The Handbook of Magazine Studies 9781119151524, 9781119151555, 9781119151562, 2482612632, 111915152X

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The Handbook of Magazine Studies

Handbooks in Communication and Media This series aims to provide theoretically ambitious but accessible volumes devoted to the major fields and subfields within communication and media studies. Each volume sets out to ground and orientate the student through a broad range of specially commissioned chapters, while also providing the more experienced scholar and teacher with a convenient and comprehensive overview of the latest trends and critical directions. The Handbook of Organizational Rhetoric and Communication edited by Øyvind Ihlen and Robert L. Heath The Handbook of Communication Engagement edited by Kim A. Johnston and Maureen Taylor The Handbook of Financial Communication and Investor Relations edited by Alexander V. Laskin The Handbook of Children, Media, and Development, edited by Sandra L. Calvert and Barbara J. Wilson The Handbook of Crisis Communication, edited by W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay The Handbook of Internet Studies, edited by Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess The Handbook of Rhetoric and Public Address, edited by Shawn J. Parry‐Giles and J. Michael Hogan The Handbook of Critical Intercultural Communication, edited by Thomas K. Nakayama and Rona Tamiko Halualani The Handbook of Global Communication and Media Ethics, edited by Robert S. Fortner and P. Mark Fackler The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility, edited by Øyvind Ihlen, Jennifer Bartlett, and Steve May The Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media, edited by Karen Ross The Handbook of Global Health Communication, edited by Rafael Obregon and Silvio Waisbord The Handbook of Global Media Research, edited by Ingrid Volkmer The Handbook of Global Online Journalism, edited by Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Reputation, edited by Craig E. Carroll The Handbook of Media and Mass Communication Theory, edited by Robert S. Fortner and P. Mark Fackler The Handbook of International Advertising Research, edited by Hong Cheng The Handbook of Psychology of Communication Technology, edited by S. Shyam Sundar The Handbook of International Crisis Communication Research, edited by Andreas Schwarz, Matthew W. Seeger, and Claudia Auer The Handbook of Magazine Studies, edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes The Handbook of European Communication History, edited by Klaus Arnold, Paschal Preston, and Susanne Kinnebrock

The Handbook of Magazine Studies

Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes

This edition first published 2020 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/ permissions. The right of Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes to be identified as the authors of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA Editorial Office 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print‐on‐demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Names: Sternadori, Miglena, editor. | Holmes, Tim, 1953- editor. Title: The handbook of magazine studies / edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. Description: First edition. | Hoboken : Wiley-Blackwell, 2020. | Series: Handbooks in communication and media | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019053406 (print) | LCCN 2019053407 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119151524 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119151555 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119151562 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Periodicals–Publishing. | Periodicals–Social aspects. | Periodicals–Publishing–Economic aspects. Classification: LCC PN4832 .H38 2020 (print) | LCC PN4832 (ebook) | DDC 050.72–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053406 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053407 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © SetsukoN/Getty Images Set in 9.5/11.5pt Galliard by SPi Global, Pondicherry, India 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

List of Figures

viii

Notes on Contributors

x

Part I  Conceptual and Historical Underpinnings

1

1

Magazines, Megazines, and Metazines: What Is a Magazine in the Twenty‐First Century? 3 Tim Holmes

2

Reading Magazines: Taking Death Cab for Cutie from Shed to Dalston 20 John Hartley

3

Social Scientific Approaches to Magazine Research Berkley Hudson and Carol B. Schwalbe

36

4

Viewing the Magazine Form Through the Lens of Classic Media Theories David Weiss and Miglena Sternadori

51

5

Case Study: Where Industry and Academy Meet 65 Tim Holmes

Part II  Magazines as Dynamic Organizations

75

6

Sex, Power, and Organizational Culture in the Glossy Magazine Industry Nicholas Boston

7

Slow Magazines: The New Indies in Print 92 Megan Le Masurier

8

Magazines and Advertising in the Digital Age John Sinclair

9

An Extraordinary Duckling: B2B Magazines as Information and Networking Tools for Professionals 120 Dan Zhang and Paul Dwyer

10

Customer Magazines as Hybrids of Journalism and PR Thomas Koch, Nora Denner, and Benedikt Gutheil

77

105

136

vi Contents 11

On Johnson’s Shoulders: The Lessons and Legacy of Ebony Magazine 146 Sharon Bloyd‐Peshkin and Charles Whitaker

12

Case Study: Porter Magazine: A Case Study in Hybridity 154 Tim Holmes

Part III  Magazines, Identities, and Lifestyles

163

13

Magazines and the Construction of Consumer Lifestyles David Weiss

165

14

The “Woke” Sex Discourse: Sexuality and Gender in Online Consumer Magazines 180 Chelsea Reynolds

15

Gatekeepers and Gal Pals: The Narrative Strategies of Celebrity Magazines 198 Andrea McDonnell

16

Gender in Magazines Elizabeth Groeneveld

17

Magazines’ Construction of Life Markers: From Youth to Old Age 226 Joy Jenkins

18

Case Study: Beauty, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: How Three British Magazines Construct Feminine Adolescence, “Middle Youth,” and Maturity 241 Joy Jenkins

19

Case Study: How Magazines Carry Western Consumer Values Around the World: The Chinese Women’s Lifestyle Magazine Rayli and its Representation of Healthy Diets 248 Ariel Chen and David Machin

214

Part IV  Magazines, Culture, and Society

261

20

Magazines as Alternative Sites of Artistic Practice Gwen Allen

263

21

Magazines as Sites of Didacticism, Edutainment, and (Sometimes) Pedagogy Miglena Sternadori

278

22

Magazines and Interpretive Communities: Approaching the Commercial Media Fan Magazine 293 Matt Hills

23

City and Regional Magazines: Consumer Guides or Social Binders? 307 Miglena Sternadori and Susan Currie Sivek

24

Case Study: The Contested Category of the Photography Magazine: Three Case Studies 322 David Brittain

25

Case Study: Language, Little Magazines, and Local Feminisms Nithila Kanagasabai

333

Part V  Magazines, Activism, and Resistance

343

26

345

Magazines as Sites of Satire, Parody, and Political Resistance Kevin M. Lerner

Contents

vii

27

The Cultural Campaigners: The Role of Advocacy in Shaping and Changing Magazine Identities 358 Sharon Maxwell Magnus

28

American Magazines as Champions of Environmental and Corporate Sustainability Matthew Yeomans

29

Case Study: Constructing an Imagined Community in Al‐Qaeda’s Magazine Inspire 384 Lara Tarantini

30

Case Study: How gal‐dem Magazine Succeeded Where Mainstream Media Failed Esther Egbeyemi

370

393

Part VI  Global Markets and Audiences

401

31

Magazines in Spanish and Portuguese America Kenton T. Wilkinson and Cristóbal Benavides Almarza

403

32

Chinese Consumer Magazines: Digital Transitions in an Evolving Cultural Economy 417 Xiang Ren

33

Indian Magazines Revitalized in Response to Demand for Long-form Storytelling Savyasaachi Jain and Usha Raman

34

From Grit to Glitz: Magazine Markets and Ideologies in Post‐Communist Europe and Asia 440 Miglena Sternadori

35

Case Study: Culinary Magazines in Oceania and Australia Lyn Barnes

36

Case Study: The Bulgarian Woman as a “Free and Happy Individual”: A Cultural Analysis of a Bulgarian Magazine’s Covers over Seven Decades 462 Elza Ibrosheva and Maria Stover

427

453

Index472

List of Figures

Figure 2.1

Figure 2.2

Figure 2.3

Figure 2.4

Blue Plaque to William Morris and Edward Lloyd on the Water House, Walthamstow. Edward Lloyd’s heirs gave it to Council in 1898. It was opened as Lloyd Park in 1900. The house is now the William Morris Gallery. Source: Stephen Craven for geograph.org.uk. CC license: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plaque_to_William:Morris _and_Edward_Lloyd_‐_geograph.org.uk_‐_1214659.jpg. And see: http://www.edwardlloyd.org/houses.htm. Picture: Stephen Craven.

25

Readership as a distributed communication network. These famous diagrams by Paul Baran (1964, p. 2) mark the fabled origin of the internet. Unlike the “command‐and‐control” system (L), which can be knocked out if the center is destroyed, the distributed system (R) is resilient enough to withstand nuclear attack: communications can just go around missing nodes. The concepts the diagrams visualize were revolutionary in military terms, but distributed communications already existed: they are the very fabric of language and culture; the means by which knowledge is circulated and preserved. Source: Baran’s original diagrams can be seen at https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html. Rand Corporation.

27

Reading Girls: Magni’s sculpture (1861) and Roussel’s painting (1887) dramatize the democratization of reading: one portends political emancipation, the other is a harbinger of the modern consumer; both depict ordinary people as realistic truth rendered desirable.

29

Inner Struggle, by Sir Richard Taylor and Weta Workshop. Dyslexia Foundation, Christchurch, New Zealand www.ctct.org.nz/ dde/exhibit.html. Source: photo: J. Hartley.

30

Figure 2.5

“We are the majority now.” Media mogul encounters the audience. Source: Hetty Einzig @HettyEinzig (Twitter). Photo courtesy of Hetty Einzig. 32

Figure 6.1

An instructional sketch to the coding and production team at Style.com emphasizes references to bodily attributes in the layout of a web page.

Figure 8.1

LUMA graphic. Source: LUMA Partners LLC.

113

Figure 9.1

Distributions of sampled papers by decades.

122

Figure 15.1 Modern Screen, April 1936, p. 14. “Information Desk.”

83

201



List of Figures

ix

Figure 15.2 Photoplay, December 1936, p. 74. “May we suggest…”

203

Figure 15.3 Photoplay, February 1936, p. 74. “Luncheon at Dolores De Rio’s.”

204

Figure 15.4 Photoplay, March 1936, p. 22, “Joan.”

206

Figure 15.5 Photoplay, June 1936, p. 86, “Shirley Temple reads her Photoplay on the set.”

208

Figure 15.6 Modern Screen, December 1936, p. 10, “All work and no play.”

210

Figure 19.1 May 2000 issue.

252

Figure 19.2 November 2006 issue.

253

Figure 19.3 March 2010 issue.

254

Figure 19.4 March 2017 issue.

255

Figure 29.1 “Table of Content.” Screenshot from Inspire Magazine, no. 5 (2011): 2.

387

Notes on Contributors

Gwen Allen is professor and director of the School of Art at San Francisco State University. She specializes in contemporary art, criticism, and visual culture. She has written about art and design for publications including Artforum, Bookforum, Art Journal, and East of Bourneo. She is the author of Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (MIT Press, 2011) and editor of The Magazine (MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery, 2016). Cristóbal Benavides Almarza is associate dean of the School of Communication at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile. His research and teaching interests focus on ­journalism and convergence. Dr. Lyn Barnes retired in early 2019 from the School of Communication Studies at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. She spent 11 years in academia after a career in journalism, most recently working in magazines as a writer, sub‐editor, and editor. Sharon Bloyd‐Peshkin is an associate professor in the Communication Department at Columbia College Chicago. Her research interests include fact‐checking in the digital age and magazine media. She has contributed to Belt, Chicago magazine, In These Times, Common Review, and Chicago Tribune, among others. Nicholas Boston is an associate professor of journalism and media studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York. His areas of research are labor and organization in the ­contemporary media industries as well as media and transnational migration. His journalism and commentary have appeared in or on The New York Observer, The London Evening Standard, the BBC, Bronxnet, CFCF Montreal, PBS, and NBC Universal New York. David Brittain is a senior lecturer in photography at the Manchester School of Art. With a background in arts journalism and broadcasting, he has contributed to numerous publications, including as editor of Creative Camera magazine from 1991 to 2001 and contributor to BBC Radio Four. His latest book, Paolozzi at New Worlds: Science Fiction and Art in the Sixties, was published by Savoy Books in 2013. His research interests include authorship, reproduction, digital culture, and the material culture of archives, text, and image. Ariel Chen is a post‐doctoral researcher at Örebro University, Sweden. Her research interests lie in multimodal critical discourse analysis especially applied to media discourse in relation to ­neoliberal society. She is currently working on a research project which focuses on the way healthy diet discourse is constructed politically and commercially.



