Dame Anna Wintour, with her rather marvellous bob hairdo, this month became chief content officer for Condé Nast. I had forgotten that a couple of years ago she was appointed a Companion of Honour – one of those interesting people the King likes to have for lunch. And I couldn’t remember whether I’d written here about content. ‘That is probably not a sign of dementia,’ said my husband encouragingly.
Why is content such an unpleasant label for articles in a magazine? After all, the title page of the Great Bible, ordered to be published by Henry VIII in 1539, read: ‘The Byble in Englyshe, that is to saye the content of all the holy Scrypture, bothe of the olde and newe testament.’ Still, no one thought of Moses as a content-provider.
I suppose the trouble is the parallel with the contents of a barrel of sprats or the contents of my lifesaving handbag. Even so, 19th-century critics liked to distinguish between form and content. The great leap forward came with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989. In 1991 a journalist wrote: ‘Microsoft is purchasing content – books, artwork and video properties – that can be used in products once multimedia computing is established.’ The internet was the medium; it only needed the message.
Newspapers had always required editorial matter to put between advertisements (although in Exchange & Mart or the Lady they were the attraction). This matter was called copy. ‘More Copie, More Copie; we lose a great deale of time for want of Text,’ wrote Thomas Nashe in the pleasantly titled pamphlet Have with You to Saffron-Walden. In the 20th century copywriters were devoted to advertising, an even more vulgar trade than journalism. Each generation has a fashion in language as much as in its bobs and fringes. The BBC favoured the Orwellian-sounding controller. I think there was a Controller of the Spoken Word. Now we get content officers.
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