Tag Archive for 'little magazines'

An expression of community

Published
by
Robert
1 year, 2 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing and Media
. 32 Comments

Originally posted on my blog.

Since Jeff Sparrow took over as editor of Overland in 2007, he has been working to increase the magazine’s presence. Part of his approach has been to publish the full contents of recent issues — free — on the Overland website.

Jeff explained his reasoning in a recent post to Overland’s new blog:

[S]ubscribers to Overland are inevitably becoming more like subscribers to public radio stations. You can listen to 3RRR or 3PBS for free but people who really care about what such stations are doing recognise that they should manifest that support by becoming a subscriber.

In the case of public radio, the act of subscription becomes an expression of community as much as simply a cash transaction.

An Overland sub is a little different (in that you do actually receive four copies of the journal) but it reflects the same sentiment. People who think that arguments about the politics of culture and the culture of politics are important will, we hope, continue to subscribe, even if it’s physically possible to read the entire journal without paying a cent.

This is a really interesting approach. As he says, “[f]or most of the twentieth century, a magazine subscriber was part of an exclusive club”, in which new members were essentially sponsored in by existing subscribers. That paradigm is gone now. If the content is good, people will find it.

The web presents an opportunity for small publications to put themselves before a broader audience. If Jeff can get the word out about the web editions, and get some buzz going in the blogosphere, I think he’ll start to see an increase in subscriptions to the print version.

English language, partisan misuse thereof, etc.

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, History, Howardia, Media and Politics
. 38 Comments

Years ago, I used to read Quadrant – incidentally before Robert Manne became editor, if I recall correctly. Back in the day, there was a sense that there was some sort of contest of ideas, and thus there was some purpose to reading, or at least casting a glance across a range of “little magazines”. I think that time ended a long while ago. Certainly, I stopped reading Quadrant over a decade ago, and I can’t say I feel there’s some huge gap in my life.

After all the brouhaha about the Katherine Wilson/Keith Windschuttle hoax dies down, I suspect the most lasting insight to be derived from all the kerfuffle is that Wilson’s target had already disappeared into a long twilight of irrelevance. For mine, John Quiggin’s point about the saga is among the most telling – Windschuttle’s own credibility on the issue which has been central to the recent stages of his career – Indigenous history – lies in tatters because of his own inability to substantiate the claims he made many years ago now with further research. The biggest hoax, Quiggin argues, is Windschuttle’s own contribution to “the history wars”.

After a number of folks actually had a look at what’s published on Quadrant’s website these days, it’s painfully obvious that there’s very little credibility there to be undermined. Egregious grammatical errors, bizarre rants with scant evidence of an elementary ability to construct a coherent argument, to be sure.

So the other motto we might draw from the hoax affair is that it’s drawn attention to the absence of both standards and relevance in most of what Quadrant has to offer. Continue reading ‘English language, partisan misuse thereof, etc.’