The premise of most of both praise and blame of this or the other left periodical in this thread is that left journals are infantry divisions. But what if they are munitions manufacturers instead? One reads them for the quality of the information and/or analysis they offer, from the perspective or in terms of what one needs in one's own work or thought. One _prefers_ reasonably decent craft in their delivery of the goods, but it is that content which is primary.
At the present time readability in maillists posts & fwds seems to me rather more important than readability on ZNET of LBO or Science & Society. I dropped my subscription to Z and to the Nation for the same reason, that on the whole I was no longer finding _enough_ useful information in them, not on the basis of their stylistic or editorial quality.
On the other hand, when someone fwds an article around the maillists, if it's filled with >s and broken lines etcetera, I simply delete it unless it seems important enough to copy to a Word file and manually reformat.
When a semi-coherent left and the necessary left organizations at its core appears, it will be more important (returning to the military metaphor) to have journals that are infantry journals, that we can sell to people we encounter in our work. I simply don't think that _any_ publication, not supported by organizational work, can do much in the way of "reaching" people regardless of its style. LBO is indeed a first-rate publication. It would still be first-rate for the readership it has _now_ if it's style were as poor as (it is said) that of Z is.
As Chet pointed out in one of the many excellent posts my "mass movement" post inspired, growth is primarily through person-to-person contact. Publication needs to serve that nucleus. For the present, one just needs ammunition as it were. Given a growing mass movement one needs publications that can "go it on their own" with only very brief oral introduction.
Carrol