Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

The essays in the first set of Proof 2010 seem to subscribe to one of two arguments: either the future of journalism will be dominated by unprofessional forms of citizen journalism; or professional journalism needs to up its game in order to be sure of having a future. My contribution sets out a third way for the future of journalism, in which citizen journalism and professional standards are combined. In discussing the changing orientation of citizen journalism or user generated content (UGC) towards a professional style of production, I will draw on the recent shift by environmental activists, who have begun to combine citizen journalism with professional journalistic content. This is especially interesting in that the move from social media towards professional media, which entails the conflation of citizen and professional journalistic practices, also raises an interesting question over the future of political activism. If activists are becoming increasingly professional media operators, can they also be offering an ‘alternative’ source of news? Indeed, how can there be any kind of alternative if even ‘alternative media’ are using standardised journalistic techniques and expectations in order to ensure mainstream coverage? It seems plausible to suggest that convergence between citizen and professional is likely to benefit journalism, but there may be negative consequences for politics. Media compromise will surely result in a compromised message.

Framed as a Pyramid

When referring to ‘citizen journalism’, I mean journalism without professional markers. Citizen journalism has been characterised by arbitrary angles and shaky footage of the incidents it depicts. The material has often looked more like a sea of mobile phones held aloft than a clear depiction of important events. Most instances of citizen journalism will have been generated from mobile phones and handheld camcorders, and it is this kind of technology that activists are utilising more and more. But without professional journalistic standards, the footage produced tends to be less appropriate for serious news broadcasts and more suited to comedy television shows such as You’ve Been Framed.

Occasionally some user generated footage has made it onto national news channels, where it is shown repeatedly, e.g. film of the Glasgow airport attack (2007), or of newspaper vendor Iain Tomlinson being pushed over by a riot police officer during the aftermath of G20 protests in London (2009). But such footage is repeated (and repeatable) only, I suggest, because it exhibits some familiar journalistic patterns. In footage of both Glasgow and the G20 incident, the images are framed well. A narrative is at least implied in shots of the car which is seen to explode at the entrance to Glasgow airport. Footage of a riot cop pushing a man over in the street, juxtaposed to other officers in riot gear set against G20 protesters, offers a framework which resembles the classic journalistic structure of the inverted pyramid.

Thus it seems that the UGCs with the greatest chance of being picked up are those which follow or at least acknowledge the simple inverted pyramid framework, largely in line with established journalistic practice. Campbell (2009) suggests that the inverted pyramid is an approach now favoured by radical political movements in their attempt to gain greater coverage of their cause. If so, and if this approach is adopted more widely, it would suggest that the days of shambolic amateurism are already numbered – as outdated as the calls people used to make to show that they had a mobile phone to make the call with; instead the user is now expected to generate content that is considered presentable and watchable according to professional or semi-professional criteria.

Doing Our Own Thing

The most prominent example of citizen journalism meeting professional journalism is the coverage of climate camp protests (2006 – present). The Camp for Climate Action (August 2009) was a week-long camp aimed at raising awareness of climate change. Significantly, the camps house a ‘media tent’, where fellow activists are encouraged to attend workshops on producing a one-minute piece of journalism. Activists are then given three different pamphlets, each setting out how to record a one-minute news item following the inverted pyramid structure. Not only do the templates prove that activists are adopting professional journalistic standards, as opposed to relying on shaky footage, but they also signal a shift in the relationships between radical protest movements and mainstream media houses. Traditionally, radical activists’ movements have had a limited relationship with media houses, preferring to engage with alternative, independent media. Yet in a mediatised world, Web 2.0 technology has led to some activists engaging with both alternative and mainstream journalism.

Previously, the relationship between activists and the mainstream media has been tempestuous, partially because of their differing ideological approaches. The ideological foundation of many activist movements rejects forms of mainstream media and politics which involve working with institutions. The collectives and individuals of UK activist movements reject the formal, hierarchical organisation of politics, in preference to an ‘informal network and grass roots’ politics (Martell, 1994). Activist groups prefer instead to take direct action and adhere (if they adhere to anything) to a form of cultural politics (Martell, 1994). National newspaper journalists and broadcast news editors have been seen as representing the hegemonic position of major institutions up to and including national government, and, accordingly, protest movements have previously tended to reject them. Moreover, many protesters further rejected the mainstream media because of a continual framing of protest movements (1968 to present) in negative discourses (Halloran et al., 1971), in which activists are often labeled as aggressors, violent and deviant (Hall, 1968; Newlands, 2009). However, one-sidedness on the part of mainstream media has been matched by that of activists, whose relationship to journalists is often prejudiced by their outright dismissal of all formal structures.

Many collectives lack formal cohesion, partly because of the “social movement perspective [which] emphasises a lack of hierarchy and formal organisation” (Jordan and Maloney, 1997:47). The lack of cohesion often results in a conflict of practice between journalists and activists. Without a formal hierarchical structure there is no spokesperson, no single representative, no sound-bites or figurehead to speak on behalf of the activists. The autonomous nature of such endogenous groups means that no spokesperson or individual is representing the whole. There is no singular voice; instead, to quote Paul Kingsnorth’s book title, there are One No, Many Yeses (2004); and this kind of plurality does not lend itself to the exclusive and excluding idea which news reporters have been trained to identify in their stories. Given the incompatibility of their working methods, it’s perhaps not surprising that journalists have displayed a tendency to frame radical protest groups in unfavourable terms. Coupled with competing ideological pressures, the lack of engagement between the mainstream media and each cycle of protest formulated a media framework which relied on deviance and violence in representing radical protesters – at least, until recently. This historic framework has led to many collectives refusing to co-operate with journalists. However, in a mediatised society, today’s protest collectives understand that a conscious lack of engagement with professional journalists is detrimental to representation of their own activism.

Activating Promotional Culture

By engaging with professional journalistic practices, the internet and associated technologies offer a way of altering mainstream media representation of radical protests. Today, activists are utilising the internet and Web 2.0 technology to play the role of gate-keepers and produce their own news reports through citizen journalism. Since the late 1990s the internet has offered the opportunity to produce ‘alternative’ news sites, away from the mainstream media. The internet and Web 2.0 technology can circumvent traditional gate-keeping routes. Hutchins and Lester show that rather than challenging the protesters’ need for access to traditional forms of news media, the internet provides an opportunity to “bypass corporate, multinational media” and to “become another device in the strategic toolbox of the environmental movement for gaining mainstream news media access” (2009: 580-581). The rhizomatic nature of the internet and new technological developments in modes of communication, I suggest, opens up a gap between mainstream and alternative media forms. The correlation between the ‘non-hierarchical’ (Van Aelst and Walgrave, 2004) and the ‘hyper-textual architecture’ (Kahn and Kelner, 2003) of the internet and new social movements makes for a symbiotic relationship between new forms of communication. The most obvious example is Indy Media, an autonomous internet site where users are both producers and consumers of news and events. Websites such as Indy Media act as “communication nodes for political resistance on both local and international issues” (Downing, 2003:243).

