The sweet sound of feedback

Hello? Hello? Is this thing on? If the answer is a sonic squeal that cuts a jagged line from your molar to your eardrum, that's feedback. Jimi Hendrix grabbing a microphone stand and using it to scrub a banshee wail from the strings of his electric guitar: that's feedback too.

A caller to a talkshow, so eager to hear the sound of his own voice, that he leaves his radio on and ricochets his opinions into infinity. That, too, is feedback.

Feedback, to cite its origins in the realm of acoustic engineering, is dissonance, discord, distortion, the sound of the world turning inside out and doubling back on itself. But feedback, of course, has another meaning.

If an instrument is in tune with its environment, if it is played at precisely the right pitch, if the notes and phrases are spun together in a sequence that oscillates and resonates, at a frequency that hath charms to sooth the savage breast, then that, too, is feedback.

Every year, as the members of the Mondi Magazine Awards judging panel gather around the mahogany table, fuelled by coffee and Rooibos, some slouching back with pens dangling from mouths, some leaning forward with foreheads propped against palms, some scrabbling through stacks of cardboard on the floor, some lost in the reverie of a gaze at the distant skyline, I find myself pondering the same Big Question.

Why do people enter awards? Why, in particular, do they enter the Mondis? It can't be for the Golden Nib, whose sole practical function is to stop the wind from blowing the papers all over your desk, or in an emergency, to serve as warning that you hold in your possession a weapon that is mightier than the sword.

It can't be for the money, which has enough noughts in it to quicken the pulse of any magazine journalist, but which soon reverts to zero when you weigh it up against your mortgage and your car payments and lunch with the people in production.

So it must be for something else, and I believe that something else is the premise that awards offer an avenue of concrete feedback, in an industry where some roads are best left untravelled.

We earn our keep in the court of public opinion, but the opinions that mean most to us are those of our peers and publishers and editors, and only the most foolhardy among us would dare to solicit those opinions directly...

Journalist: "Hello, I was just checking to see if you got my story."
Editor: "Yes."
Journalist: "Is it...I mean, is everything..."
Editor: "It's fine."

So we learn not to ask, and we learn to pretend that it doesn't really matter, and we learn to console ourselves with the knowledge that feedback doesn't pay the rent.

But how we long to hear, in a corridor or at a cocktail party, that the work we have toiled and sweated over is "good", or that it's "nice", or "lekker", or even - allow us this conceit, as members of the judging panel - that "it's a Mondi".

We realise there are very few objective barometers of excellence in magazine publishing, and even when we pore over the ABCs to see how well we are doing, there are many of us who are forced to scratch our heads and concede that they are really just a bunch of 123s.

So that is what the Mondis are. They are feedback. They are our small way of letting people know that they enthralled us, and moved us, and stirred us, and surprised us and delighted us and caused us to argue among ourselves.

Because we are human, and while we strive to be fair, we cannot lay claim to being neutral or aloof or at a loss for opinions. The other Big Question I ask myself, every year at the Mondis, is this: "Who are we to judge?"

The only answer I can honestly give is that we are a bunch of people who happen to be crazy about magazines.

To everyone who entered, thank you; to the finalists and winners, congratulations; to my fellow judges, thank you for sharing your time and passion and expertise; to everyone at Mondi and the Magazine Publishers Association of South Africa, thank you once again for making this whole thing possible. And to everyone else: the microphone is on, the amp is cooking. Let's have your feedback.