The next 50 years
The recent celebration of 50 years of Fortean Times provoked a number of personal reactions. It is an incredible achievement to keep any publication thriving over such a long period of time – especially in the fickle world of ‘strange stuff’. FT has become, in what is perhaps a minor but nonetheless very real fashion, that most elusive of stations, a ‘national treasure’.
Yet despite this, there is sometimes a whiff of the autumnal in the collective fortean air; Paul Lee’s ‘State of the Spectral Nation’ [FT437:38-41] points towards a sense of decline in the reportage of ghosts; many articles and features look back at “the haunted generation” of the 1970s and 1980s (this is my generation and I love these articles), from public information shorts through to Arthur C Clarke and Readers’ Digest; there is debate in the letters column about the possibility that ‘science’ relentlessly squeezes out the mysterious, reducing the scope of modern forteana.
This made me start to think about the next 50 years of FT. As a publication, FT has always been in the forefront of asking readers what they want in surveys and questionnaires. However, I suspect that many readers are, like me, children of the 1970s and 1980s and therefore very much inclined to favour articles covering these eras (I suspect this based mostly on my own preferences). The question therefore occurs: are we doing enough to engage a younger readership? Following that, might we be actively alienating that more youthful audience by increasing focus upon days gone by, however popular that may be with the current readers?
It seems to me that while FT appeals to me and to my generation, we should not be in the position of concern about the wonderful stories of our youth being questioned or ‘explained’ but should instead be looking at ways of investigating, in those parts of the magazine more detailed than ‘Strange Days’, issues of more concern to a potential younger readership.
None of this is intended as being in any way critical, but is hopefully a stimulus for our wonderfully creative and diverse readership to have more thoughts about securing a readership to take FT to 2073.
Anthony Wilkins
Rishworth, West Yorkshire