Notes on Contributors

xi

Nora Denner is a research associate in the Department of Communication at Johannes Gutenberg‐University in Mainz, Germany. She is currently working on her dissertation, which explores the personalization of corporate communication and corporate news coverage. Her research interests include crisis communication, trust in news media, and media effects. Dr Paul Dwyer is Director of the Creative Enterprise Centre and a member of the Communication and Media Research Institute research group at the University of Westminster in the UK. He is a former BBC executive and a producer and director of factual, news, and drama TV and radio programmes. His latest book, Understanding Media Production, was published in 2019. Esther Egbeyemi completed her master’s degree in Magazine Journalism at Cardiff University in 2017. She is a journalist at Newsround, the BBC’s news platform for children, and a contributor to the online magazines Girl Got Faith and Black Ballad in the UK as well as to the New York‐based Valour Magazine. Elizabeth Groeneveld is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s Studies at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. She is the author of Making Feminist Media: Third‐Wave Magazines on the Cusp of the Digital Age (Laurier University Press, 2016). Her recent work on 1980s feminist pornography magazines is published in American Periodicals and Continuum: A Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. Benedikt Gutheil is a graduate student specializing in corporate communications in the Department of Communication at Johannes Gutenberg‐University in Mainz, Germany. John Hartley, AM, is the author of many books and papers on popular media, culture, journalism and the creative industries. He was founding head of the School of Journalism at Cardiff University (Wales), foundation dean of Creative Industries at QUT (Australia), and an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow. He is now professor of Cultural Science at Curtin University, an elected fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, Australian Academy of Humanities, and International Communication Association. Matt Hills is a professor of media and film at the University of Huddersfield. He is the author of six monographs, including Fan Cultures (Routledge, 2002) and Triumph of a Time Lord (I.B. Tauris, 2010), and has published widely on media fandom. His latest sole‐authored book is Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event (Palgrave, 2015), and he recently co‐edited Transatlantic Television Drama for Oxford University Press (2019). Tim Holmes is associate director of postgraduate‐taught journalism programs at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture, Cardiff University, Wales. He has specialized in teaching and writing about magazine journalism and is founder of the Mapping the Magazine series of ­conferences. His books include Magazine Journalism (2012, with Liz Nice), Subediting and Production for Journalists (2016), and Mapping the Magazine (2008), an edited collection of papers from the first and second conferences. Berkley Hudson is an associate professor of magazine journalism at the University of Missouri‐ Columbia. His research interests center on American media history, visual studies, interviewing, media representation of racial conflict, and narrative journalism. Before joining academia, he was a newspaper and magazine editor and writer for 25 years including at the Los Angeles Times. Elza Ibrosheva is a professor and associate dean of the School of Communications at Webster University in Missouri. She has published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, Central

xii

Notes on Contributors

European Journal of Communication, Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, and Sex Roles. A native of Bulgaria, she studies media developments in Eastern Europe and is the author of Advertising, Sex and Post Socialism: Women, Media and Femininity in the Balkans (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). Savyasaachi Jain is a senior lecturer specializing in journalism and documentary at Cardiff University in the UK. His research focuses on international journalism, global media systems, and the influences that shape journalistic practices and standards. A former print and television journalist and documentary filmmaker, he has conducted workshops for journalists in many countries on behalf of the Asia‐Pacific Broadcasting Union, Asia‐Pacific Institute for Broadcasting Development, Commonwealth Broadcasting Association, UNDP, UNESCO, and UNICEF. Joy Jenkins, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee‐Knoxville, is a former post‐ doctoral research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Her research focuses on media sociology, including the changing organizational structures and practices of newsrooms and the potential for news organizations, particularly at the local level, to contribute to public engagement. She has a specific interest in magazines and alternative media. Jenkins’ research has been published in Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice, Journalism, Feminist Media Studies, and New Media & Society. Nithila Kanagasabai is a doctoral student in women’s studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Her research interests include feminist media studies, cultural studies, and feminist pedagogy. Before entering academia, she worked as a reporter at NDTV and Times Now. Thomas Koch is professor for corporate communications and public relations in the Department of Communication at Johannes Gutenberg‐University in Mainz, Germany. His research interests include persuasive communication, the relationship between journalism and public ­relations, internal and external corporate communication, and media reception/effects. Kevin M. Lerner, an assistant professor of journalism at Marist College, is the editor of the Journal of Magazine Media. His research focuses on the intellectual history of journalism through press criticism, satire, and magazines. His first book, Provoking the Press: (MORE) Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism, was published by the University of Missouri Press in 2019. Megan Le Masurier is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Her professional life began briefly in the academy, after which she worked in the magazine industry for many years (as journalist and editor). She is currently writing a book titled Independent Magazines in Print in a Digital Age. Her research interests include magazine theory, history, and practice; popular feminism; slow journalism; and independent magazines. David Machin is professor of media and communication at Örebro University, Sweden. He has published in the areas of critical discourse analysis and multimodality. His most recent book is Doing Visual Analysis (2018), published by Sage. He is co‐editor of the journals Social Semiotics and Journal of Language and Politics. Sharon Maxwell Magnus is a faculty member at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. Her research interest include the use of effective and ineffective advocacy in magazines, the



Notes on Contributors

xiii

r­elationship between women’s magazines and feminism, entrepreneurship, and strategies for improving the learning experiences of students from non‐traditional backgrounds. She is also an award‐winning journalist who has contributed to publications such as The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, Night and Day, and The Independent. Andrea McDonnell, associate professor and chair of the Department of English at Emmanuel College, is a media scholar and author whose work examines the production, content, and ­audience reception of media texts that are produced for and consumed by women. Her work emphasizes the intersection of media technologies, audiences, and everyday life. Her first book was Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines (Polity Press, 2014). Her new book, Celebrity, co‐authored with Susan Douglas (University of Michigan), is forthcoming with NYU Press. Usha Raman is an associate professor of communication at the University of Hyderabad, India. Her research interests include cultural studies of science, health communication, feminist media studies, and the social and cultural impact of digital media. Before entering academia in 2010, she worked as a freelance journalist and health communicator for over three decades. Xiang Ren is a research fellow in digital communications and Chinese cultures at Western Sydney University, Australia. Ren completed his PhD at Queensland University of Technology, receiving the University’s outstanding doctoral thesis award. He has published widely in digital publishing, open access, and China’s creative industries. Prior to his academic career, he spent more than a decade working as a publisher in China. Chelsea Reynolds is an assistant professor in the Department of Communications at California State University‐Fullerton. Her research investigates media representations of sexuality, gender, race, and sexual health. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s (AEJMC) Mary Yodelis Smith Award for Feminist Scholarship. Carol B. Schwalbe is an associate professor of journalism and director of the School of Journalism at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on the role of images in shaping ideas and public opinion during the Cold War, ethical concerns about publishing violent images, and the visual framing of the Iraq War on the Internet. Before joining academia, she worked as a writer and editor at National Geographic for almost three decades. Professor John Sinclair is an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His published work covers selected aspects of the internationalization of the media and communication industries, with a special emphasis on advertising and television in Asia and Latin America. He has held visiting professorships at leading universities in Europe and the United States, and is active on journals and professional organizations. Susan Currie Sivek is an associate professor of mass communication at Linfield College in Oregon. She also serves as the magazine industry correspondent for PBS MediaShift, where she writes about the transition to the digital age. Her research and teaching focus on social media, magazine journalism, multimedia communication, and political communication. She is a ­frequent contributor to academic journals and conferences and a freelance writer for several magazines and websites. Miglena Sternadori is an associate professor of journalism at Texas Tech University. Her research interests include magazine studies, feminist framing analysis, stereotypes in media

xiv

Notes on Contributors

content, mediated malleability of attitudes, audience preferences, and media effects. She is the author of Mediated Eros (Peter Lang, 2015) and author or co‐author of more than 20 journal articles. Before entering academia, she worked as a journalist in Bulgaria and the USA. Maria Stover is a professor and chair of the department of mass media at Washburn University in Kansas. Originally from Bulgaria, she studies media systems in Eastern Europe, aspects of the gender problematic, and the social impact of new communication technologies. She has published in the Howard Journal of Communications and International Journal of Communication, and is a co‐editor (with Elza Ibrosheva) of Women in Politics and Media: Perspectives from Nations in Transition (Bloomsbury, 2014). Lara Tarantini, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, specializes in Middle Eastern and North African studies. Her research interests include contemporary Islamic movements and new media, with a specific focus on the ways in which jihadi groups conceptualize and define the Muslim umma. David Weiss (PhD University of New Mexico, 2005) is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication and Journalism at the University of New Mexico. His research interests include media discourse, political and religious communication, and the media and popular culture industries. Before his return to academia in 2000, he worked in the advertising agency business in New York City for almost two decades. Charles Whitaker is dean and professor at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, and Integrated Marketing Communications. Before joining the Medill faculty, he was a senior editor at Ebony magazine, where he covered a wide range of cultural, social, and political issues. He is the co‐author of Magazine Writing, a textbook that examines the magazine industry and deconstructs the art of feature writing, and has contributed to the Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Sun‐Times, Chicago Magazine, Jet Magazine, Essence Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Saturday Evening Post, Chicago Parent magazine, and Folio, the magazine of the magazine industry. Kenton T. Wilkinson is a Regents Professor and director of the Thomas Jay Harris Institute for Hispanic & International Communication in the College of Media & Communication at Texas Tech University. He is editor of the International Journal of Hispanic Media and serves on five editorial boards. Wilkinson’s research interests include international communication, and US Hispanic‐oriented media and health communication. His book, Spanish‐Language Television in the United States: Fifty Years of Development, was published by Routledge in 2016. Matthew Yeomans is the author of Trust Inc. How Business Gains Respect in a Social Media Age. As a journalist, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, National Geographic, Time Magazine, and Wired. He was a senior editor at The Village Voice and The Industry Standard. He is a guest lecturer at Cardiff University and Cambridge Institute of Sustainable Leadership. Dan Zhang is a lecturer in marketing and advertising at Coventry University in the UK. His research focuses on digital technologies and their impacts in media and communications businesses. Following a career in business journalism and media management, he completed his PhD at University of Westminster, where he studies the effects of social media on the B2B publishing industry in the UK.

