Nothing ‘Oldie’ is new again, thanks

There are two, and maybe only two, strategies for success in media: Do what everybody else is doing, or do the opposite.

What everybody wants to do now, of course, is forge a digital strategy — that is, a new digital strategy, to be distinguished from the former failed one. This resulted last week in a movement of digital deck chairs: Time’s digital guy, Scott Havens, went to Bloomberg, and NBC hired Nick Ascheim from BBC America, showing Julian March and Richard Wolffe, who had brief digital tenures respectively at NBC and MSNBC, the door.

Everybody wants to reach Millennials. Hence, last week, A&E gave Vice one of its cable channels to run.

For a true instance of doing something profoundly contrary, there was Alexander Chancellor, 75, a British editor who was in the USA for the past few weeks to promote his magazine, The Oldie.

The Oldie is a small phenomenon of British publishing, a growing and profitable magazine that celebrates a certain sort of crankiness and deftly turns its back on any interest in the young, or even in being young. Indeed, reading The Oldie is not so much to feel that you’re old — not like, for instance, Modern Maturity, with its rapturous celebration of retirement possibilities — but to feel that the young and their aspirations and enthusiasms do not exist. Or at least don’t impinge on the world in any meaningful way.

The unstated but powerful message of The Oldie is a deep satisfaction, even sense of value, in not having to keep up.

This is relevant as a media model, as well as a media message.

The most elemental part of a media business used to be the precise articulation of whom a media product was for. If you could describe an audience and have substantial insight into its most powerful longings and were able to speak to its sense of self — its conceits, prejudices and aspirations — that was a potentially very profitable business. Think Fox News, The Economist, Cosmopolitan, Car and Driver.

That model — a kind of license to print money if your particular media brand became the most efficient way to reach a desirable group — has largely been upended or cast aside in the digital media age. The digital model has evolved from focused audience to undifferentiated traffic. It’s a pure numbers game, and the biggest number wins, meaning a goal of something like world conquest rather than the hope of a highly valued circle of devotees.

Indeed, media companies that once might have had a keen concern about the nature of their audiences now also have to cater to digital ubiquity, always at confusing odds with core identity. Hence, the musical chairs aspects of digital directors. They are hungrily hired and often resentfully fired because their job is so deeply foreign to the established character of a media business.

The Oldie needn’t concern itself with any of this. Other than via a subscription offer, it doesn’t really exist online. To the extent it does, it still boasts of its former editor, ousted several years ago. Indeed, everything about The

Oldie is designed, consciously or not, to protect its readers from evidence that the world has meaningfully changed from, say, 1975. At least not in terms of look and feel and general pace and overall functionality.

This might seem, if not an obvious death wish, at least eccentrically British. Indeed, Prince Charles reportedly is a great fan of the magazine. But this pecu-

liarity — turning its face from the righteous future — makes it in this flattened age sui generis.

One hardly knows whom Time or Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone or

even The New Yorker or The New York Times, all shadows of their former clarity, are speaking to anymore. But in the quickest perusal, The Oldie neatly suggests its reader, a type many of us will be lucky to become: genial but skeptical; not so much angry at the world around us but having seen it all before. A laughingstock perhaps, but a contended one.

Its message, too, is quite valuable and business-minded. That is, the headlong pursuit of newness and transformation is a highrisk one. Some may succeed and change the world, but most won’t. What’s more, the medium is after all the message: In this your fate may be sealed, as print is an expression at odds with digital.

In a way, The Oldie suggests a way forward for print. As television has maintained the uniqueness of storytelling, print, and its variable look and feel and ability to convey complex sensibility, should be in stark contrast to the ever-more commoditized, massproduced digital world — if only it would stand up for itself. Newspapers and magazines ought to embrace their oldieness. Chancellor, a former editor of

The Spectator and of The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, a man of many Fleet Street incarnations, was in the USA on the somewhat quixotic mission to find partners who might help him export The Oldie here — a kind of

Economist for the less successful. This got me thinking about all the ways you could create an Old

ie empire, targeting what must surely be a growing world of people weary of disruption, skeptical of innovation, disheartened by Millennials and depressed by BuzzFeed. A world in which the disaffected can be proud. This could offer retail and lifestyle, as well as publishing, opportunities, not to mention, in an ad-blocked world, an advertiser’s last refuge.

Oh, and definitely there would be a sponsored cruise.

Indeed, everything about ‘The Oldie’ is designed, consciously or not, to protect its readers from evidence that the world has meaningfully changed from, say, 1975.