Just when the global news media is falling over itself to feed audiences with nuggets of information conveyed instantly and at minimal cost, Stryker McGuire wants to slam on the break and go in the opposite direction.
Having run the London bureau of Newsweek magazine for 12 years, McGuire rejects the apparent consensus among modern news organisations that the public has lost its appetite for in-depth journalism. So while the rest of the world speeds up towards immediate online publication, Stryker wants to slow down the pace and publish every three months, in print. While others offer bite-sized news, he wants 6,000-word articles.
He has founded International Quarterly, a project based on the proposal of making "good international journalism and a new model for relationships between those who produce that information and those who need it". Now he only needs to find 70 patrons willing to put up £6,000 a year to fund it.
"I want to... get back to slow journalism," says the New Yorker, who officially retired from Newsweek in April and lives in London. "...it's a return to an old way of doing things".
His plan is for a journal that costs £8 per issue and pays writers the (quite unheard of) rate of £1.50 a word. "There are people who are worth that – think about what lawyers or bankers make," says McGuire. The nearest comparable titles to International Quarterly are American-based heavyweight journals that tend to have the word "foreign" in their title, reflecting their approach to global affairs. "London is a much more international city than New York or Washington, because Britain is not a superpower. The City of London is more international than Wall Street."
McGuire, 61, who oversaw the Newsweek coverage of the OJ Simpson trial, the Waco siege and the Oklahoma City bombing, seeks a mix of content that includes a policy-based piece, something on economics, and science, some reportage, a themed review section and an interview by a famous person, i.e. Tony Blair interviewing the Pope.
International Quarterly's reportage would aim for the heights achieved by Ryszard Kapuscinski, and McGuire cites Christina Lamb and the Americans George Packer and Thomas Lee Anderson as writers he admires. Already, he has important collaborators in the project, including Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC's Global News division, Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair's former chief of staff, and Frances Cairncross, the rector of Exeter College, Oxford.
The economic downturn will not help McGuire to find his benefactors but he is not in a hurry. The journalist who some believe coined the notion of "Cool Britannia", through his 1996 Newsweek cover story under the headline "London Rules", says the British media, through its availability online, is playing a role in shaping American public opinion.
"People in the United States are interested in what the British have to say about the American election. This interest in British media was really given a big boost by the war in Iraq, because the British media got sceptical about Iraq much earlier than the US media."
He is concerned about the decline of the American press, saying it is reducing further the people's understanding of foreign affairs. In US cities the size of Edinburgh, local newspapers now carry just a single page of world news, usually relating to events in Iraq, he says. "It's very sad, and ironic, given... we need to know more about the world than ever before."
Though coverage of world affairs can now be found in abundance online, such information will pass by the casual reader, says McGuire. "There's a really important difference between making an effort to get stories online and having a newspaper that you get every morning of your life, that lands on your doorstep and you open it up and are exposed to things that you would not even know to look for."
McGuire praises the British press for being "much more entertaining" than its American counterpart but believes "there's not quite the same premium put on reporting as there is in the United States".
As a seasoned observer of the British newsstand, he says "you have to be almost a media studies person to read the newspapers here, especially on political stories. You have to triangulate stories to figure out what really happened because the newspapers are overtly coming to stories from different ideological standpoints. In the US, the stories tend to be flatter, less colourful and less hyperbolic."
He thinks International Quarterly can benefit from a fairly sober presentation but also be "diverse, accessible and unorthodox", according to the vision he has set out on the journal's fledgling website, www.iquarterly.org. "We want to build a bridge between the best international writers, broadcasters and thinkers, and those who are most curious about the world," it reads. "We propose that the two sides should meet and make things better."
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