Good Journalism Still Thrives

It was great to see Susan Wood back on our screen on Sunday morning’s Q+A programme.

In our household Q+A is probably the most-watched programme of the lot.

Susan interviewed the editor of Time Magazine about Time’s health in this era when print media are being swamped by on-line and other electronic whizz-bangs.

I remember reading Time in the early 1950s when my father discovered it. I was a student and getting interested in the world and its events and issues, such as the US Presidential elections of 1952 when Ike Eisenhower was the successful candidate.

In those days Time made a name for itself renovating the vocabulary and syntax of journalese language to bring in a new succinct style that really packed information into its sentences, and cut out any unnecessary verbiage.

Each week my father and I would fight for the first chance to read the new issue from cover to cover; and then the discussion would run for a day or two as to our opinions on what was reported.

As the current editor told Susan, Time provides a useful summary of the important news, issues and discussion from around the world. In the 50s we certainly soon learned that the magazine’s stance was greatly influenced by its leaning towards the Republican Party, but if you took that on board it was easy enough to discount about 20% of the mildly right-wing bias and reach a middle of the road standpoint.

Q+A, we find, provides a similarly useful concise summary and round-up of the important political and economic issues of the week, with interviews with the key figures, and a pretty unbiased take giving several points of view on each item.

Ten years after we first read Time, I was working in India and still reading each week’s issue, thanks to a gift subscription from my father. Fortunately around that stage I also got the chance to compare it with a similar publication, because I took out a subscription to the Times Weekly Airmail edition, the weekly summary of the London Times newspaper on very light paper, airmailed all over the world.

So on Fridays I would receive the Times from London, and on Monday Time from New York. I regularly found the news from London was a week ahead of the US version, if they both covered the same story.

The record for speed was the week when the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer read his Budget Speech in the House of Commons on Wednesday afternoon, and I read about it in the Times on Friday half-way round the world in the Indian backwater I lived in. And that was before the days of jet-powered airliners.

When we went on our annual holidays, I would send a note to both papers to change the address for the four weeks. The Times continued to come like clockwork, taking the changes of address in its stride, but the American firm did not trust my instructions and wanted confirmation in writing a second time, by which time we had been for our holiday and come home again.

Back in New Zealand, I found the NZ Listener performed something of the same function. For a while I also read the BBC Listener as well and found that useful too. I still remember fondly an article by Clive James on the Wimbledon Championships’ broadcasts: wonderful concise, colourful language and thoughtful opinions.

The editor of Time told Susan that readership has doubled in the last year, largely due to electronic media outlets, and that the future looks bright for the venerable old lady; we hope Q+A has a similarly hopeful outlook.