Colin Jacobson publishes Reportage magazine because he believes fervently in what it stands for. Michael Cockerham interviews him on his beliefs, how he faces up to publishing realities and the changing face of photodocumentary photography. Illustrations are from photo-stories carried by Reportage.

As men of vision go, Colin Jacobson is an unlikely example. Soft spoken, bespectacled, and, it appears, utterly at ease with life. But looks deceive, and he definitely has a vision, albeit one which by his own admission is self-indulgent. In 1993 Jacobson launched Reportage, a magazine for quality black and white photojournalism. Image led, it was inevitably hailed as a Picture Post for the nineties. But poor business decisions and Jacobson's reluctance to compromise on quality led to its demise in 1995.

At about the same time, the arguments about the death of photojournalism became a favourite in the pages of the photographic press. Perhaps it was coincidence. Nevertheless, the received wisdom was, "nice try, but the genre's dead." It was, therefore, something of a surprise when Reportage was relaunched in the winter of 1997.

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Left: By Gideon Mendel, from a story on Senegal fishermen. A prize winner in World Press Photo Nature & Environment category.
Working in London's Shoreditch, Jacobson is now guiding his creation into the second year of its second incarnation. It's make or break time and, quietly, he knows it. Files and papers all around him an exercise in controlled chaos; the hum of his Mac standing in for the insects oddly missing from a humid summer's day, he took time out to consider how he had reached this point in his life.

Jacobson's career seems in retrospect to have been grooming him for Reportage: "I started as picture researcher for The Sunday Times Magazine in 1971. At the time it was a very strong magazine with topical features. They had Don McCullin going out to Vietnam. It was in the tradition of front-line reporting. My job was to find photographs to illustrate texts that were already written. It was a very good learning school because at that time it wasdefinitely the most influential magazine in the world."

From there he moved on to become photo editor on the Economist, before working on a short-lived but interesting magazine called Now. "It was the first real attempt to launch in the UK a news magazine a bit like Paris Match, or Stern - a kind of hybrid between that and Time or Newsweek. A lot of text at the front and back but the centre