Now! or Then!?

Britain's new newsmagazine

Fleet Street cynics might say that Britain needs a new weekly newsmagazine like Newcastle needs more coal. The nation already has the respected Economist (circ. 66,000), regional editions of TIME (78,000) and Newsweek (40,000), as well as six London Sunday papers (combined circ. 18,300,000) that are sped overnight on Britain's excellent rail system to steepled hamlets from Dover to Dundee. Last week Sir James Goldsmith, 46, pugnacious publisher (France's weekly L'Express) and multimillionaire food tycoon, set out to prove the cynics wrong.

With a first-year promotion budget of $5.4 million and a staff of 121, he launched Now!, a slick weekly whose first issue was light on news, heavy on shopworn features and groaning with ads (60 pages out of 144). The initial press run of 416,000 copies was quickly claimed a sellout, but some London journalists, while wishing it well, were saying Now! should more accurately be called Then! Aside from a scoop about Iraqi spying, the only effort at hard news was a watery recap of the Rhodesian peace talks. Judged the Financial Times: "Newsmagazine is precisely what the first issue is not. It is a feature magazine, and not an especially good one at that." Said Sunday Times Editor Harold Evans: "There is less of a feeling of a window on the world than TIME or ... various British Sunday papers."

But as a second issue appeared on newsstands, Goldsmith took a bullish stance.

Said he: "If it has the feel of life in it, I will keep it going, even with losses. If it doesn't, I won't."

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