WIDENING THE WEEKLY HORIZON

Robert Silver calls for

a new magazine for the common reader

PAUL Johnson, on The Spectator's 160th birthday, predicted a happy, if difficult, future for political weeklies. Costs, he felt, would go down with desk-top publishing and more efficient means of distribution. Tony Howard, a later editor of the New Statesman, writing a few years ago, was more pessimistic. Colour supplements and serious television coverage, he claimed, had bitten deeply and irretrievably since the 1960s into the joint circulations of the magazines that he — and Johnson — care for.

The facts favour Howard, not Johnson. In its heyday, 20 years ago, the New Statesman sold two and a half times as many copies as The Spectator does now and, in today's terms, The Spectator is doing very well. Tribune's circulation, without libelling it, is at liquidation levels. The Listener, never a real 'political week- ly', given its BBC bias, has, in the hands of a television duopoly, become largely a `media' magazine, strong on soft features and Punch-style humour under Punch's ex-editor.

The New Statesman and New Society, unviable apart, have merged. The result is even more 'soft features', not hard reports, and lots of columnists, writing for those who share a highly specialised frame of reference, appealing, often, to mood, not argument. The Economist responds com- prehensively, often perceptively to the week's events, but anonymity and a busi- ness bias prevent any interaction between writer and reader — figures take over from personalities. Even so, each of these out- lets has its value for readers and writers, out to reach defined audiences.

But, none, except The Spectator, con- forms to the traditional model of a political weekly — a vehicle for genuinely indi- vidual comment, opinionated argument and vivid reports, dealing non-exclusively, `universally', with current affairs and ideas, books and the arts. 'Universality', as a defining condition, implies that any gener- al, educated or self-educated, reader can pick it up, week by week, and gain interest or pleasure without sharing its editorial outlook. The Spectator's monopoly is un- healthy — in the long run, it leads to

complacency, cliquishness and frozen assumptions. The world of the weeklies should reflect challenge and response. It is clearly the case that desk tops and better distribution can enhance the econo- mics of the enterprise. A friend and I both freelance journalists — toyed with the mechanics of setting one up. Costs were more modest than we guessed. A business plan hinted that venture capital of £150,000 in the first year would do the trick. But, clearly, costs are not the only deterrent.

An odd feature of the press revolution over the last two years is that it has so far produced four new newspapers — two survivors, more mooted — but no new weeklies. Many new magazines in fact successfully sell at high-ish prices. The secret of these colourful bundles — hand- ling, to cite a few areas, dieting, hair care, computers, guns, cars and property — is that they cater for the fixations of faddists, not general readers, fired by global curios- ity.

`General interest' titles, including the weeklies, but also Radio Times and TV Times, now account for only 12 per cent of magazine sales. The commodity comics count for far more. It is surprising, in a way. With a booming quota of arts gradu- ates after postwar expansion of the univer- sities, there should be far more people ready to take their trained interests through life to the newsagent each Friday. So far, there aren't. Does more mean less? Is it that ex-Firsts in PPE, 20 years on, tired out by a hard week in the City and a long haul in the garden, can only use the few minutes left on a heroic search for cheap lawn-mowers in the back of Ex- change and Mart?

I don't think so. The key to the revival of the weeklies as a genre is to focus on earlier virtues. The British were always, in Orwell's words, a nation of pigeon- fanciers, flower-arrangers and coupon- clippers — the amateur, happier counter- parts of today's faddists. But they co- existed with a class, committed to cerebral self-improvement. The 20th century poli- tical weeklies had their 19th century paral- lels, the quarterly reviews and, later, club- land periodicals — the Athenaeum, the

Pall Mall Gazette. They attracted people who wanted to learn more and more about a universe, which was getting wider and wider.

Their view of that world may have been radical, Whig or Tory. But the vice they did not have was contracting horizons. The politics of Parliament, the hub of the weeklies or their forerunners, played a key role in that generous, expansive world of exciting events and exciting ideas. So did the law-courts, debates on religion and the universities.

These magazines took lone autodidacts or isolated graduates, caught in rural vicar- ages, slum schools or colonial outposts, into wider spheres. They shaped the idea of what Virginia Woolf called 'the common reader', with an itch to learn and an urge to argue. Their themes each week took shape through debate or discussion in pubs, clubs and sitting-rooms.

They were read by a section of the nation, with a real interest in events at Westminster — wider than those with real Power, wider than, to use today's clichd, the 'chattering classes', much wider than artistic constellations like Bloomsbury. That sense of a common culture, a logically complete world, from which the weeklies draw verve and vigour, may have been lost, as self-improvement, formerly men- tal, is now taken to be either athletic (toning up the muscles) or vocational (making it as a banker).

Now the answer is to recapture an earlier sense of idealism. The enemy is the institu- tionalisation of the media — the primary contacts, sources and talking-partners of most journalists are fellow-hacks. A suc- cessful new weekly has to appeal to a sense of popular curiosity. That curiosity about the wider world, central, not contingent to the character of the reader, can be revived, using a revolutionary sense of news-values, like Picture Post in the 1930s.

A new weekly should act at two levels. At the weightier one, it should seek to counter contracting horizons — the abys- mal language of public debate; the way that personal finance takes over from political economy, as voters use calculators to see how they gain from marginal tax- cuts; the refusal to take long-term interna- tional issues seriously, especially British foreign policy in, say, Eastern Europe. That new weekly should also offer an outlet for eccentric, personal opinions, provocatively or cogently argued. The best, recent case was Geoffrey Wheat- Croft's case for legalising heroin a few years ago in these pages. In other words, the 'media', and the fashions they feed off, shouldn't dictate the agenda for the week. Newspapers may have to be exclusively about the day's news; a weekly magazine shouldn't be. Fascinating corners of British society, the world around us or the universe of ideas lurk outside media-man's London. I ha- ven't recently seen any cogent reports, say,

on the 200,000 Poles who live in the South-East, the family mafia that controls Antigua or the 'New Age' movement (covered, very superficially, in the Times) — all apt topics. The error which editors make is to think that potential readers

demand the same 'topical newspeg', prob- ably highly artificial, that they themselves seek. At best, it's a useful discipline; at worst, as here, it's a trap. Satisfying real curiosity matters more. Is there anyone out there with £150,000?