The Editor's column 2012

This page is part of the features section

On this page: | The Sun this Sunday | What is a magazine? | Curating Leicester's culture |

Trevor Locke, Editor of Arts in Leicestershire magazine, writes:

30th April

A LOT goes on behind the scenes. Readers land here and click through a few pages. Words and pictures emerge into their browser windows. Some will find what they want and leave straight away, rather like me looking at the BBC web site to find out what programmes are on. Others, the arterati, might, one imagines, while away many hours meandering through the maze of pages.

How does it all get here? My working day is consumed with sifting through a daily avalanche of emails, Facebook messages, Tweets, SMS messages, paper flyers ... this tsunami of input is read, evaluated and, as needs be, acted on. Some things get missed. Some things get ignored. Editing is about trying to spot the interesting from the mundane, the editable from the detritus.

The job of an editor is to ask oneself this question, day in and day out: "What do people want to know about, to read, to find out about?" Without readers, you go nowhere. So, on the first day of each new month, I pour over a sea of statistics: how many people have landed here, what have they looked at, how many pages have they read, where have they come from, how long have they stayed for?

At the end of each quarter, I look back over the previous three months to see how the trend is going. Is the graph going up, down or flat-lining? It's not just about numbers or even trends. It's about whether we are giving the arts community what they want. Now, that is where it gets really difficult.

ArtsIn magazine is not a sop to the technical elite. This is a journal aimed, very consciously, at the popularist end of the market. As an arts editor, I have to be a jack-of-all-trades, writing about everything from poetry to heavy metal bands, from abstract art to decorative crafts. We cannot compete with the high-brow critics of The Guardian, nor would we want to. Our aim to bring art to the masses.

Our team of reporters, editors and reviewers span a wide age range. Unlike some literary products, we are not a bunch of recently graduated twenty-somethings. Some are, but that is not the typical profile of a writer in our team.

By the same token, our readership (as far as we can tell) spans the demographic landscape. We have to write in a way that has immediacy for the majority of readers. We have to put up material that would find some resonance with the diverse communities of Leicester (hence our new focus pages for Asian Indian as well as African and Caribbean people) and for the wide range of age groups that we have to cater for.

I was thinking, only a last week, about how our content might look to most readers. I would like to say I was soaking in a hot bath while this inspirational thought came to me but actually I was doing the washing up at the time. How do we know that what we are doing is vibrant, interesting and relevant?

That's a pretty good question for an Editor to ask. Asking such a question is easy; figuring out how to get an answer - well, that's decidedly more difficult. As I dried the dishes, it occurred to me that one possible technique is what I call peer review.

I am not trying to side step the issue of asking our readers what they think. That is important. This line of thinking is more to do with the technicalities of Editing - asking one's peers (other editors) what, in their view, we have achieved or failed to achieved. If someone has had several years experience of editing a magazine, about the arts or anything else (within reason), they should be able to look at the fruits of another journalist's efforts and give considered feedback. Possibly.

Wikipedia (that font of all human wisdom and knowledge) defines it thus:

Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field . Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility. [Wikipedia]

It's a process that is well entrenched in the field of academic publishing. I tried Googling to see if I could find anything about the use of peer review in magazine publishing. Plenty to do with Science and Medicine but the Arts? You must be having a laugh. I did find a comment from Charlotte Higgins that I liked:

'Peer review naturally favours the mainstream, and has no interest in the avant-garde or the marginal. Peer review relies on a self-selecting group of people who get together and decide, in their own interests, what good work is." Apply that to, say, the theatre, and we're doomed.' [The Guardian On Culture Blog.]

Interesting but not enough. We devote much of our work to reviewing other people's efforts: bands, authors, play writes, film makers ... but on one has ever reviewed our work. Well, we haven't asked any body to do that. Should we?

28th February

How do you read a 500 page magazine?

TODAY marks a milestone in the history of artsIn Magazine; we now have over 500 pages online (515 to be precise.) How do you read that?

So, why do we have 500 pages about the arts and entertainment in Leicester/shire? Simples. It is an area of the country that generates huge volumes of stuff which can be written about.

News, copy and information floods in to this office every day of the week. We have to sift, sort and schedule our production on a daily basis. We cannot possibly publish everything that comes in here. We would need a newsroom the size of the Guardian to do that.

What we try to do - and it's a considerable challenge - is to get readers to the pages they are interested in, as best we can, given the severe limitations of our technology. We are still in the middle ages as far as online publishing is concerned ... the reasons why are financial. That's another post I need to write up.

How the hell does it all work?

New readers might complain they cannot figure out how it all works. Returning readers might complain that they could not find the page they were looking for. What's made it even more difficult is that this year we have been reorganising many of our pages into new structures - in an effort to make it easier to find pages!

I say 'easier' with a sense of irony because I know that these improvements will only serve to bewilder our poor readers even more. We had to do it and in the fullness of time it will begin to bed in and make sense.

I frequently look at big sites - Wikipedia, The BBC and so on - to see how they do it. It doesn't help much. These big players in the web game are backed by massive amounts of money and can afford the latest technical solutions. Sadly, here at artsIn, this is not the case.

My job is to provide copy - stuff for you to read - and to make sure you can actually find it. Quite a challenge, not least in balancing the time I spend publishing material and the time I spend bashing out links to it.

26th February

The Sun this Sunday

OUTSIDE Leicester's city centre is bathed in bright February sunshine. It's cool but not freezing. So I decided to head off to the 'Newsy' to pick up a copy of Rupert Murdoch's replacement for News of The World.

Ten shillings for a newspaper! My Mother wouldn't have been able to pay that, God rest her soul. The shelves of the Mercury Shop are festooned with papers. Can Mr. Murdoch go on cutting down half a rain forest a year to sell papers?

