Abstract
A writer who helped create a famous co-operative venture with a now defunct magazine wonders if it could be the model to follow for media
I stumbled across a graveyard recently, a web page headed Defunct Magazines of the United Kingdom. I went for a virtual stroll through its pathways and found many familiar names on the tombstones. Some were part of our cultural history: Boy's Own Paper and Picture Post, John Bull and Time and Tide, Lilliput and Tit-Bits, Spare Rib and Race Today, Smash Hits and The Face. Some I had once been thrilled to be published by: Punch, The Listener, New Society. Some – the Anti-Jacobin Review, Aunt Judy's Magazine – had passed me by. But the one that caught my eye was City Limits (born 1981, died 1993).
There had been a few brief mentions of it recently: a reference to “dear, dead City Limits” in an article by Julie Burchill in The Observer; a paragraph or two in Ken Livingstone's memoirs; a less than complimentary piece in The Guardian; and a scant entry in Wikipedia. City Limits was – and remains – an oddity. A news, arts and listings magazine about London, run as a co-operative, where everyone on a staff of more than 50 – editor, receptionist, film critic, typesetter, news reporter, ad salesperson – received exactly the same wage and everyone had an equal say in its direction. Now, in 2013, as circulations tumble and lay-offs loom and as many magazines and newspapers fear they may be hurtling towards the crematorium of print, might that odd way of working have some fresh relevance today? By chance, Co-operatives UK, the central body for such ventures, is embarking on a campaign to save disappearing local newspapers by encouraging them to reconstitute themselves as co-ops.
Some history: City Limits was started by former staff members of the London magazine, Time Out. Since its inception in the dear, dead “alternative” days of 1968, TO had paid its staff the same wages. In 1981, as sales and ad revenue took off and the magazine became a central part of London life, its owner and founder Tony Elliott wanted to create a more traditional pay structure. The staff rebelled.
There was a strike, backed by the NUJ, NGA and SOGAT, which lasted 20 weeks, during which most of the staff were sacked. Forty-two staff members, about two-thirds of the total, decided to start their own publication as a co-operative and to continue the equal pay structure. What to call it? There was a meeting at the Drill Hall off Tottenham Court Road, which had become the strike headquarters. “Lemmings,” suggested one wit. “Paint the Town Red,” said someone else. City Lights was a runner but was pipped by the eventual title of City Limits. The Greater London Enterprise Board, the commercial wing of the Greater London Council, agreed a loan of £100,000. Individual supporters and sympathisers put up a further £80,000, the highest single investment being £10,000. We launched with £180,000 in the bank, less than half the figure we estimated was necessary.
Wildly attired, but which were women or men?
Ken Livingstone, then leader of the GLC, recalled the circumstances in his memoirs: “Making a loan to striking workers horrified the middle-aged lawyers and accountants among the officers, who found themselves negotiating with people so wildly attired they claimed to be unable to tell which were men and which were women, but five years later City Limits had repaid the loan, captured a third of Time Out's readers and was only snuffed out during the recession presided over by John Major in the early 90s. When I reported the loan to the Labour party executives the only dissenting voice came from the print unions.”
The fact that it was a loan – repaid at double-digit interest – was often ignored by the Evening Standard, who portrayed it as a GLC grant. Indeed, CL was one of the most profitable ventures per capital outlay in the GLC's history. Offices were found in Upper Street, Islington. Three external directors, Christo Hird, Helena Kennedy, QC and Richard Humphreys, a sympathetic adland high-flyer, agreed to come on board. An ad campaign, accompanied by a jingle sung by the inimitable Robert Wyatt, ran on the radio and in cinemas.
Our joint editors, John Fordham and Nigel Fountain, penned the opening editorial which read: “The staff of City Limits comprised, until a few months ago, most of the masthead of Another London Magazine. We had a system of equal pay there, going on the principle that if it was worth being a paper that campaigned for change and showed you a good time, then it was worth running it in a way that was unconventional and made work a pleasure. But the owners lost interest in equal pay, and somehow we just couldn't see eye to eye. War followed. Six months, innumerable dismissals, several writs, threats, recriminations, sit-ins, lock-outs, and undignified rumbles later, we have brought you City Limits – a paper that we think you'll agree was worth the fight. Nobody owns us, directs us, or makes us fit whatever ideas they might have about the world. We represent no party and we have no dogma in tow.”
The welcome went on to promise the writing of Alexander Cockburn (who died last year) as the American correspondent, rock writer Nick Kent, and historian Gareth Steadman Jones. The original design was by Dave King, the man responsible for the look of The Sunday Times Magazine in its glory days. The core staff came from Time Out but was reinforced regularly by bright young things. A very random roll-call of staff and freelancers over the years would include Suzanne Moore, Lyn Gardner, Sheryl Garrett, Dave Hill, Michele Roberts, John Wyver, Jenny Turner, Christian Wolmar, Nick Kimberley, Kathy Myers, Saskia Baron, Deborah Orr, Ros Asquith, Judith Williamson, Sean O'Neil, Helen Birch, Melissa Benn, Mandy Merck, Cynthia Rose and Kim Newman. Some, such as Chris Auty and Don Macpherson, eventually went off into film production. Others, such as Tony Ageh, into management at The Guardian and then the BBC. Our main cartoonist was Steve Bell, cataloguing the Thatcher years with Maggie's Farm, soon to be joined by Biff and a young chap called Will Self.
