In 1967 a near-fatal disease struck The New Yorker then, as now, one of the most successful magazines on the planet. The publication picked up the virus when it ran a detailed feature on the war in Vietnam. Written by one Jonathan Schell, a Harvard graduate with the credentials to get himself invited along on helicopter assaults and bombing missions, the piece told of the experiences of American soldiers and enemy civilians during the obliteration of the village of Ben Suc. It was the first feature amongst many in The New Yorker’s anti-war crusade.
Fortunately for the owners, the virus kind of petered out before The New Yorker keeled over. Diagnosed in hindsight as a severe case of “bad demographics,” the source of the malady was found to be the college students across the country who were reading the magazine because of its moral stand, which was why the median age of readers had dropped from 48.7 to 34 and advertisers were placing with competitors. Convalescence was protracted, but by the 1980s with the war and the social upheaval over The New Yorker was being read once again by the well heeled, it was selling over 4000 pages of advertising per year, and profits were back to their pre-disease levels of $3 million.
So The Media’s cover story this month isn’t really touching on a new dilemma in publishing. The fight for adspend in South Africa’s financial print market in 2003 is vicious. It’s a fight for the county’s wealthiest readers, the largest corporate advertising budgets. But it’s also a fight that’s taking place against larger socio-economic questions. As revision of the old JSE rule threatens once-secure revenue streams, can the individual titles afford to consider how they influence business and consumer confidence in a country in transition? When there’s always a tough competitor waiting to take up the slack, can these titles adopt a more inclusive editorial philosophy?
The financial editors feature strongly in our story. Conceivably, they would admit to the difference between their autonomy and that of William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker during its revenue disease. Shawn just carried on publishing his anti-war stories through the slump. Commenting on this hard-nosed position, he said: “I don’t know if you tried to start up a New Yorker today if you could get anybody to back you.”