From the early days of Indy Media (1999) until the mid-2000s, collectives have used the internet as their main source for publishing news stories. IMC reports and footage of the Seattle protests (1999) came from around “100 independent videographers [who] roamed the streets during the confrontations… and so were able to capture the reasons people were there in their own words… not the ‘violent anti-trade flat-earthers’ story that widely circulated in mainstream accounts” (Downing, 2003:251).

However, the recent combination of the internet, Web 2.0 technology, and the adoption of professional journalistic standards on the part of activists, suggests yet another field for activism alongside some possibilities for the future of journalism. As Martin Sims notes in the first set of Proof 2010, every generation seeks alternative ways of communicating. The favoured form of the new generation of activists may turn out to be not so much its own independent channels, separate from the mainstream, but the deployment of new media technology and the adoption of newly professionalised techniques in order to engage more closely with mainstream media outlets.

Climate Camp activists seem to have experienced a ‘bolt moment’ (to steal a term from another Proof-er, Richard Sharpe) during the anti-G8 protests (2005) at Gleneagles, Scotland. The activists moved away from only using the internet and flyers to communicate, and began inviting journalists to engage with activists. Activists felt that ignoring the mainstream media was a “luxury that we [activists] could not collectively afford” ” (CSC, 2005:322). The Camp[s] for Climate Action makes full use of social media by organising its protests through social networking sites, (Facebook, Twitter and SMS messages). At the Camp for Climate Action (2009) in Blackheath, South London, text messaging was used to co-ordinate a ‘swoop’. Prior to the camp, interested parties signed up to an emailing list and were requested to give their mobile phone numbers. Activists were encouraged to gather outside pre-determined companies around London, who were targeted for their environmental record. Activists were then told to await instructions for the location of the camp, via text messaging and the social networking site Twitter. Using mobile phones and a social networking site opened up the event, enabling anyone with an interest to be part of the ‘swoop’, either physically or at a virtual level. Not only interested individuals utilised Twitter, ‘Tweets’ weren’t just coming from camp participants; news organisations, local politicians, local residents and the Metropolitan Police were all using Twitter as a communication tool. The Guardian and The Times newspapers ran with live commentaries and blogs as events unfolded. The Sky News website had an overall view of different ‘Tweets’ on their front page.

The success of the ‘swoop’ shows how new technologies can offer a wider range of news sources. Technological developments and the internet are easily adaptable by both mainstream news agencies and protest movements. Television news footage of the Heathrow Climate Camp (August 2008) and the G20 Meltdown protest (April 2009) were sourced by the mainstream media from traditional pieces to camera and also mobile phone footage. Satellite news channels, Sky News and the BBC News reports were backed up with footage from protesters’ mobile phones or Twitter. Web 2.0 and the internet signal a major shift by giving the activists a media voice. This form of “tactical media – an imaginary exchange of concepts outbidding and overlaying each other” (Lovink, 2002:254) is a ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ means of communicating, which means that activists can flourish in the “public part of cyberspace” (ibid.). This position, between the state and the market, is currently demonstrated as the point where workshops on citizen journalism and editing mobile phone footage became prominent features of the Camp for Climate Action’s media tent. Environmental activists have attempted to change the representation of the movement by engaging with journalists and appropriating professional journalistic standards. The Camp for Climate Action marks an engagement with new technologies and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook as an alternative to other forms of social media (e.g., Indy Media). Activists have also adopted the PR stalwart of a ‘press centre’, but presented as a ‘media tent’. The Climate Camp also took on the role of gate-keepers by restricting the source of information, and by advising fellow activists and participants at the camp on how to produce citizen journalism that is likely to be picked up by the mainstream.

The most explicit representation of the shift on the activists’ part remains their leaflet recommending adoption of the inverted pyramid form in order to maximise the chances of radical content being aired in mainstream media. However, this shift comes at a price: it may also entail the loss of an autonomous, alternative form of journalism.

If the ‘media tent’ is designed to act as a form of gate-keeping and the camp participants are encouraged to follow the inverted pyramid, what happens to the autonomous nature of such protests which claim to adhere to the new social movement paradigm of endogenous, informal, non-hierarchical cultural politics?

I want to make it clear that I accept that protest groups have to somehow find a voice or, as suggested, mainstream journalists will continue to position environmental protest in a negative framework. However, the introduction of a series of spokespersons and commentators speaking on behalf of the entire activist movement necessarily negates the idea of the alternative, individualised nature of radical protest collectives. They are referred to as collectives precisely because they are a collection of like-minded people with similar interests, who reject relations with the mainstream media or political parties in favour of an autonomous and alternative approach. The media tent, whilst signalling a change in the relationship between activists and professional journalists, also negates the idea of alternative media, and even, perhaps, the very idea of the alternative that activists have been trying to mediate.

The media team were advising that “TV crews and press photographers are allowed in the camp between 10am and 7pm, so long as they have a friendly guide from the media team” (Campbell, 2009:12). Media spots can be arranged outside of these hours providing “[journalists] are accompanied on and off the site” (ibid). This form of gate-keeping focuses around a nine page handbook (ibid.), which covers the “key message and general guidelines” and advises activists on questions about “the Camp”, “the economy and workers”, “policing” and “solutions”. Activists, when speaking to journalists, are advised to “take control of the interview by bridging the key message”, which links political economy with climate change. The adoption of professional journalistic standards, through a media tent, or ‘press centre’, and the controlling of journalists’ movement around the camp, or ‘gate-keeping’, suggests there is no escape from promotional culture (‘spin’), and no alternative way of producing and disseminating media content. Although on one level I can see the logic underlying the convergence between radical activists and professional journalists, politically I find this problematic.

I agree that a media strategy is needed to try and prevent news reports of protest falling into a negative representation. There is a sense that Climate Camps, for example, must engage with the mainstream media in order to prevent negative reporting. Yet taking the gate-keeping approach can only be to withdraw from the new social movement paradigm of non-hierarchical, no spokesperson, no one voice speaking for all etc. Moreover, once a journalist leaves the camp, members of the media tent have no control over which ‘preferred meaning’ (Hall, 1990) is given by the journalist. It seems short-sighted to sacrifice the autonomy of protest for temporary, totally reversible gains in gate-keeping.

