Why is the left press so crashingly dull?
Posted on Monday 19 January, 2009
Filed Under The left
I HAVE in the past worked for Tribune and Red Pepper, and written for New Statesman and the Morning Star. For the sake of sentiment alone, I naturally wish all of these fine publications well.
But in truth, these days not even nostalgia combined with a vague sense of duty can motivate me to read any of them regularly. And if such titles cannot get people like me to fork out for a subscription, it is little wonder that they are – without exception – struggling to survive.
Unfortunately there is no nice way of putting this to the many friends of mine, including an ex-wife, who do their valiant best to keep the left press from complete collapse. But the basic problem here is that almost all the content of the above is tailor-made to fit the description ‘worthy but dull’. Sorry, but there you have it.
The irony is that, in a climate where capitalism is increasingly under question, and even New Labour is being forced involuntarily to discuss issues such as nationalisation and class, there should be an obvious market for punchy and well-written leftwing writing.
There is a clear need for something more than what is on offer from the national press and broadcast media, which restrict themselves – to paraphrase Dorothy Parker – to the whole gamut of political opinion from A to B, and even the biggest leftie blogs are not yet capable of plugging the gap.
Yet look at what is happening out there. Red Pepper could not sustain monthly publication, and has been forced to half its frequency. Trib came close to closure last year, and only managed to avoid going under after an unnamed Labour Party figure promised to put up £40,000 a year and the unions agreed to write off existing debts.
The word is that the new boss – anybody know who he or she is, by the way? – is keen on extended coverage of EU affairs, which is unlikely to make for the kind of riveting journalism that will bring back the paying punters.
Things do seem to be looking up for the Morning Star, which has recently relaunched with higher pagination, and finally made its website free. Yet this has only been achieved thanks to financial support from Anita Halpin, a veteran communist who became an overnight multimillionaire in 2006, after selling an inherited painting.
The newspaper shows no sign of being able to pay its way, and Ms Halpin is said to want to be a hands-on proprietor, enforcing a pro-Labour editorial line that will put paid to earlier flirtation with the idea of some kind of new left party.
Meanwhile, the Guardian media supplement this morning carries an extensive feature on the travails of the Staggers, now owned by a squabbling diumvirate of Geoffrey Robinson and millionaire businessman Mike Danson.
All the signs are looking bad. The magazine is refusing to recognise the National Union of Journalists, has made a number of long-time staffers redundant, and has apparently ditched star columnist John Pilger, still one of my journalistic heroes.
Circulation is falling fast. Recently-appointed editor Jason Cowley is said to want to ‘remake the title as a mainstream magazine with broad appeal … running more big reads on subjects ranging from food to sport’.
Well, he’s in the editor’s chair and it’s his call, but I cannot see how the strategy can possibly work. The field is already crowded. Who is going to pay a hefty cover charge for the kind of material that comes free in endless national newspaper supplements every weekend?
Such an editorial direction is far cry from what the New Statesman represented in the 1980s, when it regularly broke investigative journalism scoops and carried some coruscating critiques of Thatcherism.
The reality is the leftwing public deserves a better media diet than an endless succession of badly-ghosted opinion pieces published under the by-line of a trade union general secretary. Interspersed with first-person accounts of time spent on work brigades in Cuba. Either the left press starts to provide it, or it is not much longer for this world.
<<Go back
Comments
60 Responses to “Why is the left press so crashingly dull?”
-
- Yemen: an unfinished revolution
- Comment Is Free: An honours system for those who fight to make Britain a better place
- Democracy crushed; elected President arrested; World wrings its hands
- Fabians change policy on unpaid internships
- Kamal al-Fayoumi arrested as Egyptian regime retaliates to strikes
-
-
Meta
-
PR’s good!
Thing is, there’s loads of people on the blogosphere and in the conventional left-leaning press who you could, in theory, assemble to churn out a really good, spiky yet authoritative, publication. But there’s a curious sum-of-parts-being-less-than-the-whole air to the left press.
I am told the new owner of Tribune is Peter Slowe, a former leading light in the Labour Finance and Industry Group, a banker and the biographer of Manny Shinwell
They can always join New Labour and write for new labour, I’m sure New labour will pay good money for somebody to support them, like Progress. yuk.
Red Pepper , which I think your ex works for, have refused point blank to cover welfare issues, which contributed to the Asst editor at the time resigning. Perhaps people want to read about things that are happening around them as well as the internationalism which much of the left focusses on.