Part I

Conceptual and Historical Underpinnings

1

Magazines, Megazines, and Metazines What Is a Magazine in the Twenty‐First Century? Tim Holmes

Introduction The question about what a magazine is, or isn’t, has by now surely been won, been lost, been declared a draw, been abandoned in a fit of pique … hasn’t it? No, it would appear that despite the long drawn‐out debate (see Holmes and Nice 2012, chapter 1), it hasn’t. It hasn’t because the premise of the question keeps changing as the ways that people use media, and particularly digital and social media, evolve. It hasn’t because magazine‐like media entities continue to be invented and used in ways that make them candidates for inclusion in the taxonomy. Here’s an interesting metaphor, drawn from a magazine about wildlife, for how perspectives on what is or isn’t a magazine can legitimately differ. The Kittiwake (Rissa tridactyla) is a seabird that many of us would, in our ignorance, classify rather generally as a small seagull. Like many birds, kittiwakes have moved into urban areas and adapted man‐made landscapes for their own purposes. In the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, in the northeast of England, there is a colony of kittiwakes that nests on the Tyne Bridge. The magazine story itself is about how not everyone welcomes the presence of these birds but the author makes the point that, “As far as kittiwakes are concerned, the bridge is a cliff, but in a different setting. It looks quite different to us, but it provides most of the same features” (Mason 2018, p. 34). I will argue in this chapter that it is the features that are important, not the setting, when it comes to debating what is or is not a magazine. Dr. Samir Husni (n.d.), whose impressive credentials include being the founder and director of the Magazine Innovation Center, as well as professor and Hederman lecturer at the Meek School of Journalism and New Media, University of Mississippi, is also known as Mr. Magazine. On his website of the same name, there is a strapline that reads, “If it is not ink on paper, it is not a magazine”. (Mr. Magazine n.d.). He is right, of course, but right in the sense that the opponents of Newcastle upon Tyne’s kittiwakes are right: it’s a bridge, not a cliff – but in the absence of a real cliff, it will perform the functions of a cliff very well indeed for the birds that use it. Are media consumers who use non‐traditional structures for magazine‐like purposes to be denied the opportunity to think of them how they like? Are we who study those uses to be strictly limited by a historical straitjacket that forces us to consider only old issues of Vogue or new issues of Cereal? Or, as Andrew O’Neill notes in his history of the highly contested musical genre heavy metal, is it the case that, “Ultimately, genre labels are unimportant. The map is not the territory. They exist as a descriptive guide, but the boundaries between genres are all porous” (O’Neill 2018, p. xxi)? The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

4 Holmes The metaphor above might help to illustrate a point but it does not explain what “magazine‐ like purposes” are, nor does it provide a solid framework for analysis. For the former I draw on the General Theory of Magazines expounded in Magazine Journalism (Holmes and Nice 2012); for the latter a useful model is provided by Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, who proposes that the industrialized world has been through three industrial revolutions and is entering the fourth (Schwab 2017). The theory of magazines states: 1. magazines always target a precisely defined group of readers; 2. magazines base their content on the expressed and perceived needs, desires, hopes, and fears of that defined group; 3. magazines develop a bond of trust with their readerships; 4. magazines foster community‐like interactions between themselves and their readers, and among readers; 5. magazines can respond quickly and flexibly to changes in the readership and changes in the wider society (loc. cit.). Although the primary focus in this definition is on what magazines do, it is equally important to note the functions of members of the readership group in the relationship – they are a cohesive community of interest; they express, explicitly or implicitly, a set of information needs; they trust (and are trusted); they interact with one another; and they change, either because group membership rotates or because their information needs change in response to external stimuli or personal development. All these factors count toward determining the “magazine‐like purposes” of both the media entity and the community of interest. In his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Klaus Schwab briefly delineates three phases of industrial development that precede the current situation in which machines are smart and technologies are fusing “across the physical, digital and biological domains [making] the fourth industrial revolution fundamentally different from previous revolutions” (op. cit., p. 8). Although sketched rather than analyzed deeply, with a little customization the precursory phases provide a useful framework on which to map out an evolutionary history of magazines. In Schwab’s timeline, the first industrial revolution occurred with the shift from reliance on animals, human effort, and biomass as primary sources of energy, to the mechanical power enabled by using fossil fuels. In fact there is a strong argument that the roots of the first revolution can be more accurately dated to Gutenberg’s perfection of the printing press and movable type circa 1439 (Eisenstein 2012, p. 13; Steinberg 2017, p. 17). Not only did this permit and encourage the spread of knowledge essential to the flowering of the first phase of industrial development, it also allowed the invention of the magazine form. Whether the very first was Gynasceum, sive Theatrum Mulierum (1586, fashion plates) or Erbauliche Monaths‐Unterredungen (1663, edifying philosophical discussions) or Journal des Scavans (1665, book reviews), the form is accurately defined by David Abrahamson as bringing “high‐value interpretative information to specifically defined … audiences” (Abrahamson 1996, p. 1). Landmark inventions from the post‐printing press phase include James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny (1764), Arkwright’s water frame (1769), Trevithick’s steam locomotive (1803) and, of course, Koenig and Bauer’s steam‐driven printing press, the first two of which were installed by The Times of London in 1814. The key magazine from this period was undoubtedly The Gentleman’s Magazine, founded by Edward Cave in 1731. Not only was it the first periodical to feature the word “magazine” in its title, it concerned itself with improving the social, cultural, and economic capital of the landed gentry who were its intended consumers, including ways of incorporating inventions of the industrial‐agrarian revolution into their farms and estates. Cave’s publication was also taken as a model by other publishers, including Benjamin Franklin who, in



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1740, planned to launch America’s first monthly magazine. However, his General Magazine ended up second to bitter rival John Webbe’s American Magazine by a few days (Lemay 2006). Neither magazine lasted very long.1 Many would agree the canonical book to be An Inquiry Into Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations by Adam Smith (1776). Smith’s book famously contains the description of a pin‐making factory where the various stages of production are separated into discreet operations, thus delineating the principles of the division of labor that permits higher productivity, greater output, lower prices – and mass production. Schwab puts mass production at the heart of the second industrial revolution, but allies it with a change of power to electricity. A plausible date for the start of this second phase would be 1882, when public power stations employing electric generators began operation in London and New York. Both used direct current (DC) which had significant drawbacks for long‐distance power transmission in comparison with alternating current (AC) systems. The decisive engagement in the ensuing Battle of The Currents was fought at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair between Thomas Edison (DC pioneer) and George Westinghouse (who had licensed Nikola Tesla’s polyphase AC induction motor). Westinghouse (and AC) emerged the victor, but the practical advantage had already been demonstrated in Lauffen, Germany, where an AC generator went into service in 1890. One of the earliest pioneers of the electrically powered printing press was Thomas Davenport of Vermont, USA, who in 1840 used his self‐built electric rotary press to publish his own magazine, The Electro‐Magnet and Mechanics Intelligencer, in which he described such impossible devices as electrically powered trains, pianos, and cars (Wicks 1999, p. 69). Electricity took a surprisingly long time to supplant steam as an industrial power source, but by 1906 British newspaper proprietor Edward Lloyd was printing Lloyd’s Weekly and the Daily Chronicle on electrically powered Hoe2 perfecting presses (Vick n.d.). One name permanently associated with mass production is Henry Ford, but it was Ransom E. Olds who created the first automobile assembly line for the Oldsmobile Curved Dash in 1901 (Berger 2001). The Model T did not get going until 1908, but before either car hit the road, English publisher Illife had launched the world’s first weekly motoring magazine, The Autocar, in 1895. This was as much a statement of faith in the future of the motor car as it was a commercial venture, but the fact that it is still appearing every week is a strong argument for the correctness of the decision. Mass production encouraged the development and professionalization of a raft of new marketing techniques, including branding and advertising, and it was during this phase that a sustainable business model for magazine publishing was developed. Credit for realizing the potential of advertising revenue to subsidize production costs and allow more affordable cover prices is divided between Cyrus Curtis (Ladies Home Journal, 1883), Frank A. Munsey (Munsey’s Magazine, 1889), and Samuel McLure (McLure’s Magazine, 1893); whoever it was, the new model allowed magazine publishing to expand and flourish at a time when manufacturers were increasingly aware of the need to reach potential customers and persuade them to buy – it’s all very well having the means with which to create a cornucopia of artifacts, but their value is only realized when a sale has occurred. For this to happen, potential consumers must be made aware of availability, they usually need an idea of cost or level of expenditure, of the specific benefits of a particular product, and where the item can be located. As a grossly oversimplified generalization, branding concerns itself with explaining the benefits that will accrue to the customer (Clifton and Simmons 2003; Holt 2004), and advertising takes care of the rest. When combined with the forms of popular mass communication readily available at the time – newspapers and magazines – the right conditions were formed for the enduring business model characterized so well by Abrahamson: “delivering … readers to a group of manufacturers or distributors with the means and willingness to advertise their products and services to them” (Abrahamson 1996, p 28). Curtis or Munsey or McLure saw this model could be used to the benefit of both partners in the arrangement – the manufacturer and the medium. Although none of their magazines

6 Holmes was concerned with two wheelers, bicycles make a good example. The bicycle went through a long period of design evolution, from the Laufmaschine invented by Baron Karl von Drais in 1817 (also known as the Draisine), through a succession of velocipedes pedaled through the front of two equal‐sized wheels, to the ordinary, or penny‐farthing, perfected in the 1870s with its gigantic front wheel and tiny rear. The ordinary may have had many great characteristics but its tendency to pitch riders off head first when the front wheel hit a bump or pothole somewhat counted against it becoming a popular means of transport, and the difficulty of adjusting the ratio between pedals and wheel made it relatively inefficient. There was still a large gap in the market for a bicycle that was much easier and safer to ride for ordinary mortals, preferably one that was also straightforward to manufacture. The gap was filled in 1885 when John Kemp Starley designed and made what came to be known as the safety bicycle for the Rover brand. The safety was a bicycle as we have known it – a diamond frame with equally sized wheels at either end, pedals in the middle of the diamond connected to the rear wheel with a chain running over gears. Starley, who came from a family of renowned engineers, did not patent his design and it was soon adopted and adapted by most other cycle manufacturers. It was simple to make and could be standardized, which helped to lower costs and increase sales; by 1889 Rover had created a version for women that did away with the top tube of the diamond frame, widening the market further and, incidentally, giving rise to conditions that fomented a moral panic around female cyclists and their rational attire.3 With a standardized design across the industry (the global industry as it happened) manufacturers began to compete in the market on price and brand promises; some makes became the reliable way of getting to work, others sought glory on the racetrack for their sporting mounts. All needed ways to alert consumers to their wares and persuade them to purchase. The magazine related point of this? A study of Muddiman’s Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers, Magazines and Reviews (Muddiman and Roland 1920) shows that between 1875 and 1900 there were 31 cycling magazines launched in the UK. Enthusiasts on the one side could meet manufacturers and distributors on the other, through the medium of the magazine. Publishers were clearly happy to facilitate the encounter. This was not restricted to the British Isles – in the USA, according to Norcliffe (2001), cycle manufacturers accounted for up to 10% of all advertising in US periodicals by 1898. The third industrial revolution, pace Schwab, began in the 1960s with the development of digital systems and rapid advances in computing power, that was “catalysed by the development of semiconductors, mainframe computing (1960s), personal computing (1970s and 1980s) and the internet (1990s)” (Schwab 2017, p. 7) Marshall McLuhan, perhaps the foremost cultural critic of the electric age, certainly thought that this phase marked a revolutionary change from the era dominated by Gutenberg’s mechanical invention: “Obsession with the older patterns of mechanical, one‐way expansion from centers to margins is no longer relevant to our electric world. Electricity does not centralize, but decentralizes” (McLuhan 1994, p. 36). The idea of decentralization certainly seems to accord with the postwar boom in magazine publishing (Abrahamson 1996; Johnson and Prijatel 1999) that resulted, at least in part, from the alignment of three key elements  –  the growth of viable specialist subject areas, increased emphasis on individual identity (often expressed through conspicuous consumption) and the capitalist commodification of leisure. Hobbies, interests, and leisure activities pursued outside work became important markers of identity, and the adoption of specific magazines reinforced those personal choices, the more so when alternative titles became available. Choosing NME over Melody Maker (both British music weeklies at their peak in the 1960s) became a subcultural marker of authenticity as much as a musical preference. Erving Goffman’s (1972) canonical, but in many respects extremely dated, work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was published at the start of the electric era. It incorporates the concept of “front” as “that part of an i­ ndividual’s