It is clear there has to be some form of voice to counter the negative discourse, and citizen journalism combined with professional standards gives this opportunity. However, activists lack the same resources as large media houses and so there is no guarantee the appropriation of professional journalistic standards will change the mainstream representation of activists’ movements. As the pamphlets say: ‘Stick to the Template’ (Campbell, 2009); not the template for DIY spin, but the principle of autonomous protest.

Maxine Newlands is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of East London. Her research focuses on media coverage of environmental activism, and she is an active participant in the environmental movement Critical Mass.

Bibliography

Burstein, P. (1995). “What do interest groups, social movements and political parties do? A synthesis”, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago.

Campbell, H. (2009). “Media Q&As: Camp for Climate Action Leaflet”. Available on-line at http://visionon.tv/mobile, accessed August 2009.

Downing, J. (2003). “The independent media centre movement and the anarchist social tradition”. In: Couldry, N. (2003). Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World,Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, pp.243-259.

Counterspin collective (2005) Media, Movement(s) and Public Image(s): Counterspininng in Scotland, in Harvie, D. Milburn, K. Trott, B. & Watts, D. (Eds) Shut them Down! The G8, Gleneagles 2005 and the movements of movements, Leeds, Dissent! And Autonomedia.

Grant, W. (2005). “Pressure politics: a politics of collective consumption?”, Parliamentary Affairs, 58(2), 366-379.

Halloran, J., Elliott, P. & Murdock, G. (1970). Demonstrations and Communication: A Case Study,Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.

Hall, S. (1968). “The hippies: an American moment”, occasional paper, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.

Hutchins, B. & Lester, B. (2009). “Power games: environmental protest, news media and the internet”, Media, Culture and Society, 31, 579-595.

Jordan, G. & Maloney, W. (1997). The Protest Business? Mobilising Campaign Groups, Manchester: University of Manchester.

Kahn, R. & Kellner, D. (2003). “Internet subcultures and oppositional politics”. In: Muggleton, D. & Weinzierl, R. (eds.) (2003). The Post-Subcultures Reader, London: Berg Publishers, pp.294-309.

Kingsnorth, P. (2003). One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement,New York: Free Press.

Lovink, G. (2002). Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture,Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Martell, L. (1994). Ecology and Society: an Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Newlands, M. (2009). Protesters as the new gatekeepers? SNF Research Project, Protest as Medium Culture conference paper, October 2009. Available online at http://www.protestmedia.net/cms/front_content.php

Van Aelst, P. & Walgrave, S. (2004). “New media, new movements? The role of the internet in shaping the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement”. In: W. van de Donk, B.D. Loader, P.G. Nixon & D. Rucht (eds.) (2004). Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and New Social Movements, London: Routledge, pp.97-122.

Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

David Harvey says of postmodernism: “The collapse of time horizons and the preoccupation with instantaneity have in part arisen through the contemporary emphasis in cultural production on events, spectacles, happenings, and media images.” (Harvey 1990: 59) And there can be few subjects more about events, spectacles, happenings, and media images than fashion and celebrities.

There are two iconic editors in fashion and celebrity: Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of the US edition of Vogue, and Mark Frith, ex-editor of Heat and now at Time Out.

Before getting into the details of Frith and Wintour’s lives as editors, let’s take a wider look at the role of the editor in what some have called the postmodern world. This from Roland Barthes, doyen of postmodernism: “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.” All is text, to be interpreted as we wish, rather than dictated by the Author. If the Author is dead, then, at least in the modern version of their relationship, so must be the Editor. Yet these two editors , as all editors of magazines do, spend a lot of their time in the act of selection, with behind that selection implicitly or explicitly, meaning and purpose. After all, the pages have to be in some order.

Take the selection of magazine cover content. Here, if ever there was one, is a hierarchy, constructed and maintained by the Editor throughout the process of deliberate selection and prioritisation in the attempt to appeal to the reader and to project values to the reader. Now, the most influential postmodernists say “the text” lacks ultimate meaning, since meaning is perpetually deferred; there can be no privileged interpretation of “the text”. But privileged interpretation there is in the day-to-day, issue-to-issue performance of the editor’s job, notably in the selection of the cover, in the order of the pages, in saying what’s in and what’s out of the publication.

For postmodernists, the meaning of “the text” has, in the past, been tyrannically centred on the author, their person, their history, their tastes and their passions. Frith and Wintour are such tyrants. Their persons, their histories, their tastes and their passions flow through their work. Day in and day out they did not say “I don’t know”; they have said “do it this way” and “this in and that out”.

Wintour has become a celebrity beyond the realm of fashion through the September Issue documentary and the feature film The Devil Wears Prada, said to be based on her personality. She has been interviewed widely. And when interviewed we see her person, her history, her taste and her passions, even if the passions are kept under a glacial demeanour. There is a US TV interview with her where she is asked if she makes all the decisions about the coverage in Vogue. Yes, she says and turns her head away from the camera. She is, I think, a fundamentally shy person who uses self-control to overcome her shyness. Self-control is not in the postmodernism handbook.

It’s all about surface

Yet, fashion is a classic postmodern subject: it’s all about surface. It’s not what you do; but what you select to put on your body. It’s not what you achieve; but how you present yourself. In the world according to fashion, as in the world according to postmodernism, there is no metanarrative giving consistent meaning to the entirety. But is not fashion a construction of the person through selection. And the postmodern stance is, surely: “how does the world construct me?” But fashion is construction of the self by conscious action. And that conscious action has a privileged interpretation of the world: fashion is, after all, a privileged interpretation of selection. This is right, that wrong. These go together; those do not. Watch Wintour in the documentary, making her selections: it is done with deliberation, with a certain knowledge (even though the criteria are rarely revealed).

Similarly, Frith had the know-how to turn round the ailing Heat, which he has written about in his memoir The Celeb Diaries. And celebrity is another, classic post-modern subject. It’s not who you are but who they are and how you relate to them. And, in Heat’s case, it is not aspirational as in OK! and Hello, but ironic. And celebrities are, by definition, known people. They are not on the margins but in the centre. This creates another contradiction in the stance of the editor. Postmodernism is supposed to be concerned with the margins, not restricted to known quantities. Allegedly, the known is blasé, is already selected for us, carries too much of a hierarchy for us to contemplate in a postmodern world which rejects hierarchy. Yet the world of Heat and other such magazines depends on the identification of those who are celebrities because they are known, and again on the identification of those A-list celebs who are more widely known than the others.

Wintour welds the two subjects of fashion and celebrity together by putting celebrities on the cover of Vogue. She gets clothes from labels onto the backs of celebs, into Vogue and into the other publications covering celebs as they wear these clothes. Here she is working with two hierarchies at the same time: the celebrity hierarchy and the fashion hierarchy. This is indeed a privileged interpretation of the world. She knows who is B-list and who is on the A-list. And she’s not using the B-list for her covers.

