MagBlog

Many years ago the journalism department I work in was visited by two Norwegian media academics. They were looking for partners in a scheme to set up a “neutral” journalism school in the Balkans, believing fractures in that region’s social fabric could be mended with a trusted news provider.

Everything was going swimmingly until I made the mistake of telling them I taught magazine journalism. “Oh, magazines”, they said dismissively and then literally turned their backs on me to concentrate on what the newspaper guys, the real journalists, had to say.

Those two Norwegians came to mind during Ibrahim Nehme’s talk at Modern Magazine 2015. Nehme is a founder/editor of The Outpost, a Beirut-based magazine established in the fallout from the Arab Spring to capture the energy and hopes of young people in the Middle East. Its mission is "to ignite a socio-cultural renaissance in the Arab world through inspiring its readers to explore a world of possibilities". To achieve this it uses narratives to elevate the places in which its readers live; telling stories to make a difference and aiming to inspire others. Nehme finished his presentation by saying, "To move to a better future we need to start telling better stories ... when we make the magazine we are making a prototype for the future."

In the generously furnished goodie bag given to ModMag15’s delegates there was another magazine that reminded me of those Nordic scoffers – the second issue of Weapons Of Reason. This partwork (there will only be eight issues) states its mission very clearly – it's "A magazine to turn knowledge into action". Each issue discusses and analyses one of the planet’s most complex and challenging problems in an attempt to "understand and articulate the interconnected global issues shaping our world" using longform storytelling, illustration and striking data visualisations.

The first intake of students to Cardiff University's pioneering MBA in Media Management, a collaboration between the Business and Journalism schools, has arrived – from Pakistan, USA, India and China.

Here they are, waiting eagerly for the first session of the Managing Creative Digital & Social Media module.



Clearly the module will be about more than just magazines, but the new world of multimedia, multimodal magazines provides a really useful grounding – and some real-life problems that a big UK publisher has asked us to help solve will provide excellent project topics.

After a summer of looking like this


The Cardiff MagLab has now been populated by a new intake of keen young people who will be part the future of the magazine industry and it looks like this


Let the good times roll!

Quality of content, says Jay Lauf, is the “third filter” for online content, after search and word of mouth.

Lauf has the credentials to make such a statement – he’s publisher of The Atlantic, the American magazine that specializes in long form, thought-provoking features, and architect of that title's online resurgence. Quoted in Ian Burrell’s piece for the Independent, Lauf says, “There are too many choices and quality outlets are becoming a filter.”

I would like to think he’s right and that this process is a “natural” factor in consumer choice as expressed in a capitalist economic system, though it would take a deal more research to stand up my half baked hunch (pace Stephen Johnson). Take the automobile industry as an example. In the very early days both demand and supply were limited – cars were massively expensive and few people were making them (parallel: not everyone had internet access and few publishers were online).

Then came an initial boom with a lot more manufacturers, reduced prices and a bigger market in which the sheer novelty of owning a car was more important than the quality of the car (parallel: a large number of consumers got internet access, publishers fell over themselves to capture eyeballs … and consumers also became producers thanks to Blogger, etc)

The global car industry has now had a massive shakedown and, for example, mass produced British cars have been relegated to the history books as consumers look for quality, reliability and value for money (parallel: online consumers have so much choice that it is impossible to check out everything, leading to social recommendation and the re-imposition of brands that guarantee quality).

As I said, it’s half-baked, it’s incomplete and it’s wildly oversimplified but it makes sense. And an important thing about quality, something that manufacturers from Rolls Royce to Rolex to Krug have known forever, is that people will pay for it.

Sounds like the start of a business model.

Writing For The Media Today got underway this morning. It's our shiny new "converged journalism" module for third year undergraduate students on the BA in Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies. I took the first lecture, which is a practice-oriented look at what journalists do and how they do it.

You can never be sure about asking questions of large student groups (there are 90 on this popular module) – sometimes you get a silence so dense you have to break it yourself, sometimes you can coax answers and sometimes they just come. Today was one of the latter, very pleasingly.

To my question "What do journalists do",  the answers included some very useful examples ("They report on events", "They provide information") and one that opens itself up to a number of different answers: "They maintain the status quo".

Now, if you are of the Chomskyist school of thought, maintaining the status quo will mean manufacturing consent, making sure that the mass of people are given sufficient mental pablum to stop them rocking the boat. Bread, circuses and gossip (did @CherylCole have an affair with @harveyofficial or not?) provide all that.

But it is possible to look at it in a completely different way too. If you take "status quo" as meaning that the flow of democratic information is or should be fairly evenly balanced – ie that sources of social, cultural and economic power are sharing information in an open and transparent way with the mass of people – then you can indeed see it as the journalist's role to ensure that the status quo is maintained as far as possible. Journalists do that by investigating, researching, asking awkward questions, developing strong sources. They do it, in fact, by holding power to account.

Top answer!

The Mag-Dragons have decided. This year’s two course magazines for the Cardiff MA will be for –

• boys in the 12-13 age range, focusing particularly on those who rush to their games console as soon as they get home from school
• young entrepreneurs starting up their own businesses

Both are really interesting ideas for a number of reasons.

A couple of days before students pitched to the Mag-Dragons I had a conversation with Nick Brett, Managing Director of the BBC Magazine Unit and Cardiff’s Honorary Professor of Magazine Journalism, about the current Holy Grails of magazine publishing – a title that captured the attention of teenage boys was one such for many years. Professor Brett’s response demonstrated how times have changed – he hadn’t heard a “holy grail” conversation for a long time; it’s all about capturing the digital space at the moment.

Without any prompting, the teen boy development group did something that combined former holy grail and current concerns – they proposed their title should be screen-first; that is, not primarily a print magazine. It sounds odd to admit it, considering how fervently we preach the digital message to our students, but this is a first for the Magazine MA. Naturally it will require some tweaking of the assessment schedule and criteria – and thought about how to incorporate some print elements that test their editorial and craft skills – but nothing that we cannot and should not do. In fact it is an inevitable and necessary development.

The business magazine is another first by virtue of being strictly business. Another odd admission, since we stress the B2B career pathway from the very first day of the course. This idea feels very zeitgeisty though and the winning pitch came on the same day that David Cameron launched Start Up Britain – something our on-the-ball students included in their presentation.

There’s still a massive amount of development and refinement to do on both titles but they are very exciting ideas. Each of the six groups pitching had individual development sessions with Professor Brett the Friday before the Mag-Dragon panel and at the end of next week the two amalgamated groups will present their research and development findings to Mel Nichols, former Editorial Director of Haymarket and, like Nick Brett, the over-seer of countless launches, relaunches and projects that didn’t quite make the grade.

I hope the students appreciate the level of access they are getting with these and the many other people who will help them during the Magazine MA – I don’t think I even saw anyone that high up until I’d been working at Emap for a couple of years!