or appeared to solve an age-old problem: where to find reporters capable both of standing up to the rigours of the field, days spent, perhaps, under fire, or in the midst of flood and pestilence, and nights passed in bars pressing drinks on tight-lipped informants, who were still capable of turning out a passable English prose when they finally staggered back to their hotel rooms, not to mention surviving long enough to acquire the experience and reading which alone could give their judgements some useful predictive power. The trick was to make travelling and thinking separate functions, only tenuously related.

By using expendable reporters and highly-trained, cosseted rewrite men, Luce undoubtedly managed to turn out an irresistible product, a success signalled in 1933 by the appearance of News-Week (with a hyphen in those days), the first of the horde of Time imitations which have surfaced and submerged over the years. The pleasures of reading a news magazine have changed little over the years, either, and are a direct result of Luce's system. Events about which the reader knows nothing, on unfamiliar subjects or faraway places, read smoothly and entertainingly, the result of shaping in moulds cast long ago and verbal sandpaper applied by experts to the tiniest rough spot. On topics the reader knows something about, however, news magazine reports almost invariably seem childishly oversimplified, exaggerated close to the point of incredibility, or just plain wrong (the teams of researchers who check the reporters' 'files' never leave New York, where by definition the action is not.) This characteristic effect is produced by competition, the operation of the same market forces Sir James endorses so heartily. Luce was a thorough-going free-market man, and hired everyone by the week, sackable at pleasure. His top editors held their positions in the pecking order at his whim, frequently exercised. Time competes with Newsweek, individual correspondents in the field compete to get their disaster into the paper, the rewrite men compete with each other in creativity and productivity, which means in practice the greatest possible change between what comes into the office and what goes into the paper. At every stage in the process, the available facts are screwed up to the maximum they will bear of brightness, certainty and geewhizz astonishment. This is, in turn, treated as a lawyer's brief, the more startling bits sifted out and again inflated just short of bursting point. 'It was in the file', says the rewrite man, when the complaints come, as they do, pouring in. Everyone is covered, except the complex and mysterious events out there in the real world.

Time's dismal track record (Newsweek's is little better) is the result of the system. In the years of its worldwide ascendancy, from the Communist victory in China in 1949, through the McCarthy years and up to the American disaster in Vietnam and beyond to the melodrama in Iran, Time got all the big issues wrong, or changed its tune only when the dogs were barking the real story in the streets of Manhattan. For the point of analysis and decision lay, and Hal, in New York, and the rewrite men have either not been out in the harsh, baffling world for years, or have never been there at all. What seems so modern, so up-to-the-minute, has always been years behind the times. 'It can't be true,' say Time's editors, when some weary leg-man attempts to undermine received opinion with troubling doubts. 'Otherwise it would have been in the New York Times.'

Life on a news magazine has thus assumed a surreal quality, and journalists who have never worked on one (in the international field, hardly anyone) never tire of hearing the stories of those who have, almost always on the theme of immense effort applied for disheartening results. My own favourite concerns a compatriot who was, in the stormy Sixties, briefly Time's bureau chief in Chicago (or maybe it was Newsweek's). On Monday came the usual imperious telex from New York: the magazine was scheduling a take-out, as we say in the trade, a massive round-up on the highly topical problem of mounting tension between the races which inhabit the United States.

Our man rose to the call. In a week of 16-hour days, he combed the ghettoes, engaged Black Panther militants and American Nazi stormtroopers in risky colloquies, probed the minds of liberals and bigots, delinquents and policemen. Stringers (part-time correspondents) rounded out his account with case histories and the comments of deeply concerned academics. Come Friday night, well within the deadline and some $10,000 down the tube, as they say, on expenses, our man filed a carefully reasoned 16,000 words, understanding, of course, that some of it might have to be cut.

On Monday the advance copies of the magazine arrived. Eagerly he tore open the parcel. The take-out was there. So was his story, boiled down to . and in Chicago, the situation was much the same.' Soon after, he left to join a suburban giveaway paper in New South Wales.

Why do people work for news magazines? The same question seems to have occurred to Sir James, who heads an advertisement, 'Why these top journalists joined.' The simple answer, and one in line with Sir James's political views, would seem to be, for the money. American news magazines have always been considered the top payers in the business. Sir James, while adopting the cautioning Fleet Street custom of three-year contracts, is said to be offering £25,000 a year, a car and generous expenses to qualified newspersons, well up there with transatlantic compensation.

Life on a news magazine thus revolves around two pivotal days of the week; Monday, when the magazine arrives and the reporter looks with stinging eyes at his story, mutilated and rewritten beyond recognition; and Friday, when the eagle shouts. Payday on a news magazine has often been described as one of the supreme moments of journalism: 'it's like pulling the handle on an enormous fruit machine,' a Spiegel man once told me, over expensive drinks in Hong Kong, 'and standing there with open arms under a stream of golden coins. The three bananas come up every week. It's magic.'

Life with a more traditional type of weekly review is, in contrast, much the opposite; the light-hearted walk to the newsagent, the familiar cover of the Spec tator in a dusty corner where few regardeth, a quiet purring of the ego as one's piece peeps forth, every word and accent and italic there from headline to signature — and then the numbing shock of disbelief when the editor's cheque comes in.

Well, you can't have everything, worse luck. It is not simple lust for loot which attracts people to news magazines: the money is merely a badge of their social importance, the means of maintaining a life style appropriate to their rank. The real inducement is power, or at least the illusion of same. While Spectator persons or New Statesmen wait on hard benches in dingy outer rooms, news magazine people are whisked in to meet the Prime Minister.

Governors of Hong Kong, it is said, hurry out to meet them at the airport. Presidents seek their understanding. Men and women of power own news magazine, men and women of power write for them, men and women of power read them — or at least, would-be in all three cases.

A glance through the first NOW! would seem to confirm this diagnosis. There is not, as far as I can discover, an intentional laugh from cover to cover. The top journalists do not seem to have been able to raise even a tepid grin among the lot of them. No one, it seems, has actually been anywhere for a story. Instead, an obscure guilty man, a Mr Khalil al-Azzawi, is dragged into the light, and a stern editorial warns his henchmen to get out of Britain. The veil is ripped from the shrinking insecurities of Southern Irish politics. Exports sag while the pound soars. Even the centre spread of pictures, which are beautiful, concern the joyless business of competing in international gymnastics for the sour old Soviet Union. One story I found particularly affecting. In a ghostly handing-on of the torch, the first number of NOW! announced the last number of Reveille, a lighthearted paper which used to be passed out in submarines to cheer up the lads during the dark days of the Second World War. It was in Reveille that my own first contribution to British journalism THEY DRIVE HIM BONKERS ON APRIL 1, concerning a plumber 'named W.C. Smellie of Kentish Town, London, and his sufferings at the hands of telephone pranksters, was published on or about April Fool's Day, 1953. I failed, the following week, to come up with the warm, sexy, dramatic knitting story ordered by the editor, and my two weeks' trial with Reville was over. All the same, I was touched to see that Reveille's last editor, Cyril Kersh, my old friend and colleague from the heady Messina days of The People in 1954, was game to the last, offering to buy the stamps for anyone who would write in suggesting ways the paper could be improved. Alas, Reveille has folded, and NOW! like a new Dalai Lama, is born. I wish them well, I really do— as long as Sir James's enthusiasm, idealistic sense of mission, and cash hold out, I am sure that NOW! will be a happy ship.