Wintour claims to laud women for what they’ve accomplished. Neither, she says, does she exploit women: it’s all about ambition not insecurity. They’ve accomplished something, these women, inferring a set of criteria for what should be achieved. There never was a more modernist statement.

Missing

Yet what’s missing from Vogue is what we would expect to be missing from a postmodern publication. There is no actual criticism of designers: we are not told why some people are not in the magazine; they are just left out. The reason for the hierarchy, the criteria which drive it, are not shown: why this and not that is not discussed, just assumed. And there’s no examination of the fashion scene; there’s no debate about the role of fashion or of the working conditions of the thousands who toil to make the fashion statements on our backs. That would be too much like a metanarrative for it to be told in the pages of Vogue. There’s just the fashion. The statement. The image. The symbol. “The text”.

But at the centre of Vogue and Wintour’s role there is yet another contradiction which further unpicks the postmodernist stance. This is, after all, “high” fashion. It is not public fashion available to all. There can be no discussion of the real prices of this fashion, so there is no need to raise the issue. Yet the focus is on high fashion. And this high fashion is a matter of taste, not only of choice and spending power. So the selection is again hierarchical.

Rubble of taste

Postmodernism is built on the rubble of modernism: the rubble of a society in which taste was an arbiter. The rubble of a society in which things could be known, meanings transmitted with authority, struggles undertaken to make the world meaningful, even in its chaos. Postmodernism surely lauds the lack of taste; it undermines the role of an elite which will state what taste is for the rest of us.

Yet this is precisely Wintour’s role: to tell the rest of us what taste is. Not by revealing the criteria but by revealing her selection; not to tell us the criteria of taste, only to choose by a set of criteria which are not revealed to the rest of us. Just look at the September Issue documentary. Can you discern her criteria for choosing one fashion item over another? I don’t doubt her taste: she would not be able to edit for so long such as successful magazine without taste. But what are the criteria? They are shielded from us all. We would have to look at all of her decisions to discern what her criteria are, and even then we may get it wrong.

Some wrong and some right

In short, unlike the idea of the postmodern world where all is relative, in the Vogue world all is not equal. Some decisions about fashion are wrong and some are right. It’s Anna Wintour’s job to decide which is which.

Harvey has something to say about the role of celebrity: “The acquisition of an image becomes the presentation of self in individual identity, self-realisation and meaning.” (Harvey 1990: 288) A central part of this is a focus on celebrity, the self-realisation of others which informs our self realisation.

It is revealing that Frith had chosen his top 10 moments as editor of Heat. That, if you missed the point, is a hierarchy again. These top 10 are recorded in an interview for The Mirror ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2008/09/03/video-exclusive-ex-heat-editor-mark-frith-reveals-all-about-victoria-beckham-george-michael-elton-john-more-115875-20722734/) Although we should not judge Frith’s statements about these events at face value: he is, after all, a postmodernist.

Literally

When he says that Posh and Beck’s wedding in July 1999 was “A reality wedding…people felt part of it”, we need to understand that this fantasy event was far from reality and we were decidedly excluded on the grounds that more money could be made by the happy couple through selective coverage. This is a classic postmodern method: the inversion of binaries. Cool is hot; hot is cool. What was at the centre shall be put on the margins, and what on the margins at the centre. So literal interpretation is shed in favour of statements whose meanings are perpetually deferred. When Frith later says that the alleged affair between Becks and Rebecca Loos was “literally what everybody was talking about in Britain”, again we should not take that literally. But he does mean it, there’s the rub. In his world, everybody was talking about the affair. He has, in the postmodern stance, his own world. In the postmodern stance, there is not a singular world out there to be described, grappled with and changed.

Again and again in Frith’s comments about the top 10 events there are statements which have to be taken as postmodern. When two celebrities started to get interested in each other in I’m a celebrity… in 2003 he says the impact of that was “to be there when that was happening.” But he was not there. He was watching TV. Such is the binary nature of postmodernism: to be there is to watch it on a TV screen while not being there.

Attached, involved and beholden

As Frith describes his top 10 he uses the same types of phrases repeatedly: to be there, to be involved, to be empowered, and to be excited. Here is his central contradiction: postmodernism is about detachment and irony. The postmodern world does not have an ultimate meaning; there is no tyranny of choice; the world constructs us and not the other way around; there is no known. And yet he is attached, wants to be involved and is, clearly, beholden to his subjects. He, in short, takes a modernist position with purpose, with choice, and with the construction of the known which he presented to us in the pages of Heat.

Yes, life is a spectacle, a set of actions with no ultimate meaning, the postmodernists would say. So Frith shows us the spectacle. Yet, ruinous to his postmodern position, he is The Spectator, the selector, the person pointing to what the rest of us should take notice of – in other words, a reincarnation of Addison and Steele, the editors who founded the Spectator magazine at the onset of modern times (1711).

It seems that these two iconic, postmodern editors can’t get away from modernism. Just look at the term “postmodernism”. Its advocates could not come up with a term of their own which does not include the very stance they wished to destroy: modernism.

Yet these editors are postmodern in that they are not required to resolve, or even acknowledge such contradictions as such. That would be a modernist stance. That would involve the work of grappling with contradictions and, at the very least, papering over them. Frith and Wintour really are postmodern in that all they have to do is operate with such contradictions rather than struggle to resolve them or make them explicit. The rest of us need to recognise their skill in doing this, at the very least. It is questionable how much any of us are currently capable of engaging with such contradictions in a less reactive, more pro-active manner.

Richard Sharpe is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of East London, and a partner in ETC, the editorial training consultants.

Bibliography

Harvey, David (1990) The Condition of Post-Modernity, Oxford: Blackwell

Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

According to Esquire editor Harold Hayes, New Journalism is really ‘literary journalism’ which dates back to the early twentieth century, but ‘New Journalism’ was the name that caught on in the 1960s (Buettler, 1984). Hartsock (1999: 433) lists the various names which have been used for the form besides New Journalism, including literary journalism, literary nonfiction, creative nonfiction. Hartsock also suggests that the multiplicity of terms for this form indicates the ‘fluid nature of its boundaries’. Perhaps the main reason why the term ‘New Journalism’ caught on was its use of the word ‘new’ which, as Bourdieu (1993: 104) claims in his theory of cultural power, is a potent tool in the struggle against established forces.

Connery (1992: 4) defines this ‘genre’ as writing that falls between the traditional categories of fiction and journalism. However, Hartsock (2001: 17) seems to be more perceptive about the inability of the existing modernist categories to define the ‘narrative spectrum’ of the form since it not only blurs the line between the two genres mentioned by Connery, but also challenges the appearance of unity in the existing ideologies of practice within those literary genres, thus upsetting their stability and authority.

