ST Magazine

ST Magazine was a French monthly for the Atari ST, published by Pressimage S.A.R.L. from September 1985. This library holds 128 issues, running to September 1998.

It is the earliest ST-dedicated magazine held from anywhere — six months before Atari ST User (March 1986) and nearly four years before ST Format (July 1989). The first magazine about the Atari ST in this collection is French.

Launched on a price argument

Issue one’s cover asks a single question — “POURQUOI ACHETER UN 520 ST”, why buy a 520 ST — and the editorial answers it for readers who do not yet own the machine. Its case is not about capability but about cost, made with a comparison table: what you would have to spend on a Macintosh or an IBM PC equipped with the same options and the same software already included with a 520 ST at 8,432 francs.

The magazine is priced for three countries on its cover — 25 F, 200 Belgian francs, 10 Swiss francs. Like Amiga Joker in German, its market is a language rather than a border.

“We are not journalists”

The December 1986 editorial opens with a line that turns a trade complaint into something more interesting:

“Non ! Non ! Nous ne sommes pas des journalistes ! C’est en tout cas ce que décident les membres de la Commission paritaire en privant ST Magazine, sous sa forme actuelle, de leur agrément.”

No, no, we are not journalists — that at any rate is what the members of the Commission paritaire decide, in depriving ST Magazine, in its present form, of their approval. The reasoning is given plainly:

“Les revues dédiées (à un standard informatique) sont assimilées, grosso modo, à des catalogues de publicité pour la marque.”

Magazines devoted to a single computing standard are treated, roughly, as advertising catalogues for the brand.

France ran a state accreditation regime for the press, and it had reached a view on what a single-platform computer magazine was. The British press had no equivalent body, which is why nothing like this appears anywhere else in this Vault: a British magazine could be as devoted to one machine as it liked and no one adjudicated whether it counted as journalism.

The line the Commission drew

The judgement is worth sitting with rather than dismissing, because this Vault draws a version of the same line. It separates a manufacturer’s house organ — Club Nintendo, Atari Club Magazin — from the independent press, on the grounds that one is published by the industry and the other about it.

The Commission paritaire put the line somewhere else: not at who publishes, but at how narrow the subject is. On that test a magazine can be editorially independent, staffed by people with no connection to the manufacturer, and still function as promotion, because covering one machine and nothing else means never telling a reader to buy something different.

⚠ And ST Magazine is an awkward case for its own defence. It was published by Pressimage, its subscription cheques were payable to Micro-Application, and the page carrying this editorial is itself largely an advertisement for Micro-Application’s Atari ST books. That does not make the Commission right, and this entry takes no view on whether it was — but the magazine’s commercial entanglement is visible in the same column as its protest.

⚠ What happened next is not recorded here. The magazine continued for another twelve years, so the loss of agrément was evidently not fatal, but this library holds no account of whether the decision was reversed, appealed, or worked around by changing the magazine’s form.

See also

• Atari ST
• ST Format, Atari ST User — the later British titles
• Magazines across borders
• Club Nintendo — where this Vault draws the line instead