Diary of a Magazine Editor (12)

January 21, 2011
COVER_CT_FEB11

Alex Wade reports on life after the seventh issue of Cornwall Today under his tenure hit the streets.

Here I am on the home straight. The February issue of the magazine is now on sale, which means – assuming Kirstie Newton’s maternity leave lasts for the year envisaged last June, when I arrived – that I’m five issues from completing what has been an exciting and rewarding role.

Prior to accepting the Acting Editorship, I had edited supplements for the Guardian but, other than that, editing was new to me. I have to say that I’ve got pretty used to it now. Even the 10 days or so before press day, always fraught in monthly magazine publishing, are enjoyable, and there’s a real sense of achievement once the designers have sent all the PDFd pages to the printers. (Talking of the designers, hats off to the team at Cornwall Today – Ed Andrews, Rob Coumbe and Anne Nicholls do a fantastic job every month.)

The latest issue has possibly my favourite cover of the seven I’ve put to bed. It’s a shot of Sennen Cove in a winter storm by Mike Newman. It beautifully distills the fury and grandeur of the raging Atlantic in the far west: you simply don’t get a sea like this elsewhere in Britain.

Inside the magazine there are a couple of other features which, for me, really stand out. The first is on the nature of being Cornish in the early 21st century. We interviewed a quintet of leading Cornishmen – Pete Goss, Dave Meneer, Nicholas Rodda, Will Coleman and Old Mike (of The Cornishman fame) – and asked them to sum up what Cornwall means to them. Of particular interest was Cornish activist Will Coleman’s assertion that being Cornish isn’t just about ancestry or birth, but can be a matter of conviction and/or allegiance.

Another great piece is an exclusive by Bo Hilton on his father, the late, great Roger Hilton, a major figure in British and European abstract art from the 1950s until his death in 1975. I know Bo, who is himself a very talented artist, and it was a pleasure to run what is a first in British art history terms – until now, Bo had not written of his memories of his difficult, challenging but brilliant father.

As ever, it all goes to show that there’s a lot happening down here in the west of Britain. I hope to keep up the interest for another five issues until Kirstie Newton returns, but meanwhile, for those wondering whether I’m still freelancing here and there, the answer is yes – see The Times tomorrow for a review of The Fighter, the new boxing film starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale, and click this link to check out an ongoing media law project that I’m editing for The Guardian.

 

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If you’re Joey Barton, attack is not the best form of defence

May 17, 2012

Interesting times, these, in the life of Joey Barton.

If the violence displayed by the QPR captain at Manchester City last Sunday was remarkable, his subsequent conduct on Twitter has been astonishing. Barton appears to have radically reinterpreted the notion that attack is the best form of defence, lashing out at all and sundry via a series of tweets whose ultimate effect is entirely self-destructive.

In the past 24 hours, Barton has accepted one charge of violent conduct at the Etihad Stadium but denied another. The FA seems set to throw the book at him, and his club has declared that it will deal with the matter after the result of the FA investigation. Conspiracy theorists might conclude that QPR’s management team and board hope that the FA ban Barton for so long a period (four months and more) that their reported desire to rip up his contract can only be bolstered.

What, then, should Barton do? Should he:

(a) Keep his head down and say nothing, or

(b) Issue a sensible statement in which he acknowledges that both his conduct at the Etihad and subsequent tweets have brought QPR into disrepute, and

(c) Add an apology to said statement, or

(d) Go to Portugal, log onto Twitter and tweet that the world is against him but that he doesn’t care because everyone is a moron and he’s worked really hard to get where he is and if anyone is nasty to him again he is going to expose their secrets.

The answer is not (d).

The moral of the story is that if you’re a loose cannon, when you turn attack into defence there is a danger that you will blow yourself up.

Gunning foglessly for clarity

May 15, 2012

A fine piece, this, on Winston Churchill’s gift for language and the obscurantism that goes with so much corporate communication.

But wait, what’s this? Could this injunction have been phrased rather more successfully:

Be concrete, not abstract. Use metaphors to get your message across.

Metaphors are, by definition, not exactly concrete. But be that as it may: there is a lot of sound advice in Clare Lynch’s piece and a revelation, too. We had never heard of the Gunning Fog Index.  But it exists, and reveals the age at which someone would have to leave full-time education to understand given text.

We’re pleased to display our own Gunning Fog rating for the above words. That of the Churchill speech cited by Ms Lynch was 9.698.

The Gunning Fog index is 9.585

Spin at the Leveson Inquiry

May 9, 2012
Leveson witch hunt

The idea that Lord Justice Leveson and his Inquiry’s QC, Robert Jay, are in need of PR advice is intriguing.

Surely their respective tasks ought to be immune from spin? Then again, perhaps the way in which they execute them is deserving of some communications advice. Either way, times have changed. A similar inquiry from yesteryear (and such do exist) would surely not have been accompanied, albeit informally, by communications advice.

Pictured courtesy of this Flickr user: a portrait of the Leveson Inquiry.