Hartsock (1999: 433) also describes it as ‘epistemologically fluid’ – like the early novel, a ‘shifting form’ which attempts to mirror a changing reality that combines ‘the interplay of consciousness’ and phenomenal experience. The parallel with early novels, which became the monumental literary creatures that New Journalism claimed to have displaced (Wolfe 1973: 41), is interesting, since it illustrates the ongoing struggle for power between new forms of writing, which dislodge the established forces and then subsequently struggle to preserve their own status quo, which still newer forces try again to displace.

‘New Journalism’, New Authority

It is important to acknowledge the importance of Tom Wolfe’s 1973 anthology, The New Journalism, and to recognise it as a serious claim to legitimacy on behalf of a form of writing which had not been sanctioned by the modernist literary authorities. Wolfe’s declaration that a new form was born in the 1960s which dethroned all other forms and genres (Wolfe and Johnson, 1973: 15), became the rallying cry of its many advocates. Daniel Swift ( 2005) and Ted Conover (Boynton, 2005: 7) both acknowledge that Wolfe’s anthology The New Journalism gave a vocabulary to the methods and techniques practised by the writers of this new form: saturation reporting, attention to detail and status, etc.

Thomas Connery (1992: 3) also surmises that Wolfe’s definition of the new form acted as a departure point for writers like James Murphy, John Hollowell, Ronald Weber and Norman Sims, who expanded and altered it, but stayed within the confines of Wolfe’s major claims about the style, methods and potential of the form. In the fierce contention which exists today as to which texts constitute ‘New Journalism’, and thus which writers can be labelled ‘New Journalists’, most critics first transcribe the list of writers drawn up by Wolfe, albeit extending the list to include some earlier writers also. Furthermore, if this identifies Wolfe’s anthology as the rallying point for advocates, it also suggests that it was the definitive list which defenders of the previous hierarchy felt obliged to respond to.

Robert Boynton, Nicholaus Mills, Norman Sims, Edd Applegate, Arthur Kaul, Paul Many and even Esquire’s editor during ‘New Journalism’s’ peak years, Harold Hayes, are among the many authors who have disputed Wolfe’s claim that the form really was new. Instead they have attempted to show that New Journalism has historical antecedents or can be tied to conventional journalism or literary historiography, thereby securing the continuity of literary authority and safeguarding it from those whose interests lie in rupturing it. Theirs is an attempt to salvage the established literary traditions which Wolfe’s assertion poses a threat to. As Hartsock (2001: 17) points out, ‘the assertion of ‘‘newness’’ could only tend to reduce the earlier versions to mere antecedents and precursors and not the real thing’.

Literary Journalism and the Novel

The novel and literary journalism (or New Journalism) are equally committed to phenomenal reality and the capacity of the author to capture it and portray it in prose. Indeed, literary journalism seems to be a response to an issue raised by the novel in the nineteenth century, namely, the correspondence between literary illustration and the reality that it imitates (Watt and Carnochan, 2001: 11). This supports Wolfe’s rationale for New Journalism as the rightful successor to the novel, which he claims was in a ‘retrograde state’; stagnant for over half a century (cited in Beikhman, 1973: 57).

Both these literary forms also share a deeper, functional similarity. Like narrative literary journalism, the novel dethroned the dominant literary mode preceding it – the literary traditionalism of the heroic epics and legends, which were formulaic and stagnant. Wolfe (1973: 42) mentions ‘the similarity between the early days of the novel and the early days of the New Journalism’: in both instances a group of writers from a genre regarded as Lower Class who were ‘in love with realism for its own sake’, came and sacked the existing literary power structures. Both the journalistic tradition and the novel grew out of epistemic discontinuity which favoured the ‘new’ and the ‘real’ (Rosenberg, 1959, as cited by Carey, 2007: 6). In turn, literary journalism blurs the line again between ‘factual fiction’ and ‘fictional fact’, which, according to Carey (2007: 7), was drawn to separate reporting from social commentary in the advent of realist writing. However, literary journalism rebelled against the objective ideals of modern journalism, and this ties it even closer to the novel.

Status Anxiety

Wolfe (1973: 39), in the introduction to his anthology, celebrates the fact that the new writers are ‘ignoring literary class lines’, hence giving rise to ‘status panic’ in the field. This accounts for the criticisms he had been receiving from both journalistic and literary quarters.

The political divide between the different classes of writers in the 1960s was likened by Wolfe (1973: 39) to the eighteenth century class structure. By the early twentieth century, novelists reigned supreme in the literary field, according to Wolfe. They were followed in the status hierarchy by the literary essayists or critics, whose analytical insights defended the legitimacy of the more ‘creative’, higher class of novelists. Journalists, with their lack of ‘creative’ or subjective license, make up the lowest rung in Wolfe’s rendering of the status hierarchy in the literary field. In his eyes, the feature writers among whom ‘New Journalism’ originated, were even further down the literary scale.

This hierarchy has since been reversed, according to Lewis (n.d., as cited by Boynton, 2005: xii) who says that: ‘Whereas the journalists once felt humbled by the novel, we now live in an age in which the novelist lives in a state of anxiety about nonfiction.’ The reversal of fortunes may have come about because news has become the ‘de facto literature of our times’, which is used by many people for distraction and entertainment as well as information (Hanson, 1997, as cited by Knobloch, et al., 2004: 282).

Macleish (1992: 11) credits ‘literary journalism’ for this accomplishment, claiming that the two ‘separate purposes’ which differentiate ‘poetry’ (literature) and ‘journalism’ are merged by this form. Wolfe (1973: 40) had already suggested that status panic was brought on by the advent of a new form of writing which has taken over the ‘techniques of the novelists’, ‘the insights of the men of letters’, and combined them with investigative reporting; hence the novelists and critics displaced by it were emphatic in denying legitimacy to the new form.

This, however, does not explain why the ‘newspaper people were upset’ (Wolfe, 1973: 39). It’s not as if ‘New Journalism’ threatened their literary status, since they hardly had any. But perhaps by its very relationship with literature, already disputed by the men of letters, New Journalism also undermined the position of journalism as a decidedly non-literary activity, and thus prompted a further dispute with those who identified their journalism, and themselves as journalists, in this non-literary way.

Fazakis (2006: 6) analyses the numerous representations of journalistic ideology and practice which emerged during the Malcolm-Masson trials in 1984, and offered ‘competing definitions of what journalism is and what journalists do.’ She observes that although the journalists univocally talked about journalism as a homogenous and unified field, the image of the field which emerged was not that of a ‘unified static entity with fixed borders’ but ‘composed of several “journalisms”… in which the authority to define what journalism is and what journalists do is at stake’ (Fazakis, 2006: 11).

