MARCH/APRIL, 2024
In January I travelled into Manchester by crowded tram during the morning rush hour. Of the 200 or so commuters I could see in front and behind the only person reading a newspaper was a young lady standing by a door. The tabloid free sheet, Metro, given away at all stations along the line, occupied her for under one stop. As I’ve discovered for myself, it would be insulting to Beryl the Peril to call Metro a comic – I can’t fathom why they bother printing it. No one I could see was reading either a book or a magazine; instead, nearly everyone was staring as if hexed into their mobiles. The lady next to me was wearing what looked like white clothes pegs on her ears and watching the telly. I don’t know what others were so absorbed with on their phones, but a number impressively speed-typed using only their thumbs. Fifty years ago when I was a clerk in central London I took the Victoria Line to work from Highbury and Islington (it was in the days when the flower stand outside the Tube station was run by cartoon cockney Arthur Mullard) to Warren Street. Half the carriage would be reading a morning paper – it was admittedly a struggle to fold a broadsheet on a busy train, but we managed albeit at the cost of inky fingers. Some had heads buried into books and magazines while others nodded off and a minority stared ahead catatonic.
Draw your own conclusion from these observations. My own unscientific one is that print journalism is finished. This much has been obvious now for decades. Newspaper circulation is a fraction of what it was even ten years ago, and decreases every year. Most papers make eye-watering losses. As people turn for free news to their phones and computers, and as newspaper titles come to rely heavily on digital subscriptions and website advertising, the demise of expensive paper publications is inevitable.
Among the complex reasons for this slow death is not just the high cost of newspapers but that those who were brought up to read dailies as a habit are either dying out or have saved money by switching instead to the great information giveaway that is the internet. The former cause is certainly the case with The Jackdaw which, like many recently demised small circulation specialist papers, will, like its subscribers, itself eventually expire.
As print costs have fallen dramatically courtesy of computer technology and specialist short-run printing machines, postage has accelerated in the opposite direction. The price of a stamp increases at more than the rate of inflation every year while the service delivered is little better (if at all) than one imagines it might be in the Third World. Over the relatively short life of The Jackdaw the cost of postage has increased by over 500%. Additionally, the service has got markedly worse. The Royal Mail never keeps to its promised delivery dates, which, I believe, they simply make up. This is true especially for foreign mail which takes twice the time they say it does to arrive – and in the case of Australia and the USA is at least three or four times the promised seven days. Post-Brexit, many copies sent to the continent are returned for no apparent reason. The Royal Mail is a joke and an immediate deterrent to producing any marginal paper like The Jackdaw. And don’t get me started on the number of copies that simply fail to arrive. A long time ago Private Eye reported that the rings of Saturn were made up of unsold copies of a new (and very shortlived) magazine published by their bête noire Sir James Goldsmith. The Royal Mail must somewhere have its own equivalent rings, its very own landfill perhaps for letters and packages they simply can’t be bothered to deliver. As we’ve recently realised with its malicious prosecution of innocents, the Post Office is unfit and exists for a reason other than public service. And so – if they can afford the effort and expense required by the change – low circulation publications are driven online; or, more likely, most just cease through sheer exhaustion in the face of irresistible economic forces and dying interest.
160 years ago in Our Mutual Friend, the adorable Bella Wilfers, secretly married the same morning, sends at lunchtime a letter to her mother in Holloway from Greenwich; it would have required a penny red stamp – that is, an old copper penny the equivalent today of under half of 1p. She knows this will be received 12 miles away before she arrives home with her new husband later that same evening. A century later, in the early 1960s, I would write home from a state-run boarding school (usually a pack of censored lies about how happy I was) knowing it would arrive without fail 200 miles away next morning at the cost of a tuppence ha’penny stamp (1p). In 2024, following countless technological revolutions, it takes five days for an envelope costing 154 pence to be delivered three miles from where it was posted – I’ve tested this! I submit that you have to be deliberately trying hard to wreck the efficient system taken for granted by Bella to turn it into as poor, unreliable and overpriced a service as we now receive.
Perversely, the only art publications to buck this trend of inevitable forced closures will be those kept alive, come what may, by, firstly, wealthy individuals unconcerned (if temporarily, as is usually the case) by losses and, secondly, by those in receipt of annual State Art subsidy via the ‘arm’s-length’, ‘independent’ Arts Council. And so the taxpayer will keep alive those artificially protected against economic realities irrespective of their performance, service or circulation … or even the need for them at all. If you are lucky to be aboard its gravy train, State Art is a brilliant system of self-perpetuating immunity to outside circumstances – as was proved when some of its clients actually prospered during Covid lockdowns when so many independents went bust. State Art carries on regardless while everything around it collapses.
The British Art Journal, started in 1999 by Robin Simon a year before The Jackdaw, has recently published its last issue (first and last covers opposite). It is an irony that, coincident with its demise, the campaign started decades ago by Professor Simon, which argued for the removal of punitive museum reproduction fees, has at last succeeded. The end of the BAJ is a sad waste of an important resource produced against the headwinds facing all such publications. Over its lifetime it has been a major contributor to the research of historical British art, adding important detail to our knowledge of both well-known and obscure artists. Many young scholars published their first work here. Always run on a shoestring, it appeared courtesy of generous sponsors but especially by the efforts of a few dedicated individuals.
If public subsidy of the arts was doing its job properly, this crucial resource would be nurtured in preference to papers whose only purpose is to promote a species of contemporary art favoured by a prejudiced, corrupt and flawed State Art system.