'The Comedy Manifesto', The Guardian

Monday, June 05, 2006

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The comedy manifesto: This week the New Statesman aims to break away from its joyless leftwing legacy with a radical revamp. James Silver asks if writers like Julian Clary will boost sales

John Kampfner has a thing for slogans. When he took over the editorship of the New Statesman a year ago, he declared that the magazine would be about "intelligence with edge". "Edge" is one of those rather meaningless words used at media brainstorming sessions, but almost nowhere else. For the record, Kampfner defines it as: "Rattling cages, getting under the skin of issues, breaking stories, antagonising authority and never letting up. It's not about throwing little pebbles, it's about throwing socking great rocks."

This week Britain's leading leftwing weekly unveils a major revamp and a raft of new columnists, including the comedian Julian Clary, former BBC correspondent Rageh Omaar, the economist Noreena Hertz, the author and environmental activist Mark Lynas, the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith and a "civil rights agony aunt". Of course, it also gets a spanking new advertising slogan: "Expand your mind. Change your world." Cynics might consider that rather a tall order for a political magazine with a circulation stuck at 25,000.

Kampfner, 43, characterises the relaunch as "a reinvention of the New Statesman". He explains: "Over the last year we've been addressing the profile of the magazine, laying out the groundwork. What we are now launching is the magazine for the new radicals and the new idealists." And who are they exactly? "People who are interested in being active in improving the world at a time where the public perceptions of the Labour government are steadily falling, but yet what I would call radical activism, manifested in local communities, on the internet, in parts of journalism, and in mainstream politics, is growing. I don't detect any sense of apathy. What we are trying to do is harness and be the voice of this energy."

But the catchy slogan and somewhat breathless ethos aside, what readers will notice when the new NS hits newsstands and doormats later this week is a thoroughly revamped product, designed by Simon Esterson and Stephen Coates. The magazine's size increases significantly, boosting its impact on newsagents' shelves. "The nearest equivalent in terms of size," Kampfner points out, "is the Evening Standard's ES magazine." The paper goes from "gloss" to "silk". The pagination shoots up to 72 pages. There is a new masthead, crisper layouts, "fact boxes" and a price hike to £2.95. Further investment will follow in the autumn for expansion of the NS's website. He declines to give a ballpark figure for the cost of the relaunch, which has so far attracted more than 1,000 new subscribers from pre-launch marketing. "All you need to know is that we put it out to tender and went for the single best magazine designers in the country, so it's not been cheap."

The five commandments Kampfner names five basic "tenets" for the new-look magazine. "Number one is the rattling cages stuff. Two is intelligent, insightful and fine writing. Three is positive, energetic, active. Not shouting from the sidelines and complaining. From the autumn we are going to be doing road-shows around the country. Next is being a mustread, making people who haven't read the New Statesman that week feel exposed. The fifth one - and it's not the least - is that it's got to be enjoyable. It doesn't have to be irredeemably bleak."

The last point is a major admission. Despite having first-rate writers and the occasional agenda-setting scoop - it was political editor Martin Bright who revealed on his NS blog that a terrorist suspect was among the foreign ex-prisoners released by the Home Office, thereby reportedly ending Charles Clarke's tenure as home secretary - the magazine has a lingering image problem to overcome. To put it delicately, it has long been perceived as somewhat joyless and worthy. "I would say that's a lazy perception of old," Kampfner retorts. "We have Britain's top TV satirist in the columnist Rory Bremner. We now have Julian Clary. We also have Neighbours from Hell, this fantastic skit [about relations between Blair and Brown], written by a famous but unnamed playwright, which has had people in stitches."

He then appears to backtrack. "I acknowledge the challenge. But I'm saying that the feedback I've been getting is that we are breaking down old shibboleths, old misperceptions. The design and the layout were reinforcing those. It was not the easiest of reads, visually. We needed to make it visually arresting."

But his biggest headache remains the NS's circulation, which is stuck at about a third of the number who buy or order the magazine it is always paired with, namely the Spectator. "The market is such that the Spectator and ourselves can both flourish. But they are a very different product. My frustration is not that they are selling what they sell and we are selling what we sell, but that we sell 25,000 when the combined readership of the four centre-left titles - the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Independent on Sunday - is more than half a million people. So we are just scratching the surface of the existing centre-left liberal readership."

The Spectator recently underwent an overhaul of its own, and Kampfner chose not to emulate that title's new luxury consumer section. "New Statesman readers don't want what I call louche journalism. They don't want complaints about how the strawberries at Glyndebourne were not quite as good as they once were."

Over at the Spectator's offices in Doughty Street, editor Matthew d'Ancona agrees that their respective magazines "don't fish in the same pool at all". Although he does think Kampfner is tapping into an area where the left is at its most interesting. "Oddly enough, John and I came up through the ranks together and we talk a lot," he says, in an interview carried out before the NS announced its relaunch. "I think he's right that the area where the left is getting fascinating is in the whole anti-corporate and anti-globalisation movement issue. The way that leftwing energy has gone away from international socialism into an anti-corporate, anti- America, anti-Bush movement is extremely interesting."

The left has undergone something of a schism in Britain in the aftermath of the Iraq war, and Kampfner insists his magazine is "a broad church", giving ample space to the range of - often blistering - arguments that rage across the fault-lines. He published the Euston Manifesto - which, in the words of one of its leading lights, Norman Geras, "states a commitment to certain general principles and identifies patterns of left-liberal argument that we think fall short of those principles" - in full on the NS website, although "its critique of the anti-war movement" made his "blood boil".

The Observer columnist Nick Cohen, who is also a NS contributor, is one of the Euston Manifesto's signatories. He thinks the NS does "better than the Guardian and the Independent" when it comes to giving sufficient space to the views of those on the left who are regarded by many mainstream liberals as beyond the pale. "At least you can have arguments in the New Statesman, although they are sometimes very bitter arguments," he says. "On the other hand, it reflects the way the majority of mainstream liberal thinking has gone. Most of the time you will see the characteristic features of modern liberal-left thought that America is responsible for everything. You'll see the reliance on satire and hypocrisy rather than putting forward constructive proposals. When I write stuff like that in the New Statesman, some of its readers go absolutely potty. But it's had editors who are not worried if part of their readership gets upset."

Towards the end of the interview at the NS's Victoria offices, its proprietor Geoffrey Robinson MP, the Gordon Brown cheerleader and former paymaster general, pokes his head around the door. Has the magazine's owner ever attempted to interfere editorially, I ask Kampfner, once his boss has disappeared. "I have good relations with [Robinson]," he replies. "We talk all the time about budgets and advertising. But the day so much as a sentence [of editorial interference] is uttered, I walk."

The NS has made "an appreciable profit over the past several years" - under Kampfner and his predecessor Peter Wilby. Nevertheless, with a significant investment in the relaunch, its editor knows that circulation must rise. "We are a solvent, happy outfit," says Kampfner. "But we've got to raise our ambitions. This is our launching pad. Now is the time for a breakthrough."

(The Guardian, June 5th, 2206)

Posted by James Silver - On Monday, June 05, 2006

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