The ‘agreed upon rules’ (Fazakis, 2006: 11) which helped journalists cohere as a group, were based on the ideology of objectivity (Schudson, 2001: 151). Accordingly, undermining objectivity as the norm in journalism, would threaten the existence of the professional group as a whole. Hence, any action which resulted in the questioning or rejection of the objective ideal would have been opposed by those in the group with an interest in preserving it as the norm.

Feature-writing had been positioned at the lower end of the journalistic field due to its distance from the objective ideal, from which the profession derived its legitimacy. While Wolfe praised feature-writing, because it gave ‘a man a certain amount of room in which to write’ (Wolfe, 1973: 18), thus allowing the subjective opinions and views of the writer to creep in, for the same reason many journalists derided it as ‘soft news’. If Wolfe’s claim that the ‘New Journalists’, the former feature writers, with their ‘new’ form of writing, had ‘dethroned’ the highest echelons of literary power, i.e. the novelists, is to be taken seriously, then such a state of affairs, in which low-status journalists were celebrating the role of the subjective in news writing, and their own success in raising the status of the subjective, will also have threatened the ‘hard news’ group whose power in the journalistic field depended on the authority of the objective norm. This is what prompted the ‘newspaper men’ to oppose the legitimacy claim of the ‘New Journalists’, just as vehemently as the literary types.

Epistemological Gap

Boynton (2005: xxix) observes that ‘we are currently experiencing the fascination with “true stories”’, which he says is ‘common during the times of unrest and turmoil’. Hartsock (2001: 12) refers to the ‘unrest and turmoil’ as resulting from an epistemological crisis, beginning in the 1890s, which was ‘fuelled by a cultural need to know and understand the real world’ through prose (Connery, 1992, as cited by Hartsock, 2001: 12). As shown above, in the nineteenth century there was a rift between (fictional) novels and (facts-based) journalism, which later resulted in the rise of ‘literary journalism’. However, Hartsock (2001: 12) suggests that there was also a rift in the journalistic tradition itself, which proved a further factor in the subsequent development of this form.

The rift within the ranks of journalists, some of whom were already breaking away from the unified image of an objective ideal, was itself a response to the ‘objectification of news’ (Hartsock, 2001: 12). In short, those disadvantaged by the objective ideal had reason to object to it; and having lodged their objections, they tended to turn to more literary forms. Thus, just as the objective ideal reached its highest level of influence in America, so the USA also played host to the ensuing, literary rebellion.

Schudson (2001, 2005: 97) traces the evolution of the objectivity norm and its status as journalism’s ruling ideology from the 1890s when American newspapers were in revolt against control by political parties. The need for occupational independence and identity intensified as journalists began to emerge as a group with ‘prevalent patterns of behaviour’ and unique professional practices such as the interview (Schudson, 2001: 157). The significance of particular practices associated with journalists – the ‘digging’, ‘hustling’ and ‘low life legwork’, as Wolfe (1973: 40) terms them, is discernible in the tendency to attach the legitimacy and authority of journalism to any form of writing which employs them. This tendency can be observed in the New Journalists’ attempt to claim that their writing is a representation of phenomenal reality (Wolfe: 1973: 43), based on verifiable facts; moreover that this basis it itself verified by the fact that the writers employed journalistic tools and techniques to get their stories. The potency of this claim, and the power accrued in it by reference to journalistic techniques, prompted critics like Dwight Macdonald (as cited in Harvey, 1994), to reverse this powerful flow of associations, and to name New Journalism ‘parajournalism’ or a ‘bastard form’ which only exploits the ‘factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction’ in a spurious attempt to claim legitimacy.

In Europe, by contrast, journalism did not have so many partisan political ties from which to distinguish itself. Journalism evolved from the same melting pot of eighteenth century realist writing from which the novel also emerged; and the isolation of factuality in prose came about only as a result of instrumental measures such as the introduction of libel laws (Carey, 2007: 7). The French word ‘nouvelle’, encompassing both the novel and journalism (Carey, 2007: 7), indicates the shared origins and joint legacy of these two forms. Similarly, European journalism continues to be oriented towards commentary and interpretation and has strong ties to literature, forming something of a ‘secondary sub-brand of a much more prestigious literary profession’ (Schudson, 2005: 101). Since European journalism was not framed as the antithesis of literature, as was the case in the USA, in Europe the coming of New Journalism did not necessitate the overthrown of the literary status quo. Conversely, perhaps its advent has not been the major event that it was in America, where it entailed closure of an important epistemic rift.

Subjectivity in the Postmodern News Environment

Whereas the modernist view of the world considered it possible to determine the nature of reality by the scientific method of detached observation, the development of quantum physics and the introduction of the uncertainty principle by Heisenberg in 1925, together led to a shift from scientific belief in the progressive closure of uncertainty and ambiguity, to belief in the indeterminate nature of reality (Hartsock, 1999: 443). Heisenberg (1958, as cited by Hartsock, 1999: 441) comments on the subjective nature of all types of observation, saying: ‘what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our methods of questioning’. This raises doubts about the validity of established, modernist methods of journalism, which do not acknowledge the subjective nature of all observations, up to and including professional reporting,

As essential as it once was for journalists to assume a neutral voice, more recently, the neutral, omniscient voice of the objective ideal has come to be distrusted (Buettler, 1984). Expressing or recognising this distrust is now as obligatory as ‘objectivism’ once was. Moreover, since articles written in the modernist, pyramid style exhibit neutral modal shading, i.e. they consist only of physical description not interrupted by subjective interpretation or evaluation by the narrator, categorical assertions are typical of these texts (Simpson, 2004:127). In today’s climate, however, to write as if one’s writing is neutral, is sufficient to show that the writer is anything but. Instead, there is widespread scepticism towards any theory of practices which does not consider the social conditions of the practices under ‘objective’ observation (Bourdieu, 1990: 33), and equally widespread suspicion that any such ‘independence’ is really an institutional voice steeped in specific ideologies which benefit the news industry.

Narrative literary journalism, says Berger (1982, as cited in Hartsock, 1999: 440), is an attempt to re-establish the fundamentally subjective relationship between ‘teller, listener, protagonist’. This, according to Bourdieu (1990: 33), is the issue objectivism ignores whenever it claims to operate in the break between observer and society.

