Foreign Policy
Fall 1998

New Audiences

By James Gibney, Managing Editor, Foreign Policy

 

The idea that the public has become largely indifferent to international affairs is one of the more discouraging bits of received wisdom shaping the environment for all our journals. Like most mantras that trip too easily off too many tongues, it should be treated with skepticism. Upon closer examination, today’s protestations of public apathy may have more to do with the way international affairs are presented than the way they are perceived. As Talleyrand said when told that his rival Chateaubriand was complaining of losing his hearing, “He only thinks he is deaf because he can no longer hear anyone talking about him.”

True, the collapse of the Berlin Wall has done more than shatter an ideology, free half a continent, and drastically reshape the strategic landscape. It has also set free a captive audience shackled to the imperatives of superpower conflict and the established parameters of Cold War thinking. Delivered from the threat of imminent destruction, readers seem to have less incentive to plow through our pages, especially when so little of what they are used to reading actually helped prepare them for the world they now face. As crass as it may sound, the Cold War was good for our “business.”

But it does not necessarily follow that the post–Cold War world is one in which the public—the faceless masses who ultimately support our globe-twirling and theorizing—has lost interest in international affairs. On the contrary, a convincing case can be made that our fellow citizens recognize that their lives depend to a perhaps unprecedented degree on circumstances and conditions beyond their borders. Even as U.S. newspapers, networks, and news magazines—outlets that are struggling to maintain their influence—devote less space to foreign news, the amount of international information and analysis conveyed by the Internet, foreign-language cable and satellite broadcasts, and region-specific publications is growing. For all the talk about “globaphobia” and protectionist tendencies, more states, corporations, and small businesses are seeking economic opportunities overseas. While pundits rail about members of Congress who don’t even have passports, state and local officials are devising their own mini-foreign policies, whether slapping sanctions on the Swiss or issuing proclamations on human rights in Burma. And in a striking example of cognitive dissonance, foreign-policy practitioners complain that the public doesn’t care about foreign policy even as many of them fight to prevent the public, through NGOs, from playing more of a part in the policy process. One can agree or disagree with the merits of these respective developments, but it’s hard to say that they represent a dramatic falling off of interest in international affairs.

These factors help explain why we at FOREIGN POLICY are bullish on the market for international-affairs journals. We think that our readership has the potential to grow, not stay stable or shrink. But today’s audience is not the same as yesterday’s. As a journal committed to presenting the best ideas in international affairs to the broadest possible readership (horrors!), we are pursuing several strategies that we like to think are complementary:

A Broader Editorial Focus We don’t think that history has ended, or that human nature has changed. Policymakers and analysts ignore the enduring realities of great-power politics at their peril. But they would be just as foolish to dismiss the enormous changes wrought by globalization as another brief spasm of greater interdependence similar to that which preceded the First World War. Accordingly, we have placed our primary emphasis on exploring new themes, actors, disciplines, and the interconnections among them. A More Global Perspective One of our great comparative advantages is our location in the thick of policymaking in Washington, D.C. But because what happens “there” increasingly matters “here,” we have strengthened our international coverage by assembling a strong roster of contributing editors, seeking out more non-American authors, and striving for a more comparative approach in our articles. We have also moved to expand our international presence through foreign editions and syndication agreements. Greater Editorial Depth and Variety To provide our readers with more direct and timely coverage of the most interesting developments in international affairs, we have developed a Books section that focuses primarily on non–English language works and created a Global Newsstand section that provides brief reviews of journal articles from a variety of countries and disciplines. More Reader-Friendly Features We do not believe that a serious journal must be painful to read. Accordingly, we edit our articles aggressively, eliminating jargon and illustrating theory with concrete examples. Our goal is that an economist should be able to read an article about international security without the need for translation and vice versa. Using charts, sidebars, and illustrations, we also strive to provide more information in ways that are as useful as they are attractive. New Media We believe that the World Wide Web site (www.foreignpolicy.com) we have developed over the last year is an invaluable resource for both the serious scholar and the casual reader.

Of course, a journal lives or dies not by the number of its readers but by the quality of its content. As Moisés Naím noted in his first issue as editor (Summer 1997), “the core of FOREIGN POLICY will continue to be the articles that we publish.” Even as we change to meet the demands of a new era, we strive to live up to the editorial standards set almost three decades ago by FOREIGN POLICY’s founding editors—articles that are “serious but not scholarly, lively but not glib...critical without being negative,” and “‘revisionist’ in the most catholic sense of that word.”