His initial reformist article, “Network: the Art World Described as a System,” appeared in the highly influential Artforum in September 1972. Alloway had published half a dozen articles in the magazine in the 1960s when Philip Leider was editor. Leider resigned and was replaced in mid-1971 by John Coplans who invited Alloway to join the magazine as a Contributing Editor, which he did in October that year. In January 1973 he became an Associate Editor for three years; and between January and October 1976 he reverted back to being a Contributing Editor. During the time he was connected with the magazine in one editorial capacity or another, and under Coplans’ editorship, Artforum published over thirty of his articles. Coplans, a South African, had been living in London in the later 1950s. Not only did he go to the visiting American exhibitions, but he also, as we have seen, regularly attended the ICA and appreciated Alloway's contributions. He also remarked on the nature of Alloway's criticism: “Without me being conscious of it, Alloway was a pluralist [who]… would write one minute on Giacometti and the next on Francis Bacon and the next on Mark Rothko, and so on.” Coplans moved to the USA in 1960 and, when he took over the editorship of Artforum, he immediately looked to recruit Alloway because of his commitment to pluralism, “which I was also interested in,” but also because, “by this time [he] had established himself as somebody who was looking at the superstructure as well as the pluralism. I had an enormous sympathy for Alloway… [He] was an immediate resource that could be enormously useful to the magazine in balancing the overall situation—a viewpoint. A counterbalance to any extremism of someone like [Michael] Fried, for example, who was a real aesthetician.”

“Network: the Art World Described as a System” appeared in the tenth anniversary issue of Artforum in September 1972 and was part of a radical shift that Coplans was engineering in the outlook of the magazine. Peter Plagens, then a contributing editor, also realized that what was needed in the early 1970s was “a criticism of the institutions with a broader, more political, sociological take, and let's get outside Michael Fried telling us ‘what stripe in Stella goes over what’ sort of thing.”