The Monthly maelstrom

There is something very depressing about the cover of The Monthly’s latest edition. I’m aware that when a magazine’s editor departs so abruptly, it leaves a vacuum, but seriously: the white background, the dull typeface, the uncomplimentary colour scheme. It looks like a blank document on Microsoft Word. It’s a far cry from the cover of the first edition of The Monthly that I ever bought, which wasn’t much different in concept. One colour, but a lurid green to complement ‘Out of Control: the tragedy of Tasmania’s forests’: a feature essay by Richard Flanagan.

The cover of the current edition kind of embodies how I feel about The Monthly now. For several months after reading that first edition, I bought every following edition. Eventually, though, I stopped buying it because I tired of reading the same writers every month. There is a certain circle of essayists that dominate the pages of The Monthly: Robert Manne; Judith Brett; Gideon Haigh; John Hirst; Don Watson; Alice Pung; Mungo MacCallum and a handful of others.

It takes a skilled hand to write those sprawling New Yorker-style essays, and the most frequent contributors are all good writers, but in a magazine that pitches itself as a podium for new ideas and sharp social commentary, I find the resolute attachment to a clique frustrating—and boring. It seems that by sticking with the same writers in every issue, they’re not seeking to reach an audience so much as satiating the audience they already have, and it makes for a stale publication.

The habit bleeds into Black Inc.’s Best Australian Essays series which, in the past, has prominently featured essays either previously published in The Monthly or written by its regular contributors. It’s possible that the essays sourced from The Monthly were the best written, but considering that the editor’s notes to anthologies often lament being buried under a torrent of submissions, couldn’t more essays have been included that were outside of Black Inc.’s arc?

In a review of Best Australian Essays 2008—edited by David Marr—Sydney Morning Herald reviewer Gerard Windsor points out that, by page numbers, 47% of the content originates from The Monthly. The collection is praised for its quality and Windsor states that The Monthly essays are the best in the collection. Each editor will shape an anthology differently—I thought it amusing that Marr included an essay he wrote himself—but I’m curious to know whether The Monthly essays were the best out of every submission that Marr received, when almost half of the source material originates from one publication under the same publisher.

The fanfare over the appointment of Ben Naparstek—The Monthly’s new editor—to replace former editor Sally Warhaft, has focused on Naparstek’s age. At 23, he is unusually young for such a position, especially in a magazine that isn’t renowned for publishing a raft of young writers. Having volunteered in student media for a few years, I’m aware of the media’s propensity to snort at younger people in coveted positions, and of the assumption that youth is a synonym for incompetence. There were a few exceptions to this kind of commentary: Meanjin editor Sophie Cunningham wrote a post about Naparstek and the negative responses she experienced as a young person in the publishing industry.

I’m inclined to think it’s resentment in some cases: there are surely writers and editors out there who don’t appreciate a ‘zygote’ like Naparstek being the editor of a national magazine at 23. I don’t know whether Naparstek has experience in magazine publishing or not, and clearly experience helps, but I don’t see that there is anything about publishing that can’t be learned on the job. It’s not a superpower. Warhaft edited The Monthly for several years and, while older than Naparstek, she was an anthropologist when she started there, not a publisher.

It’s not that you can’t kid around (pun intended) and I thought the zygote joke was funny, but the disproportionate focus on age becomes patronising and some commentators simply couldn’t contain their amusement. Crikey’s Jonathan Green chortled. While I respect Green’s point that—given the reported stoush between Warhaft and chairman of The Monthly’s editorial board, Robert Manne—editorial influence at board-level is a cause for concern, phrases like ‘work experience kid’ and ‘year 12 English’ are unnecessary. As though Naparstek will ride to work on a scooter and shot Jäger-Bombs on his lunch break. The mirth! Such responses are demonstrative of a wider problem around media coverage of young people, but I’ll save that for another rant.

For my part, I think Naparstek’s appointment is exciting. It’s a bold move in the current landscape and, for The Monthly, it has the benefit of generating publicity—I’m sucked in to buying the first issue edited by Naparstek just to see if there are any differences. It might be a slow progression and the point made about board influence is one to keep in mind, but a new, younger editor could mean a more diverse pool of writers flowing onto The Monthly’s pages. It might not—but hey, at least it made things interesting.