A warm invitation to The Spectator’s new website
The Spectator has a new website — redesigned, easier to use, with new features and writers. The online magazine will continue to do what the print magazine has always done on paper: inspire debate, stir up controversy and have some fun, with the added advantage that you can add your thoughts to ours.
In expanding our web presence we are being true to the traditions of the magazine. The original Spectator of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele arose from the free-wheeling intellectual sparring of the 18th-century coffee house, and if there’s a modern version of this — a space where people can comment and squabble about the issues of the day — it’s surely online. Steele wrote of his own favoured coffee house that it was an intellectual haven where someone ‘of your temper is in his element’, a ‘place of rendezvous to all that live near it’. That’s what we hope The Spectator website will become — but for readers worldwide.
We’ve all read the articles about how the internet is transforming politics, journalism, knitting — and almost everything else. The claims are sometimes so hyperbolic that it is tempting to mutter and turn the page in cynical disbelief. But what the internet evangelists often miss is that the rapid dissemination of ideas in the blogosphere, and the arguments and intellectual feuds that go with them, would be very familiar to an 18th-century man or woman; the scurrilous gossip and general filth available online would have had pride of place on Grub Street.
The similarities have not escaped us. That’s why earlier this year we created our own 21st-century digital coffee house — a Spectator staff blog — which you can find online at new.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse.
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