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performance which regularly functions in a general and fixed fashion to determine the situation for those who observe the performance” (p. 32); important elements of front are the “assemblages of sign‐equipment” (p. 33) providing the accessorizing details that reinforce the part the individual is playing. Goffman focused on physical settings such as “furniture, décor, physical layout, and other background items which supply the scenery and stage props …” (p. 32) and a specialist magazine proclaiming the actor’s adherence to high fashion or powerful automobiles would certainly work as a prop. (Of course, the individual can also be genuinely interested in the subject matter.) Despite McLuhan’s dictum about decentralization, the electric age in and of itself gave rise to new interests and tribal identities that could be colonized by enthusiasts and commodified by magazine publishers. For example, computers and automation is widely credited with being the first computer magazine. It was launched and self‐published by Edmund C. Berkeley as Roster of Organizations in the Field of Automatic Computing Machinery (1951– 1952), before changing its name to the slightly snappier The Computing Machinery Field (1952–1953), then Computers and Automation.4 The name changed in 1973 to Computers and Automation and People, as Berkeley’s focus changed from the machines to the ways in which humans interacted with them, and then finally to Computers and People in 1975. The magazine ceased publishing in 1988. Berkeley’s magazine was aimed at the scholarly and serious‐minded end of the community of interest but it did not take long for hobbyists to be catered for. Popular Electronics was launched by the Ziff‐Davis publishing company, which was soon claiming it to be the world’s largest‐ selling electronics magazine (Holley n.d.). The January 1975 edition of this title can claim to have had a significant effect on developments in the personal computing industry. According to a story published on Fast Company’s website in January 2015, this issue was bought by Paul Allen because it had a cover story about the Altair 8800 minicomputer (McCracken 2015). Allen shared it with his fellow Harvard undergraduate Bill Gates, they wrote a program in Beginner’s All‐Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) for the Altair and formed a company called Micro‐Soft to market it. Thus began the personal computer (PC) industry, but also the computer/electronics publishing sector, which has grown into a multi‐branched field that covers everything from professional practice to gaming. The electric age also gave rise to several significant effects for material conditions of production in the magazine industry. One of the first fruits was phototypesetting, which began the process of taking typesetting out of the realm of mediaeval metalworking, with its hot lead sloshing around machines like the Linotype, and into relative modernity with the Linofilm (no technology based on photography, which had been around for 100 years by this point, could be called truly modern). The machines necessary for the physical creation of magazine pages became more compact, more digital, more flexible, and more based on personal computer technology (Hicks and Holmes 2002, pp. 126–132). By the 1990s it was possible to fit most of the necessary components (a PC with desktop publishing and photo‐processing programs, a scanner and a large number of storage disks) onto an office desk. Although the costs of paper, printing, and distribution remained high, other barriers to entering the market with a new magazine came tumbling down, which was good news for anyone with an idea they wanted to see in print and, perhaps even better for established publishers, who could both cut costs and risk launching more marginal projects. As we can see, the first three phases of Schwab’s timeline fit well with observable developments in the magazine industry. Before considering how the fourth and current phase might work it will be useful to provide a triadic taxonomy that allows a more granular discussion of how magazines fit into the broader media ecology suggested by the theory of successive industrial revolutions. In keeping with the main characteristics of the different eras, three categories that suggest themselves are: magazines, megazines, and metazines.

8 Holmes

Magazines This is the base category, as it were. It covers everything that Mr. Magazine (see above) believes is necessary for a magazine: print on paper. The history is well charted and it does not take a long or deep investigation to discover that traditional print‐on‐paper magazines continue to be launched. A glance at the trade press (InPublishing, Folio) or magazine organization websites (FIPP.com, Magazine.org) shows that print launches in categories as varied as children’s education (Little Baby Bum Songs and Stories, D. C. Thomson, February 2019), music festivals (FestWorld, Festworld Entertainment, March 2019), and true crime (Crime Monthly, Bauer, April 2019 – one of two print magazines Bauer launched that month, the other being the crafting title Take A Break Makes) make the news with some regularity. Magazine aficionados who are tired of being told print is dead will find such news encouraging, but a new print magazine from a commercial publisher will rarely stand alone. At the very least there are likely to be satellite media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram pages to reinforce the brand, but at the other end of the scale, the printed magazine may be a relatively small part of a much larger entity. Take Little Baby Bum Songs and Stories as an example. It is just one ingredient in the media mix of El Bebe Productions, a brand that produces content and products for pre‐school children. A cynic might be forgiven for thinking the company has found new ways to sell old, and uncopyrighted, nursery rhymes after looking at the website (http:// elbebeproductions.com), which features toys, books, DVDs of animated songs and merchandize such as dribble bibs; the magazine itself is listed in the Products tab of the main web page and it is revealing that the cover of the launch issue proclaims in the bottom right hand corner, “As seen on YouTube.” It is not hard to understand why a paper‐based magazine might be a useful part of the overall offering, with the main reason being its physical materiality: “Colouring in!” is one of the cover tasters, and while it is technically possible to “colour in” outlines on a tablet, the act of rubbing crayons or pencils against paper provides a different sensory experience (also on the cover, “DIY Sensory Play Ideas!”) that seems likely to appeal to parents who would like to afford their child a range of haptic sensations and keep time spent in front of a screen under control. The most important factor in the definition of a magazine (for this taxonomy) is that the print element is the primary focus and digital satellites are secondary. For reasons Megan Le Masurier explains in Chapter 7, this makes such magazines likely to come from the indie sector, but one of the most successful indie mags is Private Eye, perhaps the antithesis of “indie” in everything except its independence. For those unfamiliar with the title, it is a satirical fortnightly, printed on A4 size5 newsprint quality paper. It has its roots in a juvenile magazine founded by four public schoolboys (“public school” in the UK meaning one of the top‐ echelon private schools), was developed during their years at Oxford University and launched properly in 1961. It is full of jokes both good and bad, and it attacks with equal savagery politicians, cultural icons, and anyone else who is seen to be lying, cheating, or acting hypocritically. It has a lot of cartoons and, the key to its success, a lot of investigative journalism, often into areas that mainstream media cannot or will not examine (see Kevin Lerner in Chapter  26). This willingness to poke its nose into everybody’s business, to kick over the stones and see what wriggles away, seems to have had a correlative effect on its circulation figures in recent years – coincidentally, or not, the years in which information disorder6 has dominated news discourse. Official figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC; www.abc.org.uk) show Private Eye’s growth over the past three years; it hit a record figure for a single issue with the Christmas 2016 edition, at the end of the year in which the USA elected Donald Trump as its president and the UK voted to leave the European Union. Subsequent audit periods showed an upward trend that has, in the most recent figures (July to December 2018) begun



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to level off. However, at 233 869 it is still the leading title in the news and current affairs sector, comfortably ahead of The Economist (162 100 – although The Economist’s global figures are significantly larger). ABC provides forensic metrics for circulation but the publishing industry also likes to measure audiences. In the UK this task was handled until 2018 by the National Readership Survey (NRS), but because NRS methodology was based almost entirely on print it was considered unfit for purpose in the digital age and the organization was superseded by the Publishers Audience Measurement Company (PAMCo). PAMCo’s survey methodology includes print but also captures phone, tablet, and desktop data to provide a metric for total brand reach across all platforms (see Tan 2018). The results are freely available on the organization’s website and they provide a useful guide to the taxonomy being proposed here. Looking at the data available for Private Eye at the time of writing, PAMCo’s results show clearly that it is a magazine: the Venn diagram illustrating the degree of overlap between platforms shows Desktop 0, Phone/Tablet 0, Print 1 175 000.

Source: image courtesy of PAMCo.

Megazines If Private Eye is a good example of a Magazine, The Economist will stand as the initial example of a Megazine. Ironically, it is not signed up to PAMCo, but it is a committed member of the Audit Bureau of Circulation and has worked with that organization to clarify its total brand

10 Holmes reach (ABC 2019). Data results from ABC show 10 categories in which The Economist’s circulation and reach are measured:

Source: image courtesy of ABC.org.uk.

However, that is not a full account as it does not include the title’s Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr results, nor the radio/podcast that can claim six million streams and downloads a month (Walker 2018). Deputy editor Tom Standage made it clear how important the various digital platforms were in both spreading awareness of the title and driving readers toward the main offerings of print or digital editions in an interview he gave to journalism business‐to business (B2B) title Press Gazette in 2016 (Ponsford 2016). One of the reasons for revising the ­methodology for ABC data was to emphasize the importance of the digital edition; as Marina Haydn, The Economist’s managing director of global circulation, explains in that 2019 ABC case study, “The new reporting has enabled The Economist to articulate greater engagement with its ­products, particularly for digital editions which had previously been understated” (ABC 2019, n.p.). In this proposed taxonomy, then, The Economist is not a Magazine, it is, thanks to the surrounding panoply of digital offshoots and different platforms, a Megazine. We can see it is strong in its print‐on‐paper form but to focus on print to the exclusion of everything else that comprises The Economist as a media brand is to ignore reality. Yes, it is still a magazine in the traditional sense, but the print element is just one ingredient in a much larger, more complex recipe. And recipes literally lie at the heart of what might be considered an archetypal Megazine – BBC Good Food. When Nick Brett and Peter Phippen7 were charged with developing BBC television content into other forms of content that could be monetized through the corporation’s commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, some of the decisions made themselves – Top Gear could be directly translated from screen to print, for example – but others were more oblique. There was no program actually called Good Food, but there was Food and Drink, a popular show that ran from 1982 to 2002, and other food‐related programming that could be drawn on to create a portmanteau magazine concept.

Source: image courtesy BBC Worldwide. The magazine launched in 1989 and was almost immediately followed by the launch of the Good Food Show, and then a series of brand‐related developments, the most important of which have been the website and the apps, especially the fully responsive version that made the content easily accessible on mobile devices. The PAMco data clearly shows the relative importance of print, desktop, and mobile versions within the overall brand.

Source: image courtesy PAMCo.

12 Holmes What the brand dial diagram above does not show is a development that has not yet reached fruition, the BBC Good Food live experience. The print magazine’s reputation rests on its guarantee to test recipes multiple times before they are published, in a scientific attempt to ensure results can be replicated. This task is undertaken in the BBC’s test kitchens which are currently not accessible to the public. But what, Nick Brett thought, if you could make those kitchens visible and turn them into a brand experience – watch the food being tested, eat it in a restaurant, buy the utensils with which it is being prepared or the crockery on which it is served? As it happens, in the UK BBC Good Food was beaten to the actualization of this concept by Good Housekeeping (a Magazine that has definitely evolved into a Megazine), which opened a shiny new iteration of its Good Housekeeping Institute to visitors in 2014. (The Good Housekeeping Institute was originally established in 1900, and in the USA its live‐experience version opened to visitors in 2009.) There is another aspect of print magazines that is credited with increasing importance for the Megazine concept: the front cover. Simon Kanter, editorial director at Haymarket Media in the UK, is a passionate advocate of the front cover acting as a poster for the brand as a whole. He is responsible for a lot of B2B and customer titles, many of the latter being controlled‐circulation publications that are mailed to members of professional organizations such as the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (which has two titles: People Management and Work). The magazine brand is expected to play an important role in adding value to the membership fee, so Simon Kanter’s titles are expected to excel in all aspects of magazine craft – design, contents, compelling storytelling, haptically satisfying paper choices, and so on. But above all else, he emphasizes the importance of the cover as a page able to stand in its own right and generate engagement. Clearly, this is an encouragement for people to look at the rest of the print magazine – and getting people to look at something they are sent for free, whether they want it or not, is a big task – but even more importantly the provocativeness, pleasure, and creativity of the print front cover should raise awareness of the brand (and organization), and encourage engagement on social media. The ensuing network effect can then help bring new casual readers into the top end of the digital funnel and begin the process of converting them, via carefully constructed steps, into engaged readers and then paying subscribers. This general policy is echoed in many current publishing strategies. In March 2019, Folio, the North American news and information site for publishing professionals, analyzed how Wired leverages all the platforms under its umbrella: an app, a paywall for digital subscriptions, a series of themed newsletters, an OTT8 video channel, and live experiences that fall into three categories: B2B, B2C (business to customer), and custom events for brands. There is also the feted print magazine, of course, but the changing attitude to, and relative importance of, print can be judged by this statement about a “refresh” to the design, made by editor‐in‐chief Nick Thompson and quoted in the Folio story: Thompson clarifies that the refresh doesn’t equal a redesign, and that while a complete overhaul of print might have been the right approach a decade ago, “it’s probably not the right approach right now. The days of big redesigns with art directors staying up all night and things pinned to the wall and late night decisions on fonts, those days are done.” Going forward, he says that any change made on one platform should be reflected across all of them, since they’re all integrated. (Barber 2019, para. 14–15).

