Most British newspapers are not necessarily careful about language, but they are careful about bad words anyway. The phrase “family newspaper” is an inevitable part of our lives. Newspapers are not in the business of giving unjustified offence. It is a limitation of newspaper writing, and everybody in the business, whether writing or reading, understands and accepts. There are many other necessary limitations, and most of these concern time and space.
Newspapers have dominated sportswriting in Britain for years. But ten years ago, a new player entered the game. This was the phenomenon of men’s magazines. GQ was the pioneer and it leads the way still, leaving the rest panting distantly in its wake.
Sports, of course, a blindingly obvious subject for a men’s magazine — but it could not be tackled in a blindingly obvious way. Certainly, one of the first things GQ was able to offer was a new way of writing about sport, but this was not so much a cunning plan as a necessity. The magazine was doomed, as it were, to offer a whole new range of freedoms to its sportswriters. Freedom of vocabulary was simply the most obvious one and, inevitably, it appealed to the schoolboy within us. But space and time were the others, and these possibilities meant that the craft of sportswriting had to be reinvented.
Unlike newspapers, a magazine can offer a decent length of time to research and to write. These are, you would think, luxuries — especially to those of us who are often required to read an 800-word match report over the telephone the instant the final whistle has gone. No one expects a masterpiece under such circumstances. But a long magazine deadline gives you the disconcerting and agoraphobic freedom to research, to write, to think.
GQ is not restricted by the same conventions of reader expectation as a newspaper. You need not worry about offending people or alienating them; the whole ethos of the magazine is that readers are there to be challenged. There will be readers who would find some of its pieces offensive or even impossible in a newspaper, or even in a different magazine. But the same readers will read the piece in GQ and find it enthralling.
That is because the magazine is always slightly uncomfortable to be with. It is not like a cozy member of the family, nor even like a friend. It is the strong, self-opinionated person that you can never quite make up your mind whether you like or not. You admire him, but you are slightly uneasy with him. The people around him might not altogether approve of everything he says; some might not care for him at all. But they feel compelled to listen. The self-confidence is too compelling. And just when you think be is beginning to become rather a bore, he surprises you with his genuine intelligence. He makes a broad joke, and then suddenly he is demanding you follow him in the turning of an intellectual somersault.
1. What does the writer say about newspapers in the first paragraph?
2. What does the writer imply in the second paragraph?
3. Why were sportswriters for GQ given new freedoms?
4. Why can’t writers for GQ use the same methods as writers for newspapers?
5. The writer likens GQ magazine to a person who（ ）
