NEW MEDIA
Mick Hume is no stranger to controversy. The London-based journalist's former magazine, LM (once known as Living Marxism), was thrown into bankruptcy last year after being sued for libel by Britain's Independent Television News. LM had reported that ITN knowingly misrepresented the conditions at a Serbian prison camp.
Now Hume has taken his muckraking style online with spiked (www.spiked-online.com), a magazine launched in March that's already raising eyebrows in Britain. Kind of like Slate on steroids, spiked offers a fiercely libertarian view of politics, culture, economics, and the environment.
Ever the contrarian, Hume has unveiled spiked at a time when most new media companies are struggling to survive. However, with only $145,000 in the bank - enough for about six months of operation - it's unclear how long spiked can stay afloat. The site hopes to bring in more money through ad sales, sponsorships, syndication, and fees for premium content. Hume's staff is almost entirely volunteer, and his current investors (some of them like-minded British Net workers) are sympathetic to his message.
"I have no pretensions that we're going to take over the Web," Hume says. "But there's a very important niche for independent, creative thinking."
Critics question the politics of Hume and his colleagues, which have swung from doctrinaire Marxism to libertarianism (he is a columnist for the conservative Times of London).
"They've come from one ideological regime and done the backward somersault, and ended up with a whole set of new ideas," says John Vidal, environmental editor for Britain's Guardian newspaper. "So what's really their agenda?"
In June, spiked will host a conference on the future of IT at the London offices of business news service Bloomberg. Rubbing shoulders with the captains of industry is a long way from living Marxism, but Hume says it's closer to what the future is all about.
"I don't think the whole framework of left and right and all that works anymore," he explains. "The Web is the best vehicle for trying to influence a new agenda and get some critical thinking going."
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