Within the taxonomic category of the Megazine, print is just one part of a bigger mix and, given the idea of the poster effect, having a print avatar of the brand in your hand is perhaps the equivalent of the “brand experiences” that Campaign (the bible of the British advertising industry and another of Simon Kanter’s charges) reports on increasingly frequently. Time Out was the original and best “what’s on” magazine for London, but now it is published in cities around the world and the brand has branched out into food markets. As Campaign reported in



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March 2019, Time Out has reinvented its revenue model to incorporate food markets that will be worth up to 35% of total revenue (McAteer 2019). But rather than just being a bolt on brand extension, the experience was rooted in and has grown out of the magazine’s history. As McAteer explains, it started in Lisbon in 2014: Editors saw the opportunity to turn an historic city market into the Time Out Market. It’s hailed as the world’s first food and cultural market experience rooted wholly in editorial curation. The best chefs, drinks and experiences are handpicked by the publication’s writing team which test, taste and review what the city has to offer. (McAteer 2019, para. 6)

Time Out Market now claims to be one of Portugal’s biggest tourist attractions,9 and the value generated by this conflux of curation and gastronomy was not lost on Time Out Group’s CEO Julio Bruno, who launched the drive to expand the concept into cities around the world. The goal is to have Time Out Market function not just as a food destination but as a curated “experience” that is integrally linked with the editorial brand, working “hand‐in‐hand with the publication’s online and print presence to drive traffic and readership across the 315 cities it’s physically in,” so that the benefits flow “in both directions as millions of visitors to Time Out Market results in growing interactions with the Time Out brand which in return drives eyeballs and awareness, increasing our relevance for advertisers” (McAteer 2019, para. 14). As Bruno concludes: We are synonymous with the best of the city and that is why Time Out Market is the perfect extension of our brand – we curate the best of the city, and now we bring the best of the city to our audience. This is something we can own, more than other media companies. (McAteer 2019, para. 21)

Metazines: Affordance as an Analytical Tool Before moving on to the third and final element of the taxonomy, it will be useful to introduce a theoretical concept that may help us to both understand the repercussions of the Time Out Market and unravel the meaning of the Metazine. That concept is the affordance. My first encounter with affordance was in a video about doors that did not operate in a readily predictable way, published by the online magazine Vox.10 Doors that appeared to invite a user to pull them turned out to need pushing … or sliding one way or the other. Trying to work out what lay at the root of this inconvenience led Vox to a spry old geezer named Donald Norman, whose classic book The Design of Everyday Things dealt with exactly this problem (among others). Norman defines affordance as “the relationship between a physical object and a person … a relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine how the object could possibly be used” (Norman 2013, p. 11). The reason the doors confused users was because they did not offer a straightforward relationship between what they could do and what the user thought he or she could or should do with them. The affordance was not immediately obvious. Norman did not invent the concept, which was first coined by James J. Gibson, a psychologist, who used it to describe what an animal’s environment provides or furnishes it with: “I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment” (Gibson 1979, p. 127). In fact, the concept of affordance is capable of interpretation in different ways, across different disciplines. We have already seen two above and, as an introduction to their chapter “The affordances of social media,” Bucher and Helmond (2017) provide a very useful primer on the s­ ubject.

14 Holmes As they note, the term is “multivalent” (p. 261), and, in addition to Gibson’s relational affordance and Norman’s perceived affordance, they outline descriptions of technological, social, and communicative affordances that have been used by scholars in different fields. In the spirit of Derrida’s bricolage (Derrida 2001), it is possible to contrive an elucidation of affordance that draws on several useful aspects of interpretation and that will provide us with an effective lens through which to consider the Metazine. In the context of this chapter, the two most useful varieties of affordance are perceived and communicative. The perceived variety reflects an emphasis on the relationship between object and agent. The communicative type of affordance is relevant for two reasons: first, the concept of communicative affordances is widely used in studies of communications facilitated by mobile devices, which is an important consideration for the Metazine; second, because of Bucher and Helmond’s observation that “the range of social contexts in which mobile communication takes place afford new forms of social identity, as well as the modification of tacit codes of social interactions” (p. 264). Donald Norman tells us: “An affordance is a relationship” (2013, p. 11). It is a well‐­ documented characteristic of magazines that readers form strong bonds with them (Hermes 1995; Beetham 1996; Korinek 2000; Consterdine 2002) – and what is a strong bond if not a relationship? Norman and others also emphasize that an affordance is not a fixed property of the object or the agent; that is to say, the notion of a relationship explains how the same aspect of the environment or object can provide different affordances to different people, and even to the same individual at another point in time. In this sense, a magazine (to use the word in its generic sense) can be considered an affordance, or rather a series of potential affordances because the relationships readers form with magazines, the uses to which readers put them – i.e., the “relationship between the properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine how the object could possibly be used” (Norman 2013, p. 11) – multiply and compound with time. Magazines provide different affordances to different people but also to the same people at different times. Time Out in its original form afforded readers the means to learn about events or restaurants they might enjoy, but that enjoyment was at one remove from the publication. Time Out Market affords direct enjoyment of consuming food, but some of those who enjoy it might well be people who have previously enjoyed the indirect affordance. Another example: the British magazine Motorcycle Mechanics (1959–1983) was originally aimed at motorcyclists whose machine was their primary form of transport. They needed information to keep their bikes running, to get to work, or to go on holiday. The affordance provided by the magazine would generally have been one of utility, complementing the need to know with the means of knowing. The same magazine bought now as a vintage issue might afford new knowledge of a kind unrelated to the initial intention, as well as enjoyment. Its depictions of relationships between genders and classes, perhaps, might be of value to a sociologist or a cultural historian; a classic motorcycle hobbyist might find nostalgic entertainment in the descriptions of repair techniques. It is possible that a newcomer to the old motorcycle scene who lacked the skill and understanding of an old hand might enjoy the original affordance of utility. Consider now the Facebook group British Motorcycle Mechanics.11 Set up by Greg Scoffield in February 2015, it is a closed group, and every new member has to be approved by the administrator to ensure that the applicant has a genuine interest in the subject matter and is not just a false agent or a bot intent on luring members to a malicious external site. Such careful scrutiny might argue for a small group but membership is still growing and currently stands at 14 000+, which would be a respectable circulation figure for a specialized magazine. Greg is very clear about the group’s purposes: “To provide a teaching forum for learning mechanics, give experienced mechanics a place to associate and, above all, provide a forum for all members to interact with fellowship” (Scoffield n.d., n.p.). In other words, it is based on relationships and knowledge exchange. The kinds of information sought and offered concern everything from very basic fixes to very advanced engineering, and because there are different opinions about the best way to



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tackle any mechanical problem, there are very often lively discussion threads under original posts. The group page has links to a growing number of documents and files from factory and other sources, so part of its function is to act as a library or a permanent set of back issues. There are also collections of video and still images, some of which are of excellent quality. In other words, British Motorcycle Mechanics is like a living, permanently‐on magazine that is staffed by 14 000+ content creators, many of whom are globally acknowledged experts in their field. This is way beyond the situation Dan Gillmor (2006) predicted in We The Media, when he foresaw “Big Media” having to level with citizen journalists. Big Media have been shoved completely out of the picture. British Motorcycle Mechanics clearly is not a magazine, yet a comparison of its attributes with the General Theory of Magazines shows distinct parallels: 1. it targets a precisely defined group of users (indeed, a hand‐picked group); 2. its content is entirely based on the expressed and perceived needs, desires, hopes, and fears of that defined group; it is the group that determines what the content is; 3. the page and its founder has developed a bond of trust with the users; 4. the posts and their threads foster community‐like interactions between themselves and their readers, and among readers; without the community, there would be no interaction and, as noted, no content. This, and the concept of the communicative affordance, is what leads me to characterize British Motorcycle Mechanics as a Metazine, which is both a metaphor for a magazine and a meta‐representation of the form. Conventional media organizations would love to have the levels of engagement shown within this group, as well as the depth of knowledge in the content,12 but there is one significant element missing, and that is an appropriate way to monetize it. A subscription model could work but would destroy the founding principles of free access to freely shared knowledge and expertise. The Metazine may be, by its very nature, resistant to commercial exploitation. This is not to say that advertising or promotion are prohibited; they are not. Most straightforwardly, the group home page has a “recommendations” tab, under which can be found links to many different individuals or organizations that have something useful to offer, be it parts, a service, or even a good place to ride. More subtly, and woven into the very fabric of the posts, members will recommend businesses they have dealt with; indeed, some of the members leaving comments run their own specialized businesses, and users who have been in the scene for a while are likely to recognize their names from the advertisements they once placed in conventional magazines. In effect, everything that happens in a commercially published magazine is happening in this group, but the organizing principle is a sort of pro‐bono idealism rather than a profit motive. Another Facebook page that shows similar Metazine characteristics is the Epiphone Les Paul Owners (ELPO) group; with 32 969 members, it represents a more than respectable circulation. The Epiphone Les Paul is a specific make and model of guitar, but once a person has been admitted (it’s another closed group), the joke is that members are free to discuss any make and model of guitar, guitar accessories, playing techniques, or music made on any guitar, although there is an understandable preponderance of the eponymous instrument. ELPO users often contrast this total freedom to post with other specific‐make‐and‐model guitar groups that police their content very tightly and are referred to as “cork sniffers,” the analogy being with wine snobs. Again, the group is like a permanently‐on version of Total Guitar or Guitar World but instead of having to wait a month to find out whether a particular brand or model of guitar, amplifier, pickup, or effect pedal is going to be reviewed, users can just create their own content immediately and have it commented on or augmented by others in the community. Furthermore, there is very little chance of commercial considerations tainting the opinion or information because it is so heterodox – for example, when Jock Mirow of Denver, Colorado, posted on 27 March 2019 about his Epiphone Les Paul’s pickups sounding muddy, by the next morning he