Besides the needs of the audience, what pushed subjectivity to the forefront of a field previously ruled by objectivity norms, were the concerns of the professionals working in it. They found themselves reduced by the objectivity ideal to mere ‘voyeurs with no sense of participation in life’ (Knoblauch, n.d., as cited by Buettler, 1984). Fazakis’ (2006: 14, 18), in describing the professional the Malcom-Masson case, mentions that that the journalists who first vehemently opposed Malcolm’s methods (compression and conversion of spoken discourse from interviews into readable text), and denied that these were standard journalistic practices, later shifted their support to Malcolm. She says they did this because they did not ‘want to be reduced to machines, mechanically reproducing reality.’

The objectivity ideal had forced journalists to seek prestige in the field by adhering to it. Or, in the case of those ‘feature writers’ as described by Wolfe (1973: 18), they were granted (limited) freedom to be subjective and interpretive, but only if they withdrew any claim to the authority of the field, which was inextricably tied in with objectivity. As the influence of the objectivity ideal has waned, however, so more journalists have been attracted to the subjective, and intrigued, to say the least, by forms in which it finds expression. Hence even the most hardened ‘newsmen’ have moved towards styles of writing which allow them to be central to their own writing, and to gain legitimacy from their personalities rather than the constricted ideology of objectivism.

Objectivism also evolved as a form of Weberian discipline ‘to keep the lowly reporters in check’. It was a means through which the older journalists exalted themselves by passing onto the younger members of the fold an ethic which was self celebratory. The younger journalists, who were kept under control by the journalistic canon and the prescriptive norms devised by their predecessors, sought to break free by devising a new set of norms based on subjectivity. Thus the New Journalists’ techniques, according to Wolfe (1973: 46), were not based on any established journalistic theory, but discovered by ‘instinct’ and ‘trial and error’.

New Journalism as Alternative Norm

Swift (2005) claims that the early writers of the new form had ‘insufficient shared interests to cohere as a group’. Wolfe’s anthology was successful in providing a shared vocabulary that encompassed the methods practised by the dispersed writers of the new form. This might be seen as an attempt to foster horizontal solidarity and group identity.

Schudson (2001: 152) discusses the acceptance of objectivity as a norm which thereby succeeded in cohering and disciplining a new occupational group, namely, journalists in America. Similarly, Wolfe’s anthology might be seen as an effort to formalise a new norm that was distinctively different from the previously established one.

The inverted pyramid style has been characteristic of mainstream American journalism for more than 100 years. It replaced the narrative form in the second half of the nineteenth century. As recently as five years ago, it was still the most commonly used format in American newspapers (Yaros, 2006: 287). It arranges information on the basis of relative importance in the story, thus letting the writer rank the information in the article in order of importance, and introducing writer’s (or rather institutional) news-value judgements into otherwise ‘neutral’ language. The accompanying rationale for the inverted pyramid emphasises its usefulness in offering the reader quick access to the ‘more important’ facts.

Yet Yaros (2006: 287) believes that this arrangement of news is outdated. Even though the form aids speedy writing (as well as quick reading) by providing the means to ‘critical closure’ (Hartsock, 1999: 438), it seems it is failing to please new generations of news consumers. The audience’s consumption patterns have been moving more in the direction of narrative based literary forms, prompting newspapers, facing a widening rage of competitors, to turn towards this kind of writing. Harvey suggests that they started to move in this direction as far back as the middle of the twentieth century (Harvey, 1994), around the time that New Journalism made its debut.

Knobloch et al. (2004) have analysed the effects of linear, reversal and inverted discourse structures on the suspense, curiosity and reading enjoyment levels of audiences, using Brewer and Lichtenstein’s (1981, 1982, cited by Knobloch et al, 2004: 262) structural affect theory. This theory proposes that certain discourse structures lead to ‘affective reactions’, such as suspense or curiosity, which are engendered while the reader is following the narrative. The Knobloch study revealed that linear type narratives evoked more suspense; reversal types engendered maximum curiosity; and the reading enjoyment levels in both linear and reversal types were higher than those for the inverted pyramid style, regardless of whether the content of the reading material was factual or fictional.

It seems that we have witnessed the return of narrative journalism, with all its incipient, literary tendencies, during the latter half of the twentieth century; moreover, that this development corresponds to the decline of objectivism and the gradual demise of the inverted pyramid which has been its preferred form. In contrast to the difficult, angular shape of the pyramid story, Yaros (2006: 287) suggests that the narrative structure enables an audience with ‘low levels of (background) knowledge’ to process meanings more effectively. It is surely the case that narrative form communicates information better, and is suited to the complex information demands of the postmodern society.

Another factor in the renewal of narrative must have been the epistemic break brought about by the breakdown of modernist authorities and institutions – a rupture of comparable significance to the watershed which occurred during the late nineteenth century when modernist structures established themselves in epistemology, just as they also did in art, architecture and politics.

Thus New Journalism now emerges not only as a short-lived episode; instead we should recognise it as a signpost to the postmodern and a signal of our own reconnection to the continuum of narrative forms.

Maitrayee Basu is a postgraduate student of Culture and Society at the LSE. She gained her first degree at the University of Middlesex in Dubai.

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Proof 2010: Journalists Defending Journalism
Set 2, September 2010 Politics, Postmodern Journalism, and the Public

The consumption of commercially produced culture is still relatively low in Brazil; but it is growing fast. The Brazilian magazine market has been expanding since 2005. Prompted by rising living standards, national and international publishers have invested in existing titles and created new ones. While the magazine industry is facing a decline in circulation and advertising revenue in consolidated markets as the United States, in Brazil the sector is expected to grow further, with new readers coming into the domestic market and new content enabling them to explore a widening range of interests.

New consumers of information

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is widely known in Brazil by the metaphors he uses to explain almost everything. In October 2008, for instance, he used metaphors to play down the impact of global financial crisis on the Brazilian economy: “There in the U.S., it is a tsunami; here, if it arrives, it will be such a small wave that I will not be able to surf it”. This statement, and other, similarly optimistic declarations, provoked widespread outrage among Brazilian voters. Yet in 2009 Brazil did emerge as the eighth largest economy in the world, and its accelerated economic growth is expected to continue into the next decades. According to a study released in January 2010 by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, auditing supremo to the corporate sector, Brazil is likely to become the fifth biggest global economy by 2025.

The consistently strong performance of the domestic economy has contributed to large-scale upward mobility, with 25 million Brazilians entering the middle class between 2002 and 2008, acccording to the Ministry of Finance. The definition of ‘middle class’ is moot, but in any case more people now have some money left to spend on luxury items such as magazines. Issued by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Culture In Numbers: the Cultural Statistics Yearbook 2009, suggests that Brazilians put cultural goods at No 6 in their list of spending priorities, after food, shelter, clothing, health and transportation. Meanwhile, social policies such as “Bolsa Família” (a federal income transfer program to poor families) has helped to increase literacy rates. The new mass of (literate) consumers is already showing its commercial potential.

