By Sean Malloy
The alternative newspaper Broadside has joined Modern Times and Australian Left Review. Its last edition appeared last week. Green Left Weekly spoke to Broadside's editor, Ian Milliss, about the reason for the paper's closure and what it means for the future of alternative media.
Milliss saw the major factor in Broadside's closing as "lack of money, meaning lack of time." The paper, intended for the "broad left", began as a weekly last June and switched to fortnightly publication in January.
While Broadside's readership was increasing and subscriptions improving, Milliss said, "the reality was ... it was going to take another six to 12 months to get it to a break-even point. It was said right from the word go that it basically had to support itself after a certain amount of time. Well, then there was no point even though it was getting there. Simply, we ran out of time along the way."
Milliss said that, while there is discussion of a new monthly journal based on the Broadside team, there was still a long way to go.
"There is obviously room for a publication which attempts to give an overview of what's going on, whether it is a weekly, a monthly, fortnightly or whatever. The trouble is, the original concept was more of a newspaper with news, and a monthly becomes something quite different: it inevitably becomes much more features oriented. And I must say Broadside has become pretty features oriented since it became fortnightly."
Milliss said the "basic idea" of Broadside was a sound one. This was to produce "a non-factional paper which gives an overview, just the broadest of activities, like virtually everything you could lump under left and progressive politics.
"No newspaper gets itself together in under a couple of years. So I think there was a degree of naivety in expecting it to actually work within a year.
"My personal estimation would be to take two and a half to three years to really get a paper working properly. It has to actually sink into people's consciousness that it is there, it's going to continue to be there."
How will Broadside's demise affect the future of alternative media?
"I don't think Broadside is the alternative media; obviously there are a lot of others. One of the things that annoys me when people talk about the alternative media is they think of it as a variation of the mass media, the mass media but pushing a different ideology.
"I think that is a basic misconception and an incredible naivety about the way the mass media works. The mass media itself is not that crude, and an alternative media which works on that basis is not going to work either.
"The real alternative media exists in places in which people just don't look. It's trade union journals, it's institutional and organisational journals — there are in fact an enormous range of publications in this country that give alternative viewpoints.
"The problem with them is that most of them are done very badly and very amateurishly. You've got trade union journals which have readerships the size of the mass media; some of them are bigger than mass media publications."
Unfortunately, he said, neither the trade union movement nor the public understands the value of these sorts of alternative media. "Yet those and similar publications are the real source of alternative ideas in the country."
Agreeing that alternative media needed to cooperate more, Milliss said that "Cooperation really means cooperation. You've got to let other people have their say and have control as well as yourself.
"I think that rules out almost every party paper in the country. They are not prepared to let other people have a say. The very nature of parties discourages diversity of opinion, particularly left-wing parties, which really I see as not very different to religious cults. They are not about politics at all; they are about giving their members a sense of security in the world with lots of regularly repeated homilies, like everyone other than themselves is terrible.
"That's the big problem in terms of doing any cross-factional paper in the left. You will still get people behaving in a factionalistic way, and you'll get people who regard the people who are on the left with them as being more the enemy than the right wing."
The Sydney Morning Herald on April 6 quoted Milliss as saying that Green Left Weekly was "part of party propaganda", rather than an independent paper such as Broadside.
Explaining this statement, Milliss argued, "A party paper is any paper in which every article in it has a consistent line which agrees with any other article in it. You're pushing a line rather than trying to open up debate between a wide range of people and that is really what is needed on the left, a bit of debate.
"The left has basically had an imagination bypass in the last 20 years. Most people on the left are just really religious obsessives who aren't interested in politics. They are just interested in repeating the same old formulas over and over again, and that is basically why the left has failed.
"Any paper which has just got a consistent line all the way through it falls into that trap. One of the things about Broadside is, d itself on a regular basis from page to page. I think that is basically what's really needed.
"Even in Broadside, it must be said, the paucity of thought on the left was often quite obvious, there was very little innovative ideas that came out. I think it is very unfortunate and indicative of the situation of the left."