Well I’m told the new owner of Tribune is Kevin McGrath. Mind you, the transaction hasn’t gone through yet. So make that the prospective owner of Tribune.
The one that has fallen furthest in my estimation is New Statesman which, whilst always politically weak, would do great investigative stuff in the 80s particularly with the journalist Duncan Campbell, (not the Guardian journalist with the same name). Nowadays it will take me less than 5 mins to flick through in a library. In fact probably less than a minute.
If Halpin wants to waste her money putting the Morning Star back towards Labour, then she is a rich idiot. There are so few Labour lefts and their market is sewn up by the Guardian already. If that title really was to be the ‘paper of the left’, she’d get a lot further targeting the Left from official communists to SWPers to Left Greens.
What I also bemoan is the decline (completely?) of the radical community press. I have enjoyed reading Rebecca in South Wales, the Rochdale Alternative Press, a title in Manchester (name forgotten), various anarchist titles in Hackney and other places, a title in Kirkby (name forgotten). I’d be surprised if any of these titles – which were often photostatted small papers, dealing with council corruption etc – still survive.
Id be interested in any lessons that the European Left press and further away could teach us. I have seen the daily publications of Left parties in France and Italy and the Taz in Germany and have thought they were all quite good – but that was a while ago and I fear they may all have declined since.
And I think that they have declined because of the web particularly. I completely agree with E10′s point that there is a lot good in the Left blogosphere but also think that there would be no point in printing stuff – the web’s the place now, apart from leaflets and bulletins.
I’ve many times suggested a co-operative Left web portal but have not got any response. There is no reason the British Left can’t have a http://www.huffingtonpost.com or a daily (and good) ‘newspaper’ that is the daily email at http://www.wsws.org from the ‘Trotskyist’ ICP.
I wrote longer on all the above recently at http://southpawpunch.blogspot.com/2008/06/investigate-thatcher-tory-cut-good.html
the statesman has in the last couple of years gone pretty steeply downhill im afraid, i wouldnt advocate weekly worker style gossip and intrigue but there is a need and indeed plenty of room for a journal telling us what is going on in the world and on the left with serious analysis and constructive criticism of left projects
Mention of the Statesman reminds us of another perennial problem with the left press: it doesn’t practise what it preaches. The NS has been refusing to recognise the NUJ, for instance, while payment rates and reliability – where they exist – at Red Pepper and the Morning Star is similarly patchy. No one expects to earn much contributing to such titles but they’ve all got a fair bit to learn re treating the people that work for them well.
I worked for the New Statesman 1994-2005 as their marketing consultant.
In that time thanks to solid marketing and hefty investment subscriptions rose from barely 7000 to a peak of almost 20,000.
Newstrade sales ebbed and flowed, occasionally reaching 10,000, particularly when it took an anti-war stance and a critical position post 9/11 but the overall pattern was newstrade decline with sales declining to around 6000.
Robinson has stopped investing in the title and the subs campaign in particular has suffered.
Kampfner was an insufferably arrogant editor who steered the NS back to a much less critical line post Peter Wilby who was forced out after the 2005 election.
But the core problem for the NS is political. Labour politics simply doesn’t sell in sufficient numbers, leftist or centrist, Blairite or hard left theres not a big enough audience for a magazine ficussed on Westminster Labour. In this sense Steve Platt was ahead of his tome with his editorship in the mid 1990s but at the ime the mag lacked the resources to fulfil his vision.
The pincer movement for Ns is in moving away from labourist politics it loses its rationale for its owners and a sizeable chink of its staff and existing readers. And to reach out to a more movementist, younger readership demands a huge chane, too big so far for anyone to contemplate and in any case vulnerable to new media rivals.
For anyone considering a viable new left media the net must surely be central. The left’s ineptitude in producing anything remotely popular on the net is indicative of its headline decline post 1989 and series of defeats since 1997. And yes, that amounts to a collective failure. How depressing.
Mark P
I’m sure SPP’s spleen would burst on a (several times) daily basis, should his German be good enough to read the ‘taz’ as it is today, as I doubt that he’s politically gone over to the neo-liberal right wing of the Greens (with maybe some slight conscience as a nod to the past)…
We need to RSS ourselves a virtual publication – reprint the week’s best blog posts, make it heavy on fact (more Yorkshire Ranter or Pennyred than Liberal Conspiracy), and pay someone to set it up into a small, potent, pdf for electronic-only distribution.
