MONITOR MAG

Rip It Up, Issue 173, 1 December 1991, Page 33

MONITOR MAG

In your September issue you made a few bitchy comments about the demise of Monitor magazine. As a former contributor | would like to raise a few points in reply. 1. “Fashion Victim”. | note your quotes — just who did say it2 | offer the contents of my wardrobe as evidence of just how fashion orientated we were. It includes several items from Warnocks (who everyone knows are just off High Streef). - 2. “irrelevant to the music scene”. It was never Monitor’s brief to be solely a music mag. That said, in our final (as it turned out) issue we featured articles on Snapper, Sam Phillips, the Lils, three pages of record reviews, half a page of live reviews (never our strong point | concede), assorted gossip and a mini interview with Lisa Van Der Aarde. So there were articles on TV, books, films, cartoons and a number of pages devoted to pictorials — at least they were pleasant fo look at. Design was one of Monitor’s strong points — it meant that all sorts of people would pick up the magazine and take it home with them. It doesn’t worry me if they weren't all music fans. Your own organ frequently features long boring interviews with overseas top forty rockers and often ignores local bands completely. | am proud of Monitor's record in exposing local talent. : 3. Reference was made to continuing financial losses. Monitor was in fact doing pretty well as far as selling ads went. Advertising was our sole source of income as we didn't do mail order T-shirts or videos. Unfortunately Monitor was reliant on BFM management for financial planning and for most of this year they just weren't doing anything. This led to their final decision that they didn't want to be in the magazine game anyway. So they canned the mag without nofice to subscribers, contributors or even the

editor. - Overall | found your approach to be catty. Disappointing but not really suprising. You obviously found it hard to be fair about a competitor forthe same elusive ad dollar. Yours faithfully, Matthew Tetley-Jones : EDITOR: The comments were mine and echo not my concerns about “competition” for advertising, but the fact that ‘Monitor’ ceased to be a vital part of the local music scene long before its demise. As.a supporter of BFM I felt the station’s magazine should have reflected BFM’ committment to NZ music. Ironically, in the last year and a half it has been ‘Stamp’ magazine that has echoed the station’s philosophy and musical perception whilst the ‘Monitor’ drifted off into the no man’s land of titillating the illiterati and promoting Nicole Matsuda. I'm sure if ‘Monitor’ had stayed closer to a rootsy music / BFM-style mag, it'd still be here, and we'd have one more media fo expose local music. Having “Sam Phillips” as the major music story in the final issue, reflects the distance ‘Monitor’ had drifted off course. Remember that my comments were in the context of praising the contribution of the ‘Auckland Star’ to the NZ music, reflecting my belief that the quality of a publication lies in quality of the words on the paper, not the quality of the - paper.