Eco-friendly artsIn has never chopped down a single tree in its six years of life. I settled down with a cup of fair trade coffee to see what the writers of Wapping had been doing this week. The front page had only one lead story - about a woman called Amanda Holden - no idea who she is but it was a heart-wrenching story.

The Red Top rag included a handy pull out and chuck sports supplement called Goals Plus. That went straight in the bin. When we designed the layout for our current version of artsIn, we decided to emulate the Red Tops for our page banner.

Turn to page three and a naked Kelly Rowland appears under the heading 'Rowl Model.' In this case, her mammary glands are covered by her hands, presumably in an effort to spare the blushes of a family sunday around the paper before the roast comes out of the oven.

A new Sun rises today

'WELCOME to a new dawn' , trumpets the leader on page 12. 'As The Sun rises for the first time on Sunday', Murdoch reads the riot act to the hacks in Wapping. The only thing reporters will be tapping from now on are their keyboards. 'We will be the most lively, interesting, informative and entertaining news source in the business.' Well said Dominic Mohan. Dom wants to ensure 'That we remain fearless, outspoken, mischievous and fun.' I'll drink to that! Would that I could aspire to that worthy goal.

In the newspaper industry it's all about distribution. Mr. Murdoch can shift mega van loads of papers because he heads up the outlets chart. When it comes to selling papers, logistics wins over literacy. Scribblers here in Leicester will be taking lessons from the wombles of Wapping in how to write 'headlines that are famous worldwide.'

Readership numbers falling like trees

Interestingly, a little ad on page 12 offered readers an' App for their phones', so they could gen up on the gossip without getting out of bed. Useful for the paper's 7.7 million C2 adults who can now nab news on 'paper, web and app.'

With sales of newspapers falling like the trees they consume and on-line readership stats soaring, is there a future for stuff you go to the newsagents to buy? We think not. Publishing is heading inexorably into the digital age. We want to be in the vanguard.

17th February

What is a magazine?

I INSIST that what you are looking at now is a magazine. Some technics might wish to discuss or argue about the difference between a magazine and news paper.

Many general readers however have commented on the use of the term magazine to reference this online collection of 500+ pages of content. "It's a web site", they cry.

My usual reply is to say "Ok when you go to your local corner shop, do you ask for a collection of sheets of paper with writing on?". No. You ask for a newspaper or a magazine and usually you ask for it by its name or title: The Leicester Mercury, 69 Magazine, a copy of The Guardian, etc.

Do people go on-line to look at websites?

In the world - the way it is now - joe public regards anything you see in a web browser's window as being a 'web site'. Except perhaps a shop; is Amazon a web site or a shop? Does the average net ferret go on-line to look at web sites? No. They fire up the web to get information, to read stuff that interests them and to do their shopping. They don't go on to critique the art of web monkeys.

For centuries the English language has been changing. Words, phrases and terms for things in the world about us continually change. New words are introduced into the dictionary. Definitions of words are updated to reflect the changing ways in which they are used.

As a writer, scribbler and wordsmith, this is of great fascination to me. Some of it I like and some of it dismays me. I am a huge fan of The English Language. Whilst I can sometimes deplore the way in which people are using it, abusing it and bowdlerising it, I too want to change it. My contribution to the inexorable march forward of English is to change the definition of the word Magazine.

In the age of new media and the Internet, a magazine (periodical or news outlet) can take a variety of forms, some of which involve paper media but which, in these days, are also likely to include on-line media.

My insistence that this outlet is a magazine is as much a reflection of the flux in current usage of the term, as it is a personal mission to add my two penneth to the re-definition of the word That oft quoted phrase of Karl Mark keeps popping into my head:

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

I was forced to read Marx at University!

14th January

Curating Leicester's culture

ANOTHER year lies ahead. Since 2005, working on this web site come magazine, has been an all-consuming passion of mine.

It started life simply as a web site, an idea that spun off from another site I had created. It developed into a magazine, delivered over the Internet. Editing it has posed some challenging issues and decisions, not least how to effectively organise over 500 pages of material.

One of the reasons why the whole thing is so large, is that I have a mission to curate the history of the arts. Once we publish an article, it stays published. After journalism, history is another of my passions. Our pages capture a snap-shot of the artistic and cultural life of Leicester/shire over the time zone of its current activity - from 2005 to the present day.

Admittedly it was not until about 2008 that I started to systematically archive pages. Delving back into music events that took place in 2007 or 2008 might not be everyone's bag but for me the change, growth, development and trends in our local arts and culture are worth curating. By retaining pages online, rather than just deleting them once that year is over, is worthwhile, if only to the tiny number of people who do actually finding meaningful insights into the present day by reading about the past.

The challenge of 600 pages

My job as editor is to make sure, as far as we can, that the pages that most people land on are a fair reflection of what is happening now. So, all this year's pages will be labeled '2012'. If there are pages from previous years, links to them will be available for those who have an interest in delving back, at least as far as our fairly new magazine can go.

The cultural life of Leicester is constantly changing. All genres of art and culture are continually in a state of flux and keeping up with that is one of our biggest challenges. Some of our material is news, as you can see through the pages of our new section that gathers news-related pages into one place.

Larger pieces that are one-offs, are gathered together in the features section. For those that do have a passion for recent history, we have placed a range of material in our archives section.

Last year, nearly all major pages of the magazine were archived on a regular basis. This resulted in a folder containing 302 PDF files. Some of these might find their way into the online archives folder, in the fullness of time.

Had we the resources, we could do more researching, collecting and archiving but sadly we are stretched to our limits just keeping up with the present.

Other pages you might like:

The editor's column for 2011