According to the latest available data from Instituto Verificador de Circulação (IVC, the institute which verifies the circulation of newspapers and magazines in Brazil), magazine circulation has been rising since 2005. In the first quarter of 2009, it increased by 4.1%, in comparison to the same period in 2008. Between 2000 to 2008, the number of periodical publications jumped from 586 to 2,255, due to the emergence of both broad-based popular titles and specialist titles in newly emerging market segments such as food, tourism and men’s health. At the moment when magazine circulation in the United States was reported to have fallen 2.3% in the first half of 2010 (the second consecutive year of overall decline), the Brazilian media reported a joint venture between the publishing houses Globo, from Brazil, and Condé Nast, from the USA. The new company, named Edições Globo-Condé Nast, will launch Condé Nast titles in Brazil. At the press launch Jonathan Newhouse, chairman of Condé Nast International, clearly relished the opportunities for expansion in what is now the largest magazine market in Latin America: “Globo is the leading media company in South America….it is the ideal partner for Condé Nast, which aims to expand its activities in this key market.”

Another factor which works to the advantage of print magazines, is that only a third of the population has internet access, according to the latest available data. While in the USA the web is already the main source of information, in Brazil that position continues to be occupied by television. As a print journalist, countless times I’ve had editors say “Oh, it doesn’t matter, nobody saw that”, when telling me to write an article very similar to a piece I’ve already read online. Though this is a source of frustration to journalists, as far as print publishers are concerned, the relative absence of the internet as a competing information source, is cause for celebration. Publishing models that have already run their course or are currently declining in the USA still work in Brazil.

Similarly, print magazines do not face much competition here from reading devices like Kindle (Amazon) or iPad (Apple). While it is much harder to keep paper in circulation wherever many people have easy access to these gadgets, taxes make such devices far more expensive in Brazil. The same Kindle on sale for 139 dollars at Amazon costs about three times more in my country.

Brazilians still read very little — but love to read gossip

The circulation of celebrity news magazines is dropping in the United States, but a “new” title has just been released in Brazil, the Spanish Hola! I say “new”, because in 1999, more than a decade ago, Hola! prompted the launch of one of the most popular magazines in Brazil, Caras (average circulation: 312,000). The two publications are very similar. Altogether, there are five popular celebrity magazines. “If the demand now exists, it must be supplied with appropriate products, publications with popular appeal”, says Pedro Silva Martins, CEO of Instituto Verificador de Circulação. “Popular appeal” means both a simpler approach to subjects and also specific matters, such as the life of celebrities (or housekeeping, or the curative power of plants).

Although things are getting better, Brazilians still read very little, not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality. A review released in 2009 by the Brazilian Book Chamber showed that expenditure on reading takes up 0.5% of family income, while spending on TV, video, music and computers amounts to 2% of the average household budget. When spending on print, however, Brazilians prefer magazines to newspapers and non-didactic books. Families spend, on average, 42 reais (around 24 dollars) on magazines per year; on newspapers, 17 reais (9 dollars); on non-didactic books, only 11 reais (6 dollars). Now that more people have more money to spend on “superfluous things” as culture, they look for publications which satisfy their specific needs. That is why the “popular megazines” are best-sellers in Brazil. Among the top ten weekly titles, six are “popular” (2009).

Weekly news magazines are also tracing an upward curve. Although not originally intended for the more “popular” reader, they are now assuming a more popular “tone”. The three main titles, Veja, Época and IstoÉ are full of the so-called lifestyle stories — some of then are really pieces of self-help. At least, that is how I would define a cover story headlined “How to achieve inner peace”.

Published by Editora Abril, Veja is the third largest weekly news magazine in the world. It is also the largest in Brazil, with an average circulation of more than one million copies. Época is a relatively new publication: it was launched in 1998, along the lines of the German Focus. Published by Editora Globo, it benefits from being part of Organizações Globo (the largest media conglomerate in Latin America), and is now overtaking Istoé to become the nearest competitor to Veja. With an average circulation of 417, 000, it is often sent as a “gift” to the subscribers of the newspaper O Globo (also part of Organizações Globo). Boosted by this extra distribution, although it comes only third in sales (averaging 338,000), IstoÉ is considered the second-most influential magazine in the country, immediately after Veja.

Founded less than a decade apart (Veja in 1968, and IstoÉ in 1976), both publications became famous for their political coverage, with scoops that helped to bring down, for example, President Fernando Collor de Mello, impeached in 1992. Since the launch of Época, however, their focus has begun to shift. Época was the first to offer a very colorful summary of the main topics of the week. Now, all three of them do that — even though their respective publishers claim they provide depth alongside succinct analysis. Nowadays scoops and comprehensive, investigative stories are exceptions. Many articles are only a page long, and surveys show that these pieces have the largest readership. Besides, the three magazines were recently redesigned in order to guarantee a more pleasant, less demanding experience for the reader. In short, the photos are bigger and the text, shorter. The pages have more white space, so that the reader can “breathe”.

Shorter, Better?

There has been considerable debate about the ongoing changes in the news weekly magazines and their impact on the quality of journalism. “An article does not need to be long to be good. We can indeed provide reliable information in one page. We deliver the same content, but without much details”, claims Carlos José Marques, editorial director of IstoÉ, which hits the newsstands every Saturday, at the same time as Veja and Época. The intention is to give readers the opportunity to get updated with the most relevant facts during the weekend, when people have more free time. For this same reason, weekly news magazines may seem more appealing to someone who cannot afford (and/or is not willing to have) multiple sources of quality information (TV is generally considered superficial).

Although only one third of the population currently has access to the internet, Brazilians are already demanding more specialized information, in contrast to the general-knowledge provided by the news and popular magazines. Decoration, running, travelling, food, fashion – these are some of the interests that the “new middle class” is developing and, as a consequence, demanding information about. Another relevant example is the “teen” niche. One such teen-oriented title is Gloss, published by Editora Abril. The magazine was released in 2007 and has already reached a circulation of more than 140,000 copies per month. The average circulation of such titles increased by 33% in first quarter of 2009, and the trend is expected to continue.

Conclusion: Promising Future

The demand for special-interest titles will surely rise further, in line with socio-economic growth. After facing hard times in the first half of this decade, media companies are now financially healthy and eager to take opportunities, by themselves or in partnership with international players. There is still much money to be made from magazine content that fills newly identified gaps in the supply of entertainment and information. In the long-term, however, Brazilian publishers might face problems and challenges related to increasing internet usage, as already experienced by the American magazine industry.

Adriana Prado is a Brazilian journalist and writer. She plans to come to London in September 2011 to enrol on the MA Magazines programme at the University of East London.

dricaprado@gmail.com