Media Matters Stephen Glover

A new magazine called ? Crazy!

Thirty years on, Richard Ingrams’s risky venture makes perfect sense stephen glover

Three decades ago, there was a general feeling that weekly or fortnightly magazines faced an inexorable decline.

Many believed that Saturday and Sunday newspapers, which had been adding new supplements that seemed to cover the whole of human life, made intelligent publications increasingly otiose. How wrong they were.

But that was the widespread view when The Oldie emitted its first cry 30 years ago. The Listener had just closed, and Punch was about to. The New Statesman had embarked on a long downward path. The Spectator, acquired by the Telegraph Group a few years before, was admittedly showing some signs of revival, while the Economist was pinning its hopes on the United States.

If Richard Ingrams, The Oldie’s founding editor and chief progenitor, had sought the advice of media experts, they would probably have told him that a magazine for older people disregarded by the mainstream press was a barmy idea. Thankfully he didn’t. He had a hunch, and didn’t give a fig about market research. He was, of course, extremely fortunate to have, in the late Naim Attallah, the best sugar daddy imaginable.

Richard couldn’t have known, though he must have guessed, that there were tens of thousands of people who had been waiting for The Oldie to exist. It turned out that they could not find everything they wanted in the voluminous weekend supplements.

The new publication – at first fortnightly and then monthly – was one star in a constellation which, contrary to almost everyone’s expectations, shone ever brighter over the next few years.

Other intelligent magazines were launched, and some of them thrived. In 1995, David Goodhart unleashed Prospect, a distinguished, intellectual monthly vaguely of the Left. Though it has struggled financially over the years, it has made its mark. That same year, Jolyon Connell’s the Week was launched. It slowly built up a large, profitable circulation and, having passed into other hands, spawned American and Australian editions.

Meanwhile, many established weeklies, whose demise was authoritatively forecast, have flourished as never before. The Spectator, which sold as few as 13,000 copies a week in the mid-1970s, now sells not far short of 80,000 print copies, and over 25,000 in digital form. The New Statesman has reversed its decline, while the Economist sells more copies than ever, in print and digital combined, in Britain and America. The passing years have done nothing to dent the success of the fortnightly Private Eye.

What is so remarkable is that serious magazines have been enjoying a golden age while all print newspapers – whose existence was once seen as a threat to the weeklies – have steadily been losing sales. For some magazines, most notably the Economist, digital provides indispensable extra revenue. The fact remains that readers are far better disposed towards print in news and current-affairs magazines than in newspapers.

It is perfectly true that not all magazines have prospered. Some glossy ones, such as Glamour, have bitten the dust. New Musical Express, Loaded and FHM are no more. Even among the publications I have been writing about, in which words predominate over images, there have been one or two casualties.

Daniel Johnson’s Standpoint, an intellectually stimulating right-wing counterpart to Prospect, never got close to break-even, and had to close. Its progeny, the Critic, is tied to the political agenda of the multimillionaire City magnate who owns it.

There is a lesson here about sugar daddies. They are often vital for new publications. The Oldie had a succession of them before becoming financially viable. The fortnightly London Review of Books – another stunning publishing success of recent years – for a long time depended on subsidies from its wealthy co-founder and editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, who stepped down last year. Now selling more than 80,000 copies, it is strong enough to survive and thrive without its sugar mummy.

The trouble with benefactors is that they can grow bored with their voracious charges, and they will one day assuredly die. A magazine that remains reliant on a sugar daddy or mummy cannot be certain it has a future. Rich owners with agendas can be dangerous creatures. Financial independence is ultimately the only guarantor of survival.

This largely explains the success of The Oldie and other new magazines, as well as those older ones that have revitalised themselves. They have made themselves into going concerns, and they have done this by appealing to a segment of readers who feel poorly served, or at least not fully served, by newspapers.

There are hundreds of thousands of intelligent readers out there whom newspapers can never completely satisfy. Some may be so tired of the daily news that they will embrace a lively weekly synopsis, such as is supplied by the Week. Many others, in common with Richard Ingrams, feel that what used to be called Fleet Street tries too hard to please younger readers.

And so this magazine was born. The measure of its success is that it does not seem vainglorious to suppose that The Oldie will still be entertaining and enlightening its readers when another 30 years have passed.