16 Holmes had 82 pieces of advice that recommended 23 separate makes or models and the reasons for preferring them. There is no way that an influencer is going to break through that much noise and no way that a single manufacturer or brand can dominate the discourse. The Metazine affords an egalitarian marketplace of ideas and opinions. The final example of a Metazine comes from an individual rather than a group, from Twitter rather than Facebook, and represents one strand of magazine‐like material rather than a complete magazine. The author goes by the handle @gawanmac, and a good example of the kind of post I am referring to can be found at https://twitter.com/gawanmac/ status/1008254934498926592. This is a thread of posts that document a walk @gawanmac took, from a busy main road out into the English countryside to a ruined building, a historic site that is the only known example in Britain of a Roman temple that was later used as a Christian church. The thread is an artfully fashioned mixture of images and beautifully crafted captions that takes in details of the route, plants seen along the way and, close up, on site, points of architectural interest, maps, and other information. It is exactly the kind of content one would be delighted to find regularly in Country Walking (UK) or Backpacker (USA). There is even a monetizable element, as he has an Etsy shop that sells prints of his atmospheric photographs, but this is clearly not a commercial or commercializable site. Check it out and you are more likely to come across posts about LGBTQ+ or Palestinian politics than a country walk, which makes the nature rambles13 more integrated into a real life that encompasses diverse interests. What these three examples, and countless other instances, have in common is that they have progressed so far beyond the idea of participatory journalism propounded by Singer et  al. (2011). It is no longer the case that the audience is permitted to participate in media discourse under certain constraints in certain conditions; as Bucher and Helmond suggest, new forms of social identity are afforded by modern communications technology and platforms, with new codes of social interactions creating relationships among and between group members. The Metazine affords a non‐commodified mode of information exchange and entertainment, often based around a commodified field (motorcycles, guitars) but operating beyond the usual mediated boundaries.14

Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to show that, as a matter of historical and cultural necessity, the study of magazines needs to move on from its legacy roots to recognize and encompass the evolved categories of Megazine and Metazine. This applies whether the student is from an academic or an industrial background. The necessity is not comfortable news for journalists, publishers, journalism schools, or academics operating in fields of heritage media. However, as is evident from news pages of the journalism trade press or a visit to a store that specializes in indie titles, the Magazine is far from moribund. An arm of Gutenberg’s galaxy (McLuhan 1962) continues to expand, as print on paper exerts its gravitational pull on the imagination of “typographic humans” (to adapt McLuhan’s phrase). There will never be nothing to study in this field, but there can be no question that its mass market phase has passed. The Megazine is likely to continue its trajectory of growth as media organizations seek to create 360° brands. From the large titles, such as Good Housekeeping, to small ones such as Delayed Gratification,15 the concept of surrounding a magazine with offshoots and events in pursuit of revenue, sometimes to the point where the magazine becomes a subsidiary player in the scheme, is now a well‐established business model. This field will remain open to study of commercial development and cultural affect for the foreseeable future. The Metazine is a phenomenon rich with possibilities for further study by media scholars, especially those that bring with them knowledge and understanding of the magazine as a socio‐ cultural form. It overlaps with the field of social media studies, and can draw on the analytical



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tools from that field, but it has distinct characteristics that should encourage new developments in magazine studies. Such studies may also provide valuable insights for the publishing industry. In conclusion, it does not matter whether the structure of the magazine is a bridge or a cliff – if it provides the features that its users want, it can be either, or both, or something else entirely. The trick is to be able to see the magazine‐like features.

Notes 1 For an entertaining version of this story, see http://mentalfloss.com/article/92095/bitter‐race‐ publish‐americas‐first‐magazine. 2 The Hoe web perfecting press was named after an American inventor, Richard Hoe. It sped up printing because it used a continuous roll of paper and could print on both sides of a page. 3 There are two interesting observations to make here: (i) The Society for Rational Dress, founded in London in 1881, published a quarterly magazine, the Gazette, which ran for six issues; copies are available in the British Library, Shelfmark: 1866.b.9.(10.); (ii) medical studies of female cyclists discovered the interestingly named phenomenon of “bicycle face” in young women who took up the sport. See Marland (2013). For a view on the moral panic around cycling see https://thevictoriancyclist.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/cycling‐accidents‐and‐1890s‐moral‐ panics, accessed 19 March 2019. 4 A digitized collection of issues can be found at https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_computers And Automation. 5 One of the standard paper sizes in Europe and in other parts of the world, 8.27 × 11.69 in. The standard paper size in the USA that is the closest to the A4 is 8.5 by 11 in. 6 Giving a keynote at the 2016 Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, Wales, Dr. Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft News, made a very strong case for not using the term “fake news.” 7 Respectively editorial director and managing director of BBC Worldwide at the time. 8 OTT = Over The Top, a standalone video channel that delivers content over the internet. In the case of Wired and other Condé Nast media brands, this is not channeled through YouTube – although Wired does have a successful YouTube channel, too. 9 See also: https://www.timeout.com/about/market. 10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY96hTb8WgI. 11 https://www.facebook.com/groups/britishmotorcyclemechanics. 12 Indeed, when I was publishing a magazine in this sector, I did pay some of the group members to write for me. 13 Here’s another: https://twitter.com/gawanmac/status/984865835566141440. 14 The British crafting magazine Mollie Makes represents a rare disruption of the new order. A social media coordinator was the first editorial appointment, and it was her task to delve into crafting Metazines, identify key contributors, and persuade them to help Future Publishing to develop a Big Media equivalent. Of course, Future Publishing does not tell the tale exactly that way: www.­journalism. co.uk/news/how‐future‐builds‐an‐audience‐before‐launching‐a‐new‐title/s2/a553224. 15 In a related development, Delayed Gratification has offered masterclasses in how to launch and develop an independent magazine: https://www.slow‐journalism.com/filter/events‐and‐classes.

References ABC (2019). The Economist collaborates with ABC to provide more transparency into audited circulation figures. www.abc.org.uk/images/The_Economist_case_study_2019.pdf (accessed 3 March 2019). Abrahamson, D. (1996). Magazine‐Made America: The Cultural Transformation of the Postwar Periodical. Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press, Inc.

18 Holmes Barber, K. (2019). How Wired’s multiplatform strategy is increasing engagement and revenue. Folio. https:// www.foliomag.com/wired‐multiplatform‐strategy‐engagement‐revenue (accessed 17 March 2019). Beetham, M. (1996). A Magazine of her Own, Routledge. London. Berger, M.L. (2001). The Automobile in American History and Culture: A Reference Guide. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. Bucher, T. and Helmond, A. (2017). The affordances of social media platforms. In: The Sage Handbook of Social Media (eds. J. Burgess, T. Poell and A. Marwick), 259–280. London and New York: Sage. Clifton, R. and Simmons, J. (2003). Brands and Branding. London: Profile. Consterdine, G. (2002). How Magazine Advertising Works IV. London: PPA. Derrida, J. (2001). Writing and Difference, 2e. London: Routledge. Eisenstein, E.L. (2012). The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gillmor, D. (2006). We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc. Goffman, E. (1972). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Pelican. Hermes, J. (1995). Reading Women’s Magazines: An Analysis of Everyday Media Use. Cambridge, UK and Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Hicks, W. and Holmes, T. (2002). Subediting for Journalists. London: Routledge. Holley, M. (n.d.). Popular Electronic magazine: history. http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/ PopularElectronics/Popular_Electronics.htm (accessed 20 March 2019). Holmes, T. and Nice, L. (2012). Magazine Journalism. London: Sage. Holt, D. (2004). How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Husni, S. (n.d.). Mr. Magazine [home page]. www.mrmagazine.com (accessed 4 March 2019). Johnson, S. and Prijatel, P. (1999). The Magazine from Cover to Cover: Inside a Dynamic Industry. Chicago: NTC Publishing Group. Korinek, V. (2000). Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lemay, J. (2006). The Life of Benjamin Franklin Volume 2: Printer and Publisher 1730–1747. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Marland, H. (2013). Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874–1920. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mason, A. (2018). Living on the ledge. BBC Wildlife (October), p. 32–35. McAteer, O. (2019). ‘Go big or go home’: Time Out reinvents revenue model with food markets.” Campaign. www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/go‐big‐go‐home‐time‐reinvents‐revenue‐model‐food‐ markets/1579701 (accessed 20 March 2019). McCracken, H. (2015). The most important computer magazine in the history of computer magazines is back. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/3041672/the‐most‐important‐computer‐ magazine‐in‐the‐history‐of‐computer‐magazines‐is‐back (accessed 1 April 2019). McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McLuhan, M. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mr. Magazine (n.d.). www.mrmagazine.com (accessed 3 April 2019). Muddiman, J.G. and Roland, A. (1920). Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers, Magazines and Reviews. London: The Times. Norcliffe, G. (2001). The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869–1900. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Norman, D. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books. O’Neill, A. (2018). A History of Heavy Metal. London: Headline. Ponsford, D. (2016). Economist deputy editor tom standage on how the weekly business mag reached 35m social media followers. Press Gazette (29 March). www.pressgazette.co.uk/economist‐deputy‐editor‐ tom‐standage‐how‐weekly‐business‐mag‐reached‐35m‐social‐media‐followers (accessed 22 March 2019). Schwab, K. (2017). The Fourth Industrial Revolution. New York: Currency. Scoffield, G. (n.d.). British Motorcycle Mechanics. https://www.facebook.com/groups/britishmotorcycle mechanics/permalink/911993698863268 (accessed 28 September 2019).



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Singer, J.B., Domingo, D., Heinonen, A. et al. (2011). Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell. Steinberg, S.H. (2017). Five Hundred Years of Printing. New York: Dover:Publications. Tan, E. (2018). Pamco resets audience measurement with ’total brand reach’ for publishers. Campaign. www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/pamco‐resets‐audience‐measurement‐total‐brand‐reach‐ publishers/1462453 (accessed 22 March 2019). Vick, J. (n.d.). Edward Lloyd Victorian newspaper proprietor, publisher and entrepreneur. http://www. edwardlloyd.org/resources.htm (accessed 19 March 2019). Walker, J. (2018). Economist Radio Reveals 6m Monthly Streams As It Launches The World in 2018 Series. Press Gazette (5 January). www.pressgazette.co.uk/economist‐radio‐reveals‐6m‐monthly‐ streams‐as‐it‐launches‐the‐world‐in‐2018‐series (accessed 22 March 2019). Wicks, F. (1999). The blacksmith’s motor. Mechanical Engineering 121 (7): 66–69. https:// memagazineselect.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/article.aspx?articleid=2684051.

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Reading Magazines Taking Death Cab for Cutie from Shed to Dalston John Hartley

Magazine research is like Montreal — diverse on many levels Miglena Sternadori 2014

Introduction It could be said that that “there’s no such thing as a magazine” – it is too chaotic, contingent, and confused a term to stand as a category.1 The word’s Arabic origins lie in the storage of goods, especially military ordnance. Thus, the Parthenon was used as a magazine for Turkish explosives during the Ottoman occupation of Greece, with fatal effects on the former temple building when a hostile Venetian shell blew it up in 1687.2 Around the same time, the term transferred metaphorically from analogue storehouse to printed miscellany, as a generic title for collections of heterogeneous items of interest and use to particular reader‐sets. That innovation introduced a distinction between “book” as a volume concerned with one topic, and “magazine” as a volume concerned with many. The further dis‑ tinction between one‐off books and periodical magazines followed.

