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.

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. Now that the mag, and its writers, no longer have their great patron John Howard sitting in Kirribilli, the phrase “paper tiger” comes to mind. Certainly that appears to be evident from this truly bizarre piece just posted on the magazine’s website by Michael Connor, referencing a comment made here at LP by Pavlov’s Cat – “the Left totalitarianism”, “the Left establishment”, “Hatred blows in from the Left”… etc. Perhaps Connor was rankled by his writing being described as “half crazed”. But what can all this hyperbole and nonsense mean, and does anyone bar Connor and his ilk really care? I think he and the rest of Windy’s wingnut stable’s response to the hoax contains an element of schadenfreude. They’ve been rescued – I strongly suspect temporarily – from their own feelings of relevance deprivation. It might have been better, I think, if the windmills had been allowed to fall over of their own accord, without the need for any tilting at them.

Update: Margaret Simons wraps up the reaction to the hoax at Crikey, and Graham Young provides a publisher’s perspective at On Line Opinion.