It’s always gratifying to meet a reader of Professional Security Magazine and hear how the publication continues to be worth their while, writes editor Mark Rowe.
I take a professional interest (pardon the pun) and as someone who’s 35 years in journalism this year (I almost typed 335 years by mistake!) it’s a personal interest too. When in spring 1990 I got well trained as a newspaper report, someone said that paper and the wheel were the two inventions 4000 years old (or more?) that we were still using. You only have to look up from your phone, that you may well be reading this on, and if you’re on a train or in a London Underground carriage as I am due to be today, and many others will be looking at or listening to their phones, and few will be reading a book or newsprint, far fewer than before the wireless internet.
The reader I met said he still has the magazine delivered (an advert here – a subscription costs £40 a year!) and will sit with it and give half an hour to it, because he will learn things about the private security industry of the British Isles that he otherwise would not know. In a way, the way the product is delivered is immaterial, as long as the reader pays and advertisers are happy. The reader had something intriguing to say about the differences between the print and the otherwise identical digital, flip-page magazine on the website.
If the reader were to try to read the digital Professional Security Magazine, he might find himself distracted – by some email, something else online. Something about the nature of print, then, succeeds in retaining our concentration. The reader noted further that the young may be takers of the print medium – may pick up books, even – but they lack the power of concentration; they baulk at long chapters, without images let alone moving pictures.
That’s been true for some time. I recall several years ago, pre-covid, being a guest of Sky at their west London offices, and hearing how they had spotted how young viewers were consuming clips of sports (a market Sky have long been in). The attention span of the young is for a few minutes, the highlights of a match rather than the entire 90 minutes of football, let alone day of cricket. Sky felt they had to meet that demand, to keep their viewers (and advertisers).
The Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan comes to mind here, though he’s less quoted these days, perhaps merely because he has gone out of fashion; his idea of ‘the medium is the message’. In his heyday in the 1960s, that meant the difference between the print medium and the then new television; the idea that how television connected people, and at a greater speed, had cultural effects.
That people consume things digitally matters for more than the media sector. To take only counter-terrorism training. The security industry will be consumed for the next few years by Martyn’s Law, that’s going through Parliament, that will place a legal responsibility on premises to take steps to counter terrorism. One likely way to comply will be to put staff of hotels, pubs, cinemas and so on through the UK official ACT (Action Counters Terrorism) training. Even if you wanted to have police or other trainers to give the training in person rather than go through gov.uk/ACT, given the hundreds of thousands of premises that will come under Martyn’s Law, the country will not have enough police CTSAs (counter terrorism security advisers) to go round. That leaves online; but who’s to say that someone who takes a training course online is truly engaged? Yes, the training material can require people to click on questions to check they have paid attention; but that lacks the human touch of a trainer at the front of a classroom, able to spot that the learners are looking interested, and there to answer any questions. The difference in absorbing learning may be the difference between life and death in a terror or indeed other (flood, fire) emergency. Given that the Manchester Arena Inquiry raised this point about the relative weakness of online training to stewards, it’s an awkward point for the authorities that they show no sign of addressing.
To return to Professional Security Magazine; the word magazine derives from the storehouse that European colonists and traders had from the 1500s, after sailing to North America and south Asia. There inside their forts they would keep gunpowder, fuses, spare clothing and so forth, to draw on as they needed to. Likewise a paper or digital magazine is a storing pot of news, whether about your occupation, hobby, or current affairs. Your subscription pays for journalists to use their professional judgement about what’s worth placing in front of you, in Professional Security’s case 12 times a year (besides news articles most weekdays). It’s cheaper and temptingly easier to leave it to the algorithms, although if you are paying nothing, you must not be surprised if you are only given commercial crap. Whether likewise you have an algorithm decide who you choose to date, or what to read to shape and reinforce your political beliefs or what shopping you buy, is a matter for you. But choose wisely and remember that not making a choice is, a choice.
Photo by Mark Rowe; Basildon, Essex, September afternoon.