Out of the Shed The original usage of the word “magazine,” denoting any large shed, may seem a long way from Wired, Dazed & Confused, or Charlie Hebdo. But thinking of a magazine as a storehouse may still prove helpful for placing “periodical publications” as we known them now. For any center of mixed population (a city, or country), imagine a distributed network of warehouses, some with specialist contents (gunpowder), others with general goods (department stores), standing ready for users to visit when they need a particular item. Such storehouses are an efficient coordination mechanism for the distribution of specialist and novelty items for differentiated demographics among heterogeneous populations. This, in turn, defines the magazine format. Sheds must be located close to where they will be needed, but not so close as to intrude on residential space. They may be organized as part of a state apparatus (ordnance shed) or a market economy (Amazon); they may be wholesale (an agricultural barn) or retail (IKEA). It is worth recalling that in many European languages the word “magazine” refers directly to shops and The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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stores, while periodical publications are called something else (revista, périodique, etc.) So, a магазин in Russia is something you can walk into. If you want to buy a magazine while you are in there, you will have to ask for a журнал (journal). Keeping in mind their built form, it can be seen that magazines are still performing a cultural function of the same type. The contents of each title may differ but, at a higher level of integration, they are a type of “novelty bundling” service (Potts 2011), making available to the public various semiotic and knowledge resources that are too specialized or uneconomic for households to keep at home – or sometimes too risky. The thing about warehouses is that not‑ withstanding who owns them or what they contain, their cultural function is the same. Different stores keep different things for different users. They keep stuff dry for when you need it. The main issue that needs further thought is about who exactly “you” might be. Magazines as metaphorical sheds full of words and pictures continue their time‐honored function of storing miscellaneous stuff against its use but, because this is now the realm of semiotic rep‑ resentation, language, and sense‐making, this “stuff” (Miller 2009) is best conceived not as “goods” but as “knowledge,” which involves people and institutions as well as texts and forms. People notoriously do not know what they do not know,3 so “needing” any item of semiosis rarely precedes supply: you do not know you want Vogue or Grazia or the New Statesman until it is under your nose; and you do not know you want to know what is inside any issue until you open it, the surprise being part of the pleasure of keeping up, which is as much a social‐network need as an individual want. Magazines are located at the semiotic equivalent of the “edge of town” – the edge of attention (Citton 2017) – so readers must make an effort to visit, and magazines must use the store and its storefront to attract and hold readers for their particular category of difference. Their cultural function focuses on forming random individual readers into readership groups, more or less ordered, and frequently connected among themselves through other institutions or cultural practices. These range from special interests (craft, hobbies, music, sport, business, etc.) to giant abstractions – or “fictions” (Harari 2015) – based on religion, nation, gender, age, class, etc. Over time, readerships in turn use their shared consciousness of the group, sustained in part by identity‐signaling in magazines, to exercise agency as groups.

User-Created Readerships When investigating magazines and other media, scholarship has routinely adopted the point of view of the proprietor, editor, journalist, writer, artist, photographer, etc. These occupations make the object for which demand is thereby created. However, producers’ intentions – commercial or imperial advancement, the salvation of souls, or the improvement of selves (Oakeshott 1975, p. 263) – tell us little about what readers use magazines for, once acquired, and how that works within a larger cultural context. Focusing exclusively on the producer, as media research routinely does, results in a very skewed “model” of magazines. Agency, causation, and power cluster at one pole of a polarized system: it is all about ownership and control, subsidized by advertising (Curran and Seaton 2018, p. 37). There is not much left at the other pole. Readers are reduced to little more than a behavioral effect of causal agency located somewhere much further up the value chain. All that is needed is to set the marketing department loose on them. Media scholarship inherited this skewed way of thinking from both behavioral science (USA) and political economy (Europe). Both traditions saw centralized, top‐down, command‐and‐ control, power‐hungry media organizations seeking to amass readers as tokens in another game entirely: that of gaining commercial or political power (Carey 2000). It seemed acceptable to carry on using this model of communication throughout the industrial era because of the radical asymmetry between those who made money (owners) and those who made meanings (readers).

22 Hartley Looked at through the lens of behavioral political economy and following a linear sender– receiver model of communication, readers (in the mass) were there for the economic gain of proprietors or the political gain of partisans. Inevitably, readers were reduced to a mere number: circulation, that being the currency of power and influence for producers. What more was there to worry about? It has transpired that there was quite a lot to worry about. Technological changes that are now at the center of everyone’s attention destroyed the asymmetry between producer and consumer (not at a stroke, but in principle), by lowering the cost of publication effectively to zero, at least for those with access to computers or mobile devices, now numbering in the billions, more than half of all humans.4 In principle, everyone who posts a comment or sends an email is a publisher; everyone who uploads a photo or text is a journalist; anyone who wants to find something out can turn to an app or browser; anyone looking for reading matter across heterogeneous subjects can do so, at almost infinite scale, without turning a single magazine cover. Suddenly, “readers” became “users.” They used online and social media for their own pur‑ poses. Individually and as groups they made culture – sense (meanings and new language), iden‑ tity (personal and group), consciousness (of self, other, and cosmos), and knowledge (informal know‐how and formal sciences). The term “user” was not available in the days of industrial mass communication. It comes from computer culture. Its value lies in the presumption, built into the concept itself, that the “end user” retains agency. Users do something, from utilizing a ready‐made feature (copying) to making something new (creating). They are linked through technology into a system or network in which they are “nodes” of agency (Barabási 2002), not endpoints of a value chain (Hartley 2008, pp. 19–35). Further, their digital activity could be tracked, unlike the act of reading itself. Suddenly, circulation includes not just consumers but also producers and makers: it signifies a network; in an older idiom, a class. What were readers “using” through the long decades of industrial mass media? They were making meaning and growing knowledge, both their own and that of the systems they used. Unfortunately for scholars, these are fleeting, fugitive objects for analysis, extremely hard to recover. To reach them, you need a model of communication that owes more to language and literary studies than to political economy and linear cause‐and‐effect. One way of achieving that result is not to use the usual disciplinary methods but personal biography, stories from life, or what is sometimes now called auto‐ethnography, where it is pos‑ sible to smuggle life and story into science and method (and vice versa). This was the route taken by Richard Hoggart (1957), the first critic to “read” magazines as a meaningful part of culture. Hoggart did not consider magazines as a category (the shed); only in relation to his own particular interest in who used them (a class). Those following in his footsteps built on his example, to investigate the meaningfulness of magazines for particular readerships – girls, teens, and women in particular, from Angela McRobbie’s early work on Jackie (1978), via Anne Krisman’s “radiator girls” (1987), to Megan Le Masurier’s more recent studies of Cleo (2009, 2011). These certainly offer startling insights into how magazines forge readerships into self‐ knowing “imagined communities” (Anderson 1991); and they offer nuanced readings of how reading, culture, knowledge, and identity intersect. It is hard to project this approach back in time without being accused of sentimental nostalgia (Curran and Seaton 2018, pp. 270–273). It is not easy to provide evidence for the cultural role magazines may have played in turning large populations into a coherent readership in the first place. The individual uses to which they were put are manifold. The line of causation from text to knowledge and action is indirect. It hardly seems possible to trace each grain of influence from an original trickle of textual causation to the wide, amorphous alluvial plain of everyday associated life, especially when everyone involved is dead. Unsurprisingly, the general field of “reading studies” is sparse, scattered (Cavallo and Chartier 1999), and often personal – even when offered as a general history (Manguel 1997). Compared with the history of the book, it is an appendage (e.g. Finkelstein and McCleery 2002).



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It was not until about 150 years after popular periodicals began to make political and social waves in industrializing Europe, first as the precursor to the newspaper and then in their own right, that any scholar thought to study how their internal imaginative world meshed with the culture of their readers, for good and ill. Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working‐Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments was published in 1957.5 When Penguin republished this landmark book in its Modern Classics series 50 years later, the editors lopped off the part of the original subtitle that made “special reference to pub‑ lications and entertainments” (McGrath 2010). The shortened subtitle, “aspects of working‐ class life,” may leave the impression that here is a work on the sociology of a class. But, in fact, it is written in the tradition of literary criticism (Owen 2007), where evidence is not gathered from anthropological observation but from the literary organization, expression, and imagina‑ tive truth of the text. Here, Hoggart was on to something new. He asked what popular publications are for, not as economic or industrial products but in relation to the inner lives of class‐based reader‑ ships. The major innovation was not the application of Hoggart’s left‐Leavisite Lit Crit to popular culture – startling though that was. It was the way he explained the “uses of literacy” in cultural (group) rather than individualistic (behavioral) terms. Hoggart saw reading as a class practice, undertaken in the cultural environment of the urban industrial home, street, and neighborhood. This is what shaped working‐class families and their likes, loves, and loy‑ alties – at once produced by and producing the sense of solidarity and difference that marked “people like us.” Hoggart’s insight was that mass literacy was important at the group level, the “effects” of mass media being felt on class culture, not on individual behavior. He took a first step toward a “reading” of modern, urban everyday life, with a view to understanding what it meant, how it was changing, and what industrial‐scale publication had to do with that.6 To his contemporaries, Hoggart was an “angry young man.” He was placed alongside a new generation of literary intellectuals from working‐ or middle‐class backgrounds. The Angry Young Men were named after John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956). They included novelists like John Braine (Room at the Top, 1957) and Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958); and playwrights like Arnold Wesker (Chicken Soup with Barley, 1958). These writers were scornful of upper‐class privilege, working‐class restriction, and welfare meritocracy alike. They were disdainful of “the Establishment,” even while preoccupied with their own upward social mobility.7 The successful movie of Look Back in Anger (1959) starred Richard Burton, a rising Shakespearean actor and son of a Welsh miner, the living embodiment of the explosive and often toxic tension between “class” and “culture.”8 What made Hoggart’s analysis of “publications and entertainments” especially compelling, connecting it to these literary figures, was that its literary criticism was fiction. Chatto’s legal advice was that proprietors would undoubtedly sue if Hoggart named the real culprits or quoted publications directly. At a very late stage, about the time he was persuaded to change the book’s title from the intended “Abuses of Literacy” to the inspired “Uses,” Hoggart went through the manuscript and fictionalized the textual examples of “mass art” he wanted to critique. Here, he departed from the strict empiricism of modernist Leavisite criticism, which sought objectivity by narrowing the critical enterprise to the literary “object” itself – the text. With no empirical object to analyze for fear of litigation, Hoggart entered the imaginative space of the novelist,9 where the tension between the values of hard‐won class culture and the attractions of the new could be given full voice. As a recent observer has put it: The punch‐up‐prone and sex‐strewn “Yank mags” that have such a de‐vitalising effect on British teendom may be morally disgusting, but Hoggart the literary critic, working his way through Sweetie, Take It Hot and The Lady Takes a Dive, is forced to concede that their high‐octane, sub‐Hemingway, jump‐on‐his‐testicles prose style isn’t altogether to be despised. (Taylor 2017 n.p.)

