Column Comment
A most irregular column.
Poneke, who like me is a big fan of Jane Clifton, is quite kind about the Listener and Steven Price isn’t, at least not about the new issue.
Poneke points out that “In its ‘golden years’, the Listener’s circulation was huge – more than 300,000 copies a week.” I was on staff in those golden years – the biggest-selling cover, as I recall, was for the soccer World Cup in, it must have been, 1982. That really annoyed the Wellington journalists.
I was also on staff at Metro in its golden years when it sold more than 40,000 copies a month. (Coincidence? You be the judge.) The Listener is now at 69,300 and Metro, after a resurgence under the brilliant Lauren Quaintance, is now down to 14, 250. The former is quite respectable in this market if advertising holds up; not sure about the latter.
Poneke, who like me is a big fan of Jane Clifton, is quite kind about the Listener and Steven Price isn’t, at least not about the new issue.
Poneke points out that “In its ‘golden years’, the Listener’s circulation was huge – more than 300,000 copies a week.” I was on staff in those golden years – the biggest-selling cover, as I recall, was for the soccer World Cup in, it must have been, 1982. That really annoyed the Wellington journalists.
I was also on staff at Metro in its golden years when it sold more than 40,000 copies a month. (Coincidence? You be the judge.) The Listener is now at 69,300 and Metro, after a resurgence under the brilliant Lauren Quaintance, is now down to 14, 250. The former is quite respectable in this market if advertising holds up; not sure about the latter.
posted by Stephen Stratford at 5:05 PM
4 Comments:
Price was right - that was a really dumb cover story. They must think their readers are dumb too.
Well, would those 'golden years' have been the ones when The Listener could have published nothing but lyrics in Esperanto, and would still have been brought by anyone who wanted television and radio listings?
I'm not saying the magazine is in anyway beyond criticism, but really isn't the nostalgia for the 'good old days', well, sometimes a little out of focus with the reality. I suspect even the sainted M.H. Holcroft was guilty of running a certain amount of fluff.
It isn't just nostalgia that tells us that the "good old days" were very good indeed. Sure, the late 1970s Listener had the benefits of two-channel television and a monopoly on the programme listings. But the two editors of that era (Ian Cross and Tony Reid) made best use of it. Unlike, say, the Herald, which never took advantage of its classifieds cash cow to improve its journalism or its production values (right to the relaunch in 1996), its owners preferring to take the money and run back to Remmers. The Listener took risks, starting the careers of Tom Scott, Rosemary McLeod, Burton Silver, Gordon Campbell, Karen Jackman and many others. It hired great journalists who had proved themselves elsewhere, such as Reid, Vernon Wright, Helen Paske and Phil Gifford. Plus photos by Robin Morrison and Bruce Connew and a great lineup of hugely popular columnists. In its heyday, 1975 to 1983, week after week, the magazine was full of quality and surprises, sometimes up to 144 large format pages, all for 40 cents. If you wonder why people care about the magazine, go to the library and pull out a bound volume from any of those years. It is a school in journalism and editing. Only the printing and occasional layouts from that period are a letdown.
Is starting the career of Burton Silver considered a good thing?
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