Finance it through pledgebank like the Open Rights Group – you can do a lot with one full-timer. Get the listings right, have a sport page, and keep it spiky, and the world will be yr lobster. I’m in for a tenner a month if we set the bar at five hundred.
And pay for columns by Mark Ames. Not an especially nice man, it would appear, but he can write.
PS – _Freedom_ carries the occasional scoop now and again, you know. Worth a sub, it is.
taz became scared when the establishment went after it for publishing an anonymous letter from a Red Army Faction supporter in the 1970s, even though taz was not pro-RAF. It is pretty right-wing now.
Rather better is another daily, “Junge Welt”. I try to buy a copy every day when I am in Germany.
As per Chris Williams. I’d donate £10 a month.
It’s a very interesting suggestion. Can Chris direct us to any examples already being published?
The question would be what would go into any Left pdf. I’d go for agreeing a general list of Left blog sites that are acceptable to most Lefts (a difficult but possible task) and which will play ball.
Then pick the 10/20 etc top most read articles of the week across them all (which would need open tracking of hits on sites) and then, with some minor editing, (e.g. deleting similar articles and writing missing and less popular but necessary stuff e.g. sport) turn it into a pdf.
And maybe pay for name or two – possibly.
I wish I had the technical ability to do such but would be happy to help otherwise. Anyone else interested?
And it’s interesting information from Mark P about the New Statesman. The phrase ‘Westminster Labour’ sums it up well. You get the impression its target readership is Public Affairs officers wanting to get some inside advantage from a policy wonk to lever to their clients advantage.
I am sure that target audience (of complete wankers) is small (although are happy to pay for NS advertorial) but is the ‘movements’ audience also small? I’d like to think there is fair size audience who will march over Gaza, climate change etc but I’m no publishing expert.
A good, punchy left mag/website should certainly carry sport (I’d be up for writing some of it), as well as stuff on music, film, books and just general musings. But it should do so with the sort of combination of insight and wit we’d look for from the political stuff.
And yeah, the NS, really is staggeringly dull too much of the time.
what marvelous dreams, talking about web sites, portals, even emulating Huffington Post, etc ?
great dreams, great talk, just a shame that’s what much of the British Left has been reduced to, talk and dreams of what might have been….
but let’s look at the practical difficulties:
Cost of starting up a blog: £0.00
Cost of organising a Portal: £0.00
Cost of learning the skills for the above: £0.00
chance of it happening: zero
even the Liberals are more organised than parts of the British Left! talk about faux Leninism
but let’s not dwell on that and why?
still, a positive suggestion: all of you attending the next Convention of the Left could suggest that it be used to create a wider more coherent presence on the web, then later in the media
What’s the point? A left portal would just turn into a battleground between the left and racists such as modernityblog.
If Mr Southpaw Punch wants to indulge in a bit of reminiscence therapy with the 1960′s/70′s alternatiuve press can i recommend the web archive of ‘Mother Grumble’- a NE magazine that i was very loosely connected with (i.e i used to booze with some of the collective who published it). You can find it here so you can soak up the atmosphere of cheap fags, cheap beer and lentil soup…….
http://www.muthergrumble.co.uk/
Does anyone remember the ‘News on Sunday’ fiasco?
The other thing to write into the DNA of any successful left publication is that it’s a newspaper in the way that the Guardian is a newspaper, rather than one in the way that ‘Militant’ was. Don’t mistake the paper for the party. This is a difficult lesson to learn.
Ah yes, News on Sunday…… I remember being the poor sod who had to get the LA pension fund of who i was a trustee (as a councillor) to put some cash into this, which we did. Even the TU reps on the Trustee Body were apprehensive, and with good cause as it turned out.
And as an afterthought, who remembers the orignal Left Sunday Paper – Reynold’s News ? A good read, i recall, even though i was only in my early teens. However, after many years of life, it fell on hard times and was rescued by the national Co-Op movement who turned it into a crashingly boring paper called the ‘Sunday Citizen’ and whose idea of a front page splash would be a precis of a speech at a Co-Op congress by George Woodock or the GMWU’s Lord Cooper
Modernity’s comments are, I suppose, (for the first time ever) dialectical in that the attitude displayed by him is the problem (we can’t do it) whereas the point may well be correct.