Designer Neville Brody later reshaped the magazine. Celebrity photographer Nicky Johnston cut his teeth there. The Scottish fiddle-player, Robin McKidd, did a racing column under the name Asparagus Tips. And Australian readers might like to know that their master chef and food writer, Matt Preston, ran an imaginative marketing department under the name of Barry Backhander.
I was news editor for the first five years, initially in a newsroom with Beatrix Campbell and Steve Haywood, who went on to BBC's Rough Justice and to co-found Trial and Error for Channel 4. Other reporters came on board as people left – Ferdinand Dennis, who went on to make radio programmes for the BBC, and Jacquie Hughes, an enthusiastic young Liverpudlian who went on to become managing editor of documentaries and history and a commissioning editor at the BBC. Was it exciting? Ask anyone who has ever been in at the birth of a new magazine or newspaper and they will remember those first, heady days. It was a good time to launch – Mrs Thatcher, the Brixton riots, the National Front, “Red Ken,” and the Falklands War around the corner. Did it work as a co-operative? People remember dead magazines in the way that they recall past romances, forgetting sometimes the arguments and heartache and the reasons they broke up, but my own memories – and those of people there in its first half dozen years – remain rosy.
“It offered, albeit imperfectly, an alternative way of publishing,” says Nigel Fountain today. John Fordham, for many years The Guardian's jazz critic, adds that “part of the reason it worked for so long and relatively efficiently was because the first generation of staff were bonded by a prior workplace connection, a bit of post-60s idealism, and by a siege mentality because nobody expected us to survive. But there had to be more to it than that or it would never have made it. It was proof that co-ops were feasible – and enabling and exciting for a lot of people, and very creative too”.
My co-operative was a bit of a nightmare
Some think that such co-operative ventures are fine in theory but may be unworkable in practice. Deborah Orr wrote a piece on the subject in The Guardian last year: “I love the idea of workers' co-operatives, I really love it. But one tiny, nagging matter tarnishes my ardour: I used to work for one, and actually, it was a bit of a nightmare. The offices of City Limits magazine … seethed with victimhood, resentment, factionalism, incompetence and silliness.” Some ex-CLers found her description puzzling as it was not how they would have described their own experience and, as anyone who has worked for any traditionally-structured outfit knows, there is rarely any shortage of victimhood, resentment and silliness anywhere in medialand, whatever the structure. But Orr did conclude that “despite the frustrations, it was truly precious, that co-op, a wonderful failure to have been part of”.
Jacquie Hughes recalls it gave her “huge responsibility, room to learn, the best mentoring … and the co-op environment didn't stop it taking the journalism seriously … it just made for lively discussions about everything from the kitchen to the front covers, from memory!” Ed Mayo, secretary-general of Co-operatives UK, believes that such operations could be just what is needed now. “Co-operatives are an excellent way to run media publications and there are a number of success stories, including Ethical Consumer Magazine, New Internationalist and the West Highland Free Press,” he says. “With the current threats to local media from reduced revenues, we believe that many local papers may be able to secure their future by adopting a co-operative- or employee-owned approach.” To this end Co-operatives UK launch in June a series of eight workshops “for local media and their communities to explore the co-operative option further”. City Limits finally shuddered to a chaotic halt in 1993, after being bought from the receivers in 1990, bought and sold again, and briefly reconstituted as a women's magazine.
A couple of years ago, at the wake for Steve Pinder (one of the magazine's 42 founding members who, as sports editor, had opened the door to much young sports-writing talent – Rob Steen, Huw Richards, Rick Shearman), a bunch of us decided to hold a reunion to coincide with the magazine's 30th anniversary. It was duly held at the Drill Hall. They are always a risk, these events. Will any old grudges – or unfulfilled crushes – float to the surface on a few glasses of booze? But what was striking about the event, attended by nearly 100 old hands, was the sheer bonhomie of the night, and that so many people – whether journalists or admin staff – remarked on how it had been the happiest working experience of their lives.
Of course, the climate has changed dramatically since 1981. The building where CL started life is now an estate agents offering a single house for sale for 10 times the cost of our launch. Time Out became a free-sheet last year after seeing its sales slide from more than 100,000 to half that. New ventures arrive on-line rather than on-street. In fact, Spare Rib – back from the dead – is planning a relaunch, under Charlotte Raven, as both a website and a bimonthly magazine, and will be run as a “members' organisation”. So for anyone starry-eyed enough to want to start their own publishing venture or save an existing one, why not co-operate? It can work. Hence this attempt to remove some of the undergrowth from City Limits's grave and rescue it from what E P Thompson called, in much weightier circumstances, “the condescension of posterity”.
I was recently in a real graveyard, Highgate cemetery, with a friend who wanted to see Karl Marx's tomb. One of the newest gravestones there is that of punk impresario, Malcolm McLaren. His inscription reads: “Better a spectacular failure than a benign success.” Indeed.