24 Hartley One of Hoggart’s fictional coinages was a pulp‐fiction crime magazine called Death Cab for Cutie. No such magazine existed, but the title’s apt compression of sex (cutie), violence (death), modern urban mobility (cab), and cool but cruel insouciance (American idiom) has led to its own peculiar immortalization. It lives on in the name of an American “moody emo‐rock outfit” specializing in teenage‐angst music. The band is fronted by Ben Gibbard, better known in the celebrity press for having briefly been married to Zooey Deschanel. Commenting on the unlikely name, Gibbard told Chicago’s Time Out magazine: Thank God for Wikipedia. At least now, people don’t have to ask me where the fucking name came from every interview (August 23, 2011).10

Wikipedia explains: Gibbard took the band name from the song “Death Cab for Cutie” written by Neil Innes and Vivian Stanshall and performed by their group the Bonzo Dog Doo‐Dah Band. The song was performed by the Bonzos in the Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour. The song’s name was in turn taken from an invented pulp fiction crime magazine, devised by the English academic Richard Hoggart in his 1957 study of working class culture, The Uses of Literacy.11

Death Cab for Cutie proved too good a name to confine to literary criticism. A jokey take‐down of American schlock, it suited the very English Bonzo Dog band and the Beatles, bringing it to the attention of a much wider crowd. Eventually, it turned into its own opposite. Instead of warning “us” against the Americanization of teen culture, it was still circulating 50 years later – as American teen culture. That things routinely mean their opposite is a sign of our times, part of the inner lives of class‐based readerships, in Britain at least. John le Carré, master of the fiction of deception and distrust (especially on “our” side), turned that insight into an art form. In his autobiography, he explains why: “in Britain our secret services are still, for better or worse, the spiritual home of our political, social and industrial elite” (2017, p. 22). As Le Carré’s fictional writings make clear, these services are also Britain’s last bastion of class supremacy. In the 1950s and 1960s, the traditional elite were the only group deemed (by their own peers) to be trustworthy enough to deal in the stock‐in‐trade of espionage: deceit, lies, and treachery. But a succession of scandals in the 1960s revealed an upper class riddled with traitors. Le Carré’s spy fiction is at once a critical class analysis and an attempt to “explore a nation’s psyche” (2017, p. 22). Hidden behind his own well‐heeled disguise, Le Carré was, like Hoggart and the rest, an Angry Young Man. He concedes that life‐stories too are duplicitous. Narrated events become “sufficient to themselves,” part of a culture and its language, beyond the control of authority. The boundaries between fact, fiction, falsification, and fabrication, between history and imagination, are hard to maintain. Instead, they remain a resource for anyone and everyone to use, in ways that may subvert and betray the very values the original subject sought to proclaim. That is the history of reading: life and narration alike, marked by a strong sense of class consciousness that cannot identify or police its own boundaries, where “we” are also “they,” truth also duplicity, have inexorably “widened into incoherence” (Le Carré 2017, p. 12).

Proprietorial Readerships We should leave the world of the reader for a moment, to consider another character in this story: the proprietor. As they barge into our everyday life, media moguls’ heavy tread sounds menacingly to contemporary ears. But the “demon barons of Fleet Street” (as it were) have been marching noisily across popular consciousness for well over a century. What kind of mark did



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they leave on readers? Perhaps it is not so deep as we fear. Quite possibly, you have never heard of Walthamstow, or nearby Waltham Cross, now dormitory suburbs of the suburban sprawl stretching across north London. But both of them have a significant place in media history, hav‑ ing felt the footfall of the world’s first and its most recent media giant. In Walthamstow (Figure  2.1) lies the home (previously occupied by William Morris) of Edward Lloyd (1815–1890).12 Lloyd was the pioneer of the “penny press.” Starting out as a populist radical, turning out cheap periodicals brimming with plagiarized serial stories (notori‑ ously including those of Charles Dickens), Lloyd became the archetypal media industrialist. He founded (among others) Lloyd’s Weekly News, which boasted “the largest circulation in the world” and was the first British newspaper to sell over a million copies. Lloyd was a technical innovator, introducing high‐speed rotary presses to England and open‑ ing a factory for making newsprint out of Algerian esparto grass. As well as promoting progres‑ sive ideas and democratic politics, Lloyd sought popularity, scale, and speed in the dissemination of useful knowledge, factual and fictional: On 27 November 1892, Lloyd’s Weekly’s 50th jubilee issue reported that “eight monster web machines, each printing two copies at a time, run off Lloyd’s at the rate of over 200,000 copies an hour.”13

Fast forward to today’s north London, where, in direct line of filiation from Lloyd, just up the road in Waltham Cross, lies the 40‐acre Newsprinters printing works. Owned by Rupert Murdoch and opened in 2008–2009, it houses 12 manroland Colorman XXL presses. These can print “one million copies of a 120‐page newspaper every hour.”14 Impressive though that is, Waltham Cross is only one of three such plants in the UK: another near Liverpool houses five further presses, capable of printing 430 000 newspapers an hour, with a third in Scotland

Figure 2.1  Blue Plaque to William Morris and Edward Lloyd on the Water House, Walthamstow. Edward Lloyd’s heirs gave it to Council in 1898. It was opened as Lloyd Park in 1900. The house is now the William Morris Gallery. Source: Stephen Craven for geograph.org.uk. CC license: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Plaque_to_William:Morris_and_Edward_Lloyd_‐_geograph.org.uk_‐_1214659. jpg. And see: http://www.edwardlloyd.org/houses.htm. Picture: Stephen Craven.

26 Hartley operating two more, which can print a “144‐page tabloid straight in a single pass on the presses at speeds up to 86 000 copies an hour.” Such is their capacity that Newsprinters do not print only News Ltd. papers: We are proud to print The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times for News UK, plus The Daily & Sunday Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, Northern editions of the Financial Times, The London Metro, The London Evening Standard and a great many regional titles.15

From such statistics, it seems incontrovertible that the “mass” media and industrial‐era scale of the printed press are still reverberating under the heel of the all‐powerful proprietor. We should take note, even as we turn our attention to new digital realities. The speed of the presses has increased fivefold in the century between Lloyd and Murdoch (from 200 000 to 1 million copies an hour in London), and their capacity expanded to print color (and rival titles). The business model remains the same: central production and fast distribution of cheap, popular journalism, seen as mass consumption of entertainment (political and sporting spectacle; human interest and conflict; promise of comfort), maintaining an “us” versus “them” version of class consciousness as a “lived experience,” and occasionally delivering (or at least promising) vast numbers of popular votes to the proprietor’s favored party. Party politics, the greatest spectator sport of the nineteenth century, is still brought to you by an industry, with all the familiar nineteenth‐century attributes  –  unscrupulous capitalists, industrial scale, centralized control, factory‐production, mass consumption, political manipulation, modernity rendered as spectacle and story. Everything old is new again. But under the showy industrial bang and clatter, something very different is emergent, still not fully formed. One of the main achievements of the early popular press was the creation of the class reader. This is taking the radical energy of the early “pauper press” in a completely new direction, not toward standardization and scale, but turning inward, toward the relationships and identities of small‐scale or even self‐scale users. In a sense, the industrialists made this new agent, but they no longer control it. This new player is more like a “language community” than a market; readers use and create new meanings within an autopoietic (self‐creating and self‐ renewing) sense‐making system (Luhmann 2012). It is a very different “mode of production” from the proprietorial one.

Readership Systems and Classes Readership systems that are internally connected are structured like Paul Baran’s (1964) model of a distributed as opposed to a command‐and‐control communications network. While proprie‑ tors, advertisers, and governments may imagine – and wish – that a publication communicates as a centralized network (Figure 2.2, left), a literate readership means that it is organized and interconnected internally, working as a distributed system (Figure 2.2, right), of which the high‑ est‐level empirical form is a language. Such a “social technology” takes time to establish. Reading was not a popular pastime among the poor before the Industrial Revolution. Of course, rising literacy rates were the result of more than one cause. Protestantism, in particular, promoted Bible study. Education followed the demand for numerate workers to operate utilitarian industrial processes. It was seen as a political necessity, too, as the franchise was cautiously extended to the laboring classes (1867). But the radical progressive “pauper press” and “penny press,” invented by Edward Lloyd and others, was the world leader in forging a secular, popular readership around the desire for population‐ wide knowledge, supplied at a scale that dwarfed other media. The “knowledge is power” movement was linked not only to power politics, but also to Enlightenment values (science, discovery, social progress), the cultivation of “the self” ­(bildungsroman;



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Link Station

Figure 2.2  Readership as a distributed communication network. These famous diagrams by Paul Baran (1964, p. 2) mark the fabled origin of the internet. Unlike the “command‐and‐control” system (L), which can be knocked out if the center is destroyed, the distributed system (R) is resilient enough to withstand nuclear attack: communications can just go around missing nodes. The concepts the diagrams visualize were revolutionary in military terms, but distributed communications already existed: they are the very fabric of language and culture; the means by which knowledge is circulated and preserved. Source: Baran’s original diagrams can be seen at https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html. Rand Corporation.

self‐help), and practical know‐how (household management, make‐do‐and‐mend, DIY, smallhold‑ ings, “hobbies”). Naturally, in among all that useful knowledge (Rauch 2001) was a good deal of scandal, murder, sensation, and play. In among the news items and “improving” content were fic‑ tional stories by celebrity authors and (purportedly) factual ones from the police courts, although the distinction was not respected in practice. Edward Lloyd’s first periodical title was: The Penny Sunday Times and Weekly Police Gazette, a miscellany comprised of fiction and faked police reports. Advertisements for The Penny Sunday Times proclaimed the writing was “Sketched with the Humour of a ‘Boz’” [Dickens].16

Before committing exclusively to newspapers, Lloyd specialized in these “penny bloods,” novels issued in weekly parts (Kirkpatrick 2016), prefiguring “death cab for cutie” crime fiction by more than a century. He published over 200 of them between 1839 and 1853: Amongst his most famous were Varney the Vampyre, or The Feast of Blood (1845–47), and The String of Pearls, or The Sailor’s Gift (1846–47), both written by James Malcolm Rymer, the latter intro‑ ducing the character of Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.17

This was the beginning of a new kind of mass literacy, whose chief characteristic was that it was purposeless, not tied to priest, politician, or profession, available to be used for any or no purpose at the will or whim of the user, not the producer. Literacy, appetite whetted by the Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Varney the Vampire, became a “means of production” of knowledge, but, unlike most machinery, it was in the hands of the population at large. It was learned (not innate),

28 Hartley so it had to be taught. That necessitated the presence of institutions and behind them the pur‑ poses of paymasters – church, state, capital, and successive barons of Fleet Street. Even so, litera‑ cy’s peculiar attribute, a “social technology” that could nevertheless only be used by individuals, put it at least at one remove from direct or causal force from “interested” agencies. Reading is not the same as taking instructions. Instead of remaining a top‐down tool for governmental or capitalist control, literacy was increasingly available as an alternative bottom‐up source of organi‑ zation and action among a growing population who could use it to think for themselves. The “multitudes” exceeded what was wanted of them by their masters. At micro‐scale, readers might resist, refuse, or play with the resources of literacy, using it to pursue the very opposite of proprietorial wishes, or simply tune out and read the “Sunday funnies” (Mann 1992),18 looking not for ideologies but recipes, stories, tips, and scandals. At macro‐scale, collective organization could be constructed “from below.” Literacy’s spread was accompanied by the development of Tocquevillian and class‐based associations. These consolidated throughout the nineteenth century, becoming the giant class‐based unions and political parties that transformed the political landscape of modernity, not least through their cultural and educational apparatus, such as the Workers Education Association and Workers’ Libraries (Francis 1976). All the major political movements of the twentieth century were founded on literacy established in the nineteenth. Both knowledge (positive content) and uncertainty (doubt, skepticism, opposition, critique) were circulated as social facts, part of everyday life, mundane, and unremarked, but available and scalable. Later leftist historians, notably Raymond Williams (1961) and E.P. Thompson (1963), argued that the “English working class” was self‐created through its organizations, principally the trade union and cooperative movement and the Labour Party. Both Williams and Thompson pursued the history of class consciousness through the means by which it was constructed at the time: periodical publications. Like Hoggart, they felt political and cultural qualms to see how these once purposeful organs of popular enlightenment were faltering in the face of post‐World War II international commercial popular culture. No sooner had they achieved the intellectual emancipation that went with full literacy than the popular classes were squandering it – on “Death Cab for Cuties.”

Readers as Representations What did early popular readers look like to their contemporaries? They entered the realm of rep‑ resentation as self‐motivating figures inspired by knowledge but, strangely and simultaneously, as an object of desire – the very archetype of Hoggart’s “cutie.” We can meet a couple of them, both of striking beauty (Figure 2.3) … but duplicitous meaning. Both the sculpture and the painting are titled The Reading Girl. Both are duplicitous because they subvert the classical nude form, using it to depict the modern “common reader” (in Dr. Johnson’s sense). The sculpture is by Italian Pietro Magni (1817–1877). It was