I wrote my ideas on what can go in it on the fly and thinking about it further, bald popularity of articles would not work e.g. an article about a member of the SWP being slightly rude to a ‘sensible left’ and with 300 comments and thus hundreds of views shouldn’t be printed instead of an article about Egyptian left that elicits only 5 comments and a commensurate number of views. But it could guide most content.
There would also be a need to write about a lot more thinks that barely get a mention in Left blogs other than sport e.g. cinema and TV. The idea of listing is intruiging; I’d go and buy a publication that was known as the place where details of (practically) ALL Left events would be posted. There never has been such a resource.
@Tim. You’re certainly correct that’s a danger but would it be so in a pdf. e.g. Most articles on Gaza would be there because they have proved popular online and maybe also with some mechanism for minority viewpoints on such, e.g. from the AWL, to also get an airing but with a strict rule about no bunfighting. Yeah I can see the (large?) problems as I write this but I refuse to be a cynic; if Eurosceptic and Euroaligned Tories can sell 60,000 copies of the Spectator a week, we could give away 10,000 (or a lot more) pdfs each week.
@Chris. Yeah a good point about what a newspaper would be but anything collective isn’t there to build a party. Can you point us to any examples of the sort of paper you outlined?
Util the left starts focussing on the things that mean something to most UK citizens: housing jobs, welfare, the NHS, the built environment, it won’t get anywhere.
An example: people are crying out for answers to what is happening with the economic crisis, and perhaps whether we are going to descend into a 30′s style slump (quite possible) So,why not publish a non partisan pamphlet with various contributions from left minded experts, commentators, etc. Instead, there is an incredible cacophony about Palestine, a terrible situation, but one we can do little about, though fundraising for aid could be undertook.
SPP,
I thought your suggestions were good on this topic, along with many above, but I have seen such talk for decades, if only….(soon followed by “but we haven’t got the money….”)
and I am merely pointing out that NOWADAYS it costs NOTHING to start such an enterprise, nothing but wits and a bit of will power, combined with willingness to work with others
I am saying there is NO monetary impediment, it is cost free, just takes a bit of reading, playing around with HTML and the willingness to learn about modern technology.
It seems to me that if people have managed to read those massive turgid political volumes, over the years, then picking up some HTML is trivial by comparison (because it is ALL over the web, with plenty of free examples and help)
there is NO real impediment, if people really want it to happen
Yup – for a left paper to work it has to be a consumer co-op, not a producer one. Or else the producers get on their high horses, and the consumers leave. Subscriber democracy is the way to go. For more on the Open Rights Group, itself the child of a pledgebank pledge and a large number of standing orders, see:
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/
Actually, modblog, it costs time, and time is, as yr man Karl pointed out, money. Me, I used to help put together a monthly leftie freesheet hereabouts. We picked up the standing orders easy enough, and we could send out (with, like, stamps) 150 a month and give away another hundred. Cash (about £150 a month) was never a problem, the problem was getting hold of 30 hours a month to put it together (on pagemaker, since you wonder). Listings were a really popular feature, but these require a lot of phone calls to hassle people.
Shorter: We all had kids: end of.
Anything worth shit nationally needs to be able to hire an office in central London and pay someone who knows what they are doing to sort it out. It also needs people with employment law, accounting, and libel law expertise to sit on the board. And 500 readers paying a fiver a month, to elect the aforementioned board and keep it honest.
As for content, I’m with ‘history’ above. I want to know more about stuff near me, stuff that other people are not covering, stuff found out by people who’ve decided to become the expert on arms smuggling, or FITs, or martime law, or whatever. Stuff that I _need_ to know. I want graphs and tables, too, dammit. Yes, put something in about the war of the mo, but perhaps one thing we need is ‘not the war of the mo’ – Sri Lanka and the Congo are obvious examples here.
For an example, check out Schnews. Indeed, this suggests a possible tagline:
‘Schnews, but for people who wash’
Yeah it does take time and requires people with training and a modicum of professional/technical expertise. A left portal needs to look professional, accessible and – yes – entertaining.
But mod’s right in that it shouldn’t be as costly as such doomed enterprises of the past were, because the access-technology is so cheap/free. So let’s do it.
And content wise, yes, internationalism is important but that has to be built on domestic relevance and strength. I supported the recent Gaza demos but the left needs to making much louder noises on jobs, housing, workers rights and the likes. I’d like to think that the next demo I go on will be related to one of these issues.
