First Published: Frontline, Vol. 7, No. 9, November 13, 1989.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Frontline is about to go through some major changes – we think for the better. We want to let you know our plans and some of the considerations behind our decision to transform the publication. Getting through the transition ahead will require your support, your feedback and your ideas about how to make Frontline a more valuable institution on the left.
In the broadest sense, change is mandatory just to keep up with a rapidly changing world. When the paper was started six and a half years ago, no one on the U.S. left had heard of glasnost, perestroika or the “new way of thinking”; nor could we have anticipated all the ways in which the domestic political landscape has been altered by Ronald Reagan’s presidency and the resistance to it. For the Line of March, the organization that launched and shaped Frontline through these years, these larger changes were the backdrop for a thoroughgoing re-examination of our perspective and our practice, culminating in a recent conference that formalized our break with ultra-left “vanguardism“ and articulated a new direction for the organization (see “Line of March Sums Up and Transforms,” Frontline, October 30).
In addition, the Frontline staff and editors have been hoping for some time to implement a series of improvements in the paper’s coverage, many of which are motivated by the comments and criticisms we have received from our readers and supporters. All of these considerations have come together in a commitment to produce a better publication, one that builds on the considerable strengths the paper has demonstrated, but one that also takes into account the new political realities around us, as well as the resources we have at our disposal.
The improvements we want to make fall into three categories:
* more attention to our domestic coverage, including the new issues and new movements that have sprung up in the 1980s and will be critical for the left to address in the 1990s;
* less emphasis on keeping up with all the breaking news in every issue, and more emphasis on the analysis of trends, reflection on the accumulated experience of activists in different movements, and debate on political and programmatic questions facing the left as a whole;
* more involvement in the publication at every level by other groups and individuals on the left.
In terms of coverage, we think we’ve done a good job in adjusting our international reporting to the changes in the socialist world and the new climate in international relations. We intend to keep this as a strength of Frontline in the future. Our domestic coverage, however, still has a ways to go to catch up with the consequences of nine years of Reagan-Bushism. More attention has to be paid to illuminating the “social crisis” issues afflicting U.S. urban areas – drugs, homelessness, AIDS – and to understanding and working with the movements that are developing around them. As well, our commitment to stay on the front lines of the anti-racist struggle requires that we look more deeply at the current political motion in the Black, Latino, Asian and other minority communities. And based on the experience accumulated in two Jesse Jackson presidential bids and numerous state and local campaigns, we want to more closely explore the various strategies being tested by the left in the electoral arena.
As a bi-weekly with an all-volunteer staff, struggling to keep up with the very latest news has always been difficult; often it has meant scrambling to put together a last-minute story with little more than educated guesswork. Giving up what we’ve come to call “the tyranny of the news” will mean more opportunity for research, for discussions with activists directly involved in issues, and for presenting in-depth analysis in the areas the left needs to address in order to break out of its current marginality. We have no intention of turning Frontline into a theoretical journal – we intend to keep our focus on the current motion of politics. But we do want to highlight the analytical qualities that have always been the paper’s strength.
Finally, we think it is essential that Frontline find more ways to tap the potential contributions of activists and writers beyond our own staff and our immediate political circles. This will not only bring more diversity and livelier debate to Frontline’s pages, yielding a better and more interesting newspaper. It will enable Frontline to make a greater contribution to the urgent task of developing more dialogue between activists in different sectors of the mass movement, and building greater political and practical unity on the left. Over the last year, we’ve taken a number of steps in this direction, and going even further is a top priority among our current changes. And besides expanding our pool of writers, we want to broaden the range of activists who are central to Frontline’s decision-making process as working or advisory editors.
We’re excited about this direction for the paper. But we’re also trying to be more realistic than we’ve sometimes been in the past about the financial and human resources we have available. Every issue of Frontline loses money, a deficit which our supporters have absorbed through sustainer contributions and an annual fund drive. At the moment, given the paper’s limited circulation, this is fast becoming a losing battle. Similarly, the staff that writes, edits, produces and distributes the paper – after their day jobs are over – is stretched quite thin. This inventory of resources has two main implications.
First, Frontline will be going from a bi-weekly to a monthly publication. While a lot of the pressure here has to do with time and money, we also think that a monthly schedule is more compatible with the goals of improving our analysis and broadening the range of Frontline contributors. A monthly will finally give writers the opportunity to do research and improve their political and journalistic skills; it will provide editors more room for long-range planning, soliciting material from diverse sources, organizing roundtables and debates, and so on. As a monthly, Frontline will still be accountable to current events, but not bound to the immediate headlines, and we think the result should be more thoughtful and more provocative.
The second implication is that to get from here to there will require a transition period lasting several months. Gearing up for the kinds of changes we contemplate will require revamping our editorial and production processes, reconsidering our format, retraining our staff, developing new relationships with others on the left and reconstructing our financial base. Given our limited resources, there is no way we can produce a high-quality bi-weekly and put together what will in many ways be a “new” publication at the same time.
Consequently, regular publication of Frontline in its current form will end with our next issue, Volume 7,Number 10,
dated November27. We’ll use December to get a head start on our projected changes, and reappear in January with a special “transition issue” that will include a report to readers on our progress.
A second transition issue will appear in February. We’re aiming to publish a “pilot” issue of the new Frontline in March. Regular monthly publication will then resume, and subscribers will receive the balance of their current subscription. We’re sorry about the interruption in our publishing schedule, but we think an improved Frontline will be worth waiting for.
Frontline’s accomplishments in its first six-and-a-half years have been made possible by the core of readers and supporters whose enthusiasm, feedback and financial generosity kept the paper alive. During this transition we need your support more than ever.
It would be a real boost to get some financial help – please send us a “holiday gift” if you are in a position to do so. But even more important, we want to receive your opinions about Frontline, particularly about some of the changes we have tried to institute in the past year and the direction we’re now taking. We want to know what kind of articles you would find useful, and what kinds of issues you think a responsible left paper should address. We especially want to hear from you if you are interested in writing for Frontline, increasing its circulation, or helping organize discussion around the ideas in its pages.
This will be a complicated transition, but we’re enthusiastic about the possibilities ahead. We think we can make Frontline a better newspaper and a more effective tool to build the U.S. left. We hope to have your continued support in this effort.