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| NEW INTERNATIONALIST 216 | |||||||||||||||||||||
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| THIS MONTH'S THEME | |||||||||||||||||||||
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A
journey to the heart of Vietnam The
land of Vietnam Land
in hand Through
the lens After
the typhoon Adventures
in the flood War stories The American
Dream
Simply... a history of Vietnam Coming
to terms |
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VIETNAM |
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| FROM THIS MONTH'S EDITOR | |||||||||||||||||||||
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It's true I could have constructed a magazine on Vietnam easily enough in a more conventional way: commissioning, say, one article on the economy, one on ecology and another on women, and then weighing in with an editorial of my own that tried to pull them together. But would anyone bar those with an already keen interest in Vietnam have read such an issue? I doubt it. This is a problem we're trying to come to terms with at the moment. We believe the NI should focus on particular countries once or twice each year; that every once in a while we should offer our readers the chance to get to know a place in more depth than our Country Profile section could ever afford. We also believe we shouldn't choose those countries according to conventional news criteria; we shouldn't mimic the journalistic troubleshooters who only fly into a place when something awful happens that will look good on TV. If CBS TV hasn't found anything worth reporting on for years in, say, Zaire, that's all the more reason why the NI should be in there unearthing the many wonderful or terrible stories waiting to be toid. The trouble is, recent readers' polls have suggested that NI issues focussing on single countries are less popular and less read than our more normal theme magazines - unless, as with Palestine / Israel last year or South Africa a few years back, they happen to be in the news. This is understandable enough: in a busy world which bombards you with information all the time, it is hard to raise enough interest to read a whole magazine about a country with which you have no point of reference and are never likely to visit. The theory behind this issue is that if we introduce such a country through the travels and travails of an editor abroad then it will have more chance of catching your interest - perhaps because you will then be seeing the place through the eyes of someone who is encountering it for the first time, and who notices the things that you might if you were there too. Of course the weakness in this theory is that the reader has to be interested in the observations and idiosyncrasies of the writer - and by pushing myself to the fore I may well end up alienating more readers than I win over. I must admit the theory was bound to appeal to me because it enabled me to write about Vietnam in the way I wanted anyway. I enjoyed the travel itself, of course. In the days when I used to travel in Asia for pleasure and 'enlightenment' instead of for my job I would have given my right arm for the privileges of a journalist (an interpreter at your elbow, access to information and 'important' people). I've relished the challenge of writing a whole magazine, too. I've enjoyed trying to entertain while at the same time introducing the dreams and dilemmas of a country the world once loved to hate - but which it has since more or less forgotten. |
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Chris Brazier for the New Internationalist Co-operative |
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Letters
COVER PHOTO: Carol Lee / Network |
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How
presumptuous is it of me, I wonder, to write an entire magazine based on my
experiences travelling through a country and then expect you to read it? Why
should you be interested in one person s view? 