“Actually, modblog, it costs time, and time is, as yr man Karl pointed out, money. “
aye right enough Chris, that never occurred to me
well, if the alternative is to spend a LOT of time talking and dreaming, or DOING something…which might be best?
as it takes TIME to do anything, that is NOT an impediment
next?
‘I’d like to think that the next demo I go on will be related to one of these issues.’
I think you will be waiting a long time: already STWC/CND have bagged the saturday of the G20 event as they ahve all LP Conf’s for years.So, yet again there will be no main protest about the prevailing economic conditions.
“STWC/CND have bagged the saturday of the G20 event ”
That would make a perfect headline for the top of p.2 of the Weekly Thang – there are a number of decisions taken every year in rooms formerly known as smoke-filled that a large number of lefties in the UK would pay to know about.
Southpawpunch: There were a whole raft of alt press of the left in Mcr and environs. RAP is now seeing a second coming as RAW (Rochdale Alternative Website) though it is currently 99.9% anti-Lib Dem rather than non-aligned anti-anything. There was Mole Express in Tameside. And New Manchester Review in Manchester. This gave up. Manchester Flash followed though with just 13 issues. Then City Life. In its original form this too was alternative and edgy … but having grown to a self-exploiting staff of 13 co-operators but losing all three founders it was sold off to … the Manchester Evening News. Their occasional investigation thereafter wasn’t that alternative and tended to end in legals. So it became very bland, over-designed, unpalatable and finally closed by the MEN. They have kept the title for use in their pretty dreadful Channel M “community” TV station and have relaunched as a website to try to take on a relatively new phenomenon called “manchester confidential” with similar weblications in Liverpool and Leeds and, who knows?, near you soon. That’s got an edgy edge. Time Out keep promising a Mcr edition. But they won’t. GMG dominating the local media is a real drag for Manchester.
Dr Bob Dickinson wrote a thesis and a book on the subject of the alt press in Mcr and as he worked for most of the titles – and NME and BBC – this is an authorative work.
Great stuff Dave writing such a tedious post to bemoan the crashing tediousness of the left press! Ha ha ha. The comments too are humourless. Running gag anyone? Ironic adoption of long faces all round.
Is comment moderation on?
Mod’s right – the old ‘we haven’t got the cash’ excuse is now obsolete and we have all the time in the world. So who else is volunteering?
I agree with the points made about the lack of coverage,activity re benefits, TUs, housing etc in Left publications and organisations.
-
Please forgive the specific questions to Chris -
I’d be keen to know what the Mcr title was (to see if it was archived). It was b+w, photocopied/statted (?) small size (I think) and would often write about James Anderton and used to regularly have BabyBio(!) ads and was publishing in 1980. I got it in Grassroots. It wasn’t City Life, Flash or indeed another that title that was called City Fun (?) (a music fanzine) and I don’t think was NMR but maybe (don’t remember any culture, just straight digging e.g. something like ‘Mcr copper caught saying GMP needed to arm themselves with machine guns to prepare for possible uprising by SWP’ – if only).
I think Chris is being unfair about the comments on this thread. Both SouthpawPunch and ModBlog frequently drive me to despair on other threads but on this one they’ve had plenty of thoughtful and constructive things to say.
Talking of good alternative city publications of yore, the other great one I recall from my student days was Leeds Other Paper, which got stuck into all manner of major things at quite a turbulent time in the region’s history.
As someone who has read the left Press since I was, well, don’t know, but very very very young, can I say (yes you can) that there was no golden age? If that it what anyone has at the back of their mind can I argue aganst (again yes you can Coatesy).
The Morning Star never shone, in fact it’s a lot better after its upgrade. Tribune was boring in the late sixties anyway, except for its book reviews. The New Statesman was pretty mainstream, and remember there was time it was edited by that bonkers chappy who became a Tory. As for the cutting edge Underground Press. I’ve got old copies of OZ (bought when I was about twelve) and only Widgery really stands the test of time. As for Black Dwarf, I saw some of them over the summer and they were dire. Here’s betting that the Leveller doesn’t look so good now.
I would bet that if I had my grandad’s copies of the Daily Herald they wouldn’t look too brilliant either.
Ach golden ages, always associated with a certain period in one’s youth, usually twenties.
BTW: for Welfare Coverage see my Blog (and an attack on the Wainwright neglect of them, perceptive eh?)
E10 Rifle,
well, Unity is Strength eh?
funny, how some would rather take lumps out of each other than try to find common ground? who needs enemies with the British Left’s endemic sectarianism?
