27 January 2008

New issue, new issues

Ok, so I've not exactly been a regular blogger. Where do regular bloggers get all their time, exactly? The new issue of Red Pepper is out very soon. The highlight, for me, is an excellent piece on Pakistan by Graham Usher. It is always a tricky question as to how to balance our coverage of contemporary events with news agendas at the time of publication, but this article gets behind the headlines to make sense of the situation there more clearly than any other commentary I've yet read.

Sometimes we're successful at predicting what will be topical. For example, today's Observer trails a new 'eco battle' over airport expansion, another issue that is covered in the new issue. When we go to press we never quite know if someone will scoop our stories but I'm confident that the article we ran goes into far more depth than the Observer could, and I'm pleased that it doesn't just focus on the forthcoming battle over a third runway at Heathrow - important though that is.

My own contribution was to try to decode new proposals aimed at 'reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation' - which was the hot issue at the Bali climate conference, although it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue. The best background reading on this is still, probably, this paper from the Forest Peoples' Programme.

And finally, it isn't all words, words words. As well as a photo essay on Ghana and football, we've got an extract from a new Atlas of Radical Cartography

As always, it is good to receive feedback on the magazine. Hopefully, this new blog won't be so cluttered with spam as the old one, so the comments aren't fighting for space with hot Russian sexbots, cheap viagra and mortgage advice....

2 comments:

Oscar said...

This is a bit of a test post for me. Does it work? If you can read this the answer, apparently, is yes

Red Pepper said...

Hurrah, welcome back to the RP blogosphere Oscar...and may the viagra and russian bride offerings find a more welcoming blog somewhere else. Fx