Balanced zines

Growth of alternative football fan networks not only countered the hegemony of the rapacious chairmen or the Government, they were also fighting against the hooligan networks that were damaging the self-image of the game. While some fans wanted to articulate their frustrations by stabbing one another, wrecking football grounds and attacking the police, some wanted to prove that they could voice their grievances in an intelligent fashion and construct a balanced argument.

The Mag attempted to maintain the notions of magazine professionalism in respect to polished production, unbiased content, high standards of writing and desire for objectivity, while never losing sight of its aim of providing access for the minority of NUFC supporters.

In the second issue of The Mag, there is an interview with Malcolm Dix, a member of the Magpie Group, in which he was frank and open about the boardroom situation and their hopes to float the club on the stock exchange. Adjacent to the interview was a statement by Mark about their desire to provide an equal opportunity for both sides in the power struggle to state their case, but the only response to communications to the club were letters effectively warning them off.

Mark's balanced approach on one feature was contradicted by another only a few pages earlier about a comment made by McKeag describing the club as 'family silver'. This enraged the editor enough to respond in his editorial by pointing out that the board have never put anything into the club whereas the fans turn up every week like sheep, keeping a group of selfish, small-minded men in power, which is a belief that unites supporters across the country:

Fans of all teams have a pet hate and that is the ego-maniac in the boardroom. They hate the thought that a game which provokes the loyalty of a community should be run to suit the whims of a rich businessman. (Phil Shaw, Whose Game Is It Anyway? The Book of the Football Fanzines, 1989)

At the end of his editorial, Mark claims that the only way they can truly affect change is through a boycott of matches. His exhibition of radical activism to appropriate change is reminiscent of the early punk and anarchist zines that he used to read during his youth, "A bit of rebellion, that's what you need. You need something that's not necessarily agitating the establishment, but is there as a counterbalance."

Pro-anarchist messages and an oppositional stance to institutions is common to alternatives media, so Mark's suggestion of a boycott in his editorial had politicised the situation to their advantage by voting with their feet the club would be forced, financially, to listen.

Atton believes that the content of most football zines is radical to some degree and as critical of corporatism as any anarchist magazine, though it is his use of Downing's theory of radical media that I feel is most applicable to The Mag.

Downing's 'alternatives in principle' are based on an anarchist philosophy but eschew the presumption of a publication's penchant for anarchism. These principles maintain that no matter the domination of capitalist mass media, they too are as hierarchical, limiting and bound by authority as the culture they are countering.

He prioritises process over product, organisation and engagement over words and circulation listing his principles as follows:

1. the importance of encouraging contributions from as many interested parties as possible, in order to emphasise the 'multiple realities' of social life;
2. that radical media, while they may be partisan, should never become a tool of a party or intelligentsia;
3. that radical media at their most creative and socially significant privilege movements over institutions;
4. that within the organisation of radical media there appears an emphasis on prefigurative politics.

Building on a Gramscian counter-hegemonic resistance and carefully considering his terminology, Downing preferred to label any publication that met his four principles 'radical alternative media', because he considered 'alternative media' to be oxymoronic; since everything is, at some point alternative to something else. Over the course of its 150 issues The Mag has demonstrated that its content is non-political, but firmly grounded in the 'alternatives in principle' - distinctly alternative to both the Official Club magazine and the matchday programme.