I hope you join SPP’s project and use your journalistic expertise
and in that spirit of comradeship I’ll suggest a way that such a site could be put together:
0. Setup a basic blog on WordPress and get a gmail account to match the blog name. Create a secondary blog, to be used as a design scratch pad for the primary blog.
1. Draw up a short list of basic requirements (types of coverage, feeds, moderation policy, etc)
2. Sample a range of web sites, looking for particular smart ways of doing things or items that cover the basic requirements in point 1.
3. Create a list of the top 4-6 web practices that you’d like to include in this Portal/web site for the Left.
4. Itemise each one of them and research how they are done.
5. Use google with a search string such as “how do I add …… to my web site”, etc
6. if stuck bring up the web page that you like and do a View->Page Source (varies from browser to browser)
7. After about 6-8 weeks of study you should be able to replicate many of the desired functions on your new blog
8. Consider that to be the first design and not static (you might want to re-jig everything later on)
9. Draft up a few examples (as with mock newspapers) then get it tested by a variety of people, ask for feedback and make minor modifications based on people’s advice.
10. Along with the above read the http://www.websitesthatsuck.com/ and pick up a cheap tomb on HTML from your local discount bookshop.
11. When you are somewhat happy with the design, and keep it SIMPLE, no flash colours or lurid schemes, test it with a variety of browsers (IE, Opera, Lynx, Firefox, Chrome), add some accessibility option (sound, font size control) and decide on the best default viewing size (800*600 or 1024*768, etc.)
12. when happy, email other bloggers get them to test and make CONSTRUCTIVE suggestions.
13. re-jig, if needed.
14. Move all of the changes over the primary blog and finalise the first design.
15. Release the blog for beta testing with a small group of users, not the whole web.
16. Await feedback, and goto step 13
17. Above all listen to constructive views and ponder why some sites work and a lot don’t.
Obviously there are many different ways of doing it, that’s just one suggestion but I hope that helps, there’s probably a lot more, but that should keep you happy, oh and aim for a 8-12 week time scale, don’t rush things.
[to be continued]
Some sites you might like to emulate (in parts) or learn from:
Newstatesman (accessibilty), Labourstart (feed and range of news), SU blog (what to avoid), bloggers 4labour (colour scheme to avoid), odiogo (adding sound), index on censorship (simple design) Liberal Conspiracy (ditto), http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/accessibility.php
also, scan web awards and look for do-able designs (not over elaborate ones)
Glasgow’s Variant (http://www.variant.randomstate.org/) has been running for nearly fifteen years, manages to produce and internationally distribute a quarterly free print edition, is brilliantly written and researched, and has the entire archive on its website in pdf, with full html indexing, again for free. The problem is that it tends to veer right over into academic journal territory. I’m not suggesting it as a model to be copied, but it proves it can be done, and if there’s a market for this, there’s a market for a more populist equivalent.
I have to say that I disagree with Modblog’s approach. That’s for the techical bods to sort out once we’ve built the institution. To start with, get 50ish people from round the country into a room and agree a basic idea, a basic structure, and a pledgebank pledge, that can fit on a side of A4. Then get the sigs. Don’t do sod all until we’ve got £5000 a month promised (that means £3000 a month actual). _Then_ set up the tech group to make the ones and zeros happen in the right order, agree the constitution, elect a board, open the account, see how many of the pledges actually fill in the standing orders, rent s cubicle, appoint the full-timer, and launch it.
It needs a full-timer.
Chris Williams,
you can disagree with me all you like, but DO something, less rabbit, less politics by committee, DO something and don’t try to find a 1001 excuses as to WHY it couldn’t be done, we’ve all heard them before…for decades…and decades
British Lefties need a bit of SELF education in technology rather than delegating the difficult bits to others (a common middle class habit), get your hands dirty that’s the way to understand something, and to connect to people
alternatively, spend ages debating on how and why impossible such tasks are, until someone else does them?
[rewriting]history tells us things wrote
‘Red Pepper, which I think your ex works for, have refused point blank to cover welfare issues, which contributed to the Asst editor at the time resigning. Perhaps people want to read about things that are happening around them as well as the internationalism which much of the left focusses on.’
Well, you got one fact right, I do work for Red Pepper. It goes without saying that I’m ‘worthy but dull’ but I have a pretty good memory and I really don’t recall anyone resigning over RP’s ‘point blank refusal to cover welfare issues’. Nor has RP ever refused to cover welfare issues; perhaps you’d like to come into our office and browse through our back issues, I think you’ll find welfare issues are covered.
