When Lance Armstrong announced that he was forming a new team to race the 2010 Tour de France, I’d assumed he would get a company like Nike to be the main sponsor or at least a sponsor that would let him call his team LiveStrong – a great name, a great brand. (LiveStrong itself couldn’t sponsor the team because, let’s face it, that would be a complete negation of what that charity is all about, which is about funnelling money into cancer programmes, not buying Lycra for cyclists.)

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Jamie Oliver is up to the third issue of his bimonthly magazine, Jamie. As far as food magazines go, it is excellent – when it sticks to the food. It’s too bad he’s trying to sell the magazine as much on his ‘personality’ as on his authority to publish as a chef, restaurateur and food campaigner. He’s so far been the cover boy for each issue, an iffy ploy, if you ask me, as there’s something about his smug, ‘cheeky chappy’ face that makes me want to punch it. I’m happy to take his advice and follow his recipes – he’s got some great stuff, he absolutely knows what he’s doing – but I don’t want to have to wade through some of the more irrelevant ‘Jamie-ness’ to find it. The rationale might be that ‘he’ sells the magazine, but this could prove limiting as the magazine moves through its life and it could turn off a lot of prospective readers who have the same opinion of his face as I do, but don’t grit their teeth and buy the magazine anyway.

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I read an interesting article online at Newsweek, ‘Can anything save magazines?’. With the recent high-profile demise of Conde Nast’s glossy business mag Portfolio, the question is ‘if Conde Nast can’t do it, who can?’

Anyone who is a consumer of magazines (and particularly anyone who works in the industry) has to have a healthy respect for Conde Nast. In a stable full of good-looking, well-written magazines, its thoroughbreds are Vogue, the biggest fashion magazine in the world with 13 country editions, and Vanity Fair, the sleekest of celebrity / cultural titles. However, as Samir Husni mentioned in the Newsweek article, “It is a crime to sell a subscription to Portfolio for $12 a year.”

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Apparently Ashton Kutcher has over 1million followers on Twitter. With gems like ‘I feel like I'm running for class president. I'll get us pizza 4 hot lunch on Tuesdays AND Fridays!’, obviously this is the voice of a generation. But hey, let’s give the guy a break. What can you say in 140 characters that has any meaning, any wit, any subtlety?
You’d be surprised…

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Being passionate about magazines can really stir a gal up and one magazine that whips me into a frenzy is Tate etc. As a member of the Tate, I get this free each quarter with my membership pack. Every time I get it, I vow to look at it with new eyes, to give it a chance, to open my heart to it. And every time, it takes my open heart and stomps on it. In retaliation, I hurl the magazine across the room in a rage. Why, you ask?

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The new exhibition at the Tate Modern, Defining Constructivism: Rodchenko and Popova, covers the early years when Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova were setting down the foundations of what Russian Constructivism would become after the Bolshevik Revolution. They believed they were imaging a new society, that they could dispense with the visual history of Tsarist Russia and create a utopian vision. They called themselves Constructivists because they believed that they were not ‘artists’ and therefore separate from society, but constructors or engineers who were an integral part of society’s growth.

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Anyone who has read my poem of love to Rouleur magazine in this blog should know that cycling gets me fired up. In fact, I actually signed up for cable TV just for British Eurosport so that I could watch the endless hours of the Giro d’Italia, the Vuelta, the Tour de France and all the spring classics.
So it’s probably little surprise that I love Rapha, the publishers of Rouleur magazine and a company that makes ‘performance roadwear’. (That’s cycling clothes to the uninitiated). Everything about this company screams class and style – and if you’ve seen a professional peloton lately with its aqua blues, lime greens and lemon yellows with sponsors names emblazoned all over them, you’ll know that cycling gear isn’t often described as classy and stylish.

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In the Observer newspaper on 25 January 2009, Lynne Brindley, the chief executive of the British Library, warned of the black hole of history that we may be digging for ourselves by the fact that digital information is not collected in the same systematic way as more traditionally published material.  

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Rouleur is about speed and sass
Rouleur is about style and swagger
Rouleur is about love and hate
Rouleur is about expectation and disappointment
Rouleur is about climbs and sprints
Rouleur is about training and racing
Rouleur is about hard men who cry because they just can’t go on

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Newspapers may be gasping for breath but when there’s an historic event, they get the equivalent of an oxygen tent. The day after Barack Obama won the US Presidential election in November 2008, newspaper owners were caught out and had to restart the presses to try to satisfy demand from readers who rushed to buy up the morning editions.

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