The End of Print

Going out on a high, generation gaps, politics

After the magazine's first year I was back at University — well, a different one and a different course, software rather than electronics, having unsurprisingly failed my re-sits' With coursework and studying to fit in, it became progressively more difficult to find the time to run Radio Today. The increase in readership and the size of the magazine were also making it harder for our printers to produce it in a timely manner. This was made worse by the magazine not coming out regularly so they could allocate time in advance on the presses. As a result, some issues spent more than a month at the printers. Radio Today was also costing more and more to keep running, eating into my not exactly substantial savings and student grant.

What probably finally did for the magazine was when I hit the industrial placement part of my course and ended up working at BT's then online division, Telecom Gold, for a year. It just wasn't possible to juggle two jobs any more and combined with the other factors, Radio Today died.

It's a shame it didn't get a chance to go further as I still think the magazine had a lot of potential and ended up a pretty good product. By the final issue, I had a much better grasp on what editing involved, the quality of articles was at its highest from a growing team of able contributors, and the availability of reasonable, cheap DTP software meant it started to look like a real magazine should.

Despite the erratic publication, we were shifting nearly a thousand copies a month at the end and with some big name subscribers, like Tim Westwood and Coldcut's Jonathan More. Even the Independent Broadcasting Authority subscribed, as of course did the DTI's Radio Investigation Service, at their librarian's home address. Still, maybe it's better to have gone out on a high.

There were of course many things I would have liked to have done better had there been the chance. It would have been nice to have had more photos, though that was always a problem given the need to protect people's identities. There should also have been way more interviews with people and less reliance on second-hand information. I was kinda shy though...

I think there were also problems that the magazine was really bridging a generation gap. The rest of the contributors were older than me, from a generation that was now moving into more established radio, while a lot of the pirates we reported on were younger — particularly with the big influx of stations that surrounded the whole acid house movement. Perhaps though that gap could be considered an asset — and maybe helped us fulfil the 'For today's listeners and tomorrow's broadcasters' tagline that the magazine used.

What come across as the more embarrassing pieces now are the ones that dealt with politics. I had this painfully naïve view that licensing a series of stations in a range of different sizes and with a range of different formats was all that was really needed to make everyone happy. The state of the dial in London ten years on from doing just that is testament to the fact that it isn't.

TX / Radio Today was also accused of having a right-wing or libertarian editorial line, lumped in with the other anorak magazines who did generally espouse the benefits of a total free market in radio. I can understand why a superficial read-through might lead someone to think that view was shared, but it certainly wasn't ever the intention. We didn't set out to have a fixed editorial line and contributors had a range of political viewpoints. Our shared motivation was really just a desire for interesting, creative radio of all shades.

Stephen Hebditch - hiding

Look, I read the Guardian — okay?

We did go in for a fair bit of Government bashing over their broadcasting policy failures and ridiculed the DTI mercilessly for their attempts at stamping out the pirates, but just because they were taking away radio we wanted to listen to and failing to come up with an alternative. Chris England's columns drew criticism from some people who failed to get the humour or didn't understand that the point of a columnist is to try and provoke a response. The mid-eighties were very polarised politically though, which made it harder. There had also been an influx of people into the community radio movement who were motivated more by political ideals and the class struggle than by any real desire to make good radio of interest to ordinary people.

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