Modblog, I’ve made it clear what I’m prepared to do – a tenner a month. You want to come over all Stakhanovite? Put finger to keyboard, write the pledge, and see what happens:
http://www.pledgebank.com/
Here’s one we prepared earlier:
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/review-of-activities/how-org-started/
“You want to come over all Stakhanovite?”
you can do what you like, but I think that 40+ years of TOP down organisations on the British Left have largely failed
what is needed is a bit of enthusiasm, some thing radical, people getting together for common purpose, trying things out, not thinking by numbers, being a bit edgy, making mistakes, learning from them, etc
that’s the antidote to many of the British Left’s problem, getting out of that small c, conservative, mentality that has existed for so long, being open to other ideas and not passing motions on when the next cup of tea should be served, etc
two examples of that radical spirit come to mind:
open source Linux
and the Socialist Unity blog
Linux has managed, coming from nothing, to established itself as a valid alternative to the Microsoft monopoly, with dozens of very serviceable distributions created by a few keen people getting together.
SU blog, always has vibrant debates going on, and plenty of fresh articles, you might disagree with a lot that is said there, but the high readership figures speak for themselves.
Had that been left to a committee and the formal bureaucratic structures of old then I doubt it would have had the same impact. SU blog is exciting, not a staid old relic from yester year.
There are plenty more of those successful bottom UP type of collaborations, or we can go back to thinking by numbers and passing worthy motions that get no where, which brings us back to the topic of the post.
RTF link, eh, modblog? Then get back to me if you care to.
Dave, this is a useful post but doesn’t get far enough beyond a “why oh why” grumble.
What I’d like to see you do and put up for discussion is a scoring of the left wing press we have actually got against the qualities you want to see (“investigative journalism scoops”, “coruscating critiques” etc) and then we can see who you think constitutes the best of a bad lot. Or let’s see your suggestions for mergers between titles or improvements to existing titles that could make a difference.
The current economic & political climate demands that the left press raises its game and rises to the challenge. I don’t believe the left press is “not much longer for this world”, but it needs to connect with the climate camping Seattle/Genoa/Rostock generation, who I think would value a house paper with a print version.
My part of town is going crazy for Obama, an interest in politics is no longer an embarassing perversion to be kept private at all costs, and this is no time for lefty publications to be in a giving up the ghost mood.
Chris Williams,
Fascinating link, truly is
er, so how does that relate to actually getting a Left Portal going?
in the real world, that is?
oh I remember get a pledgebank, form a committee, write policies, pass motions, get more money, write more motions, hire people, tell them what to do…..and the huddled masses will beat a path to that site?
or
get some very enthusiastic and knowledgeable people to put together a Left Portal, bottom up, and form direct connections with people out there…..minimalise bureaucracy and keep it revolutionary
Hmm…..what sounds more likely to work? historically speaking that is?
A man in his 40s writes:
In my experience, altough knowledge is for keeps enthusiasm lasts til you have kids, get divorced, suffer a bad illness or a nasty bereavement, get made redundant, have to move to follow your job, etc. Then it fails to work and the magazine folds. There’s also that ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ to sort out – this can be done but it’s a problem that sneaks up on you and needs solving fast.
I have done the bottom-up route, and it worked very well, for a bit. By all means have a go – note that I’m not stopping you. Good luck.
If nobody does the pledgebank thang I think I’ll just up my standing order to _Freedom_ instead. ‘night all.
an older bloke, who’s worked in the print and a lot more besides writes:
Chris, whatever you do, make sure the 5 year plans gets done, plenty of Pig Iron type stats and lots of reports too, loads of chiefs, meetings and meetings..a few workers, make sure you tell them what you want, and of course, pass the buck when it all falls thru!
that would never be dull, might be boring, it could put people off, but hey committees and internal bickering, that’s what much of small c, conservative, Lefty politics are about
let’s have none of this revolutionary talk about self education and doing things….
PS: joking aside, I don’t think organisations are static nor should be, if such a Portal becomes more structured as things evolve then good, whatever works, but get the thing going before David Cameron has retired into the Lords as an octogenarian
What a grumpy misogynistic set of old f*ck*rsyou lot are. No wonder the left always fails to organise itself as you ALL spend too much time critising which is so easy…..