Porridge - Read All About It

Magazines are in the news, so I headed off to the supermarket to get the latest.

It’s another world in there.

Last summer I managed a four wheel drive track through the Australian Alps with nothing other than a SatNav. But a supermarket! More aisles than fire trails. And all I wanted was a little reading matter to have with my traditional breakfast porridge.

Remember porridge? It was simple in the old days – one cup of oats, two cups of water, a pinch of salt and Bob’s your long lost Scottish uncle – a healthy hearty breakfast to set you up for the day out on the moors or deep in the stock market jungle. Although for some it was a bit too healthy and the palate required the decadent stimulation of brown sugar, honey and bananas.

Now I find a bewildering array of porridges in the supermarket. There’s “traditional” oats, “quick” oats (whatever that might mean), oats with apple and cinnamon, “fitness” oats with powerful enzymes - even oats turned into dried porridge bars called “brits”

Porridge is now so complicated because of the individual markets that have been created – except for my English friends for whom porridge is still really simple – two years in the slammer– not two cups in the bowl with sultanas and your choice of milks.

Armed with a box of spicy Moroccan flavoured cinnamon and paw paw rolled oats (and a six pack of porridge bars), I headed for the magazine section looking for a simpler world.

Older readers will remember The Women’s Weekly in 1983 and its 1.2 million copies - it had everything in it we ever needed. What a year 1983 was! Bob Hawke was elected Prime Minister for the first time. Now the dear old Weekly is down to just 493,000 copies. But don’t worry, they’re doing okay and they are happy with that.

And just like the porridge, there’s an unbelievable array of magazines proving that they’re far from dying. Currently there are 1,200 different Australian magazines plus more than 3,000 magazine titles shipped in from foreign lands - a total retail sales value of $1.2 billion - more than we spend on soap.

According to Nick Chan, the big boss at Pacific Publications, Australia is close to the world’s largest per capita consumer of magazines. And we don’t just use them to decorate coffee tables - Australians spend a bit under two hours a week reading them.

But it’s more complicated than 1983 which is why the industry is currently in uproar as to how to measure the readership in a research hungry world.

They reckon the current system is about as old-fashioned as the compass and the RACV map of the Australian Alps which I ditched on my last trip and went with the modern technology of the SatNav.

Our querulous editor has been on about this subject this week. If you wander around the rest of this page you’ll find his musings about trying to get our research up to date by the use of the latest techniques.

I think he's onto something.

There seems to be a good argument that we’re stuck in the old days of porridge with a pinch of salt when it’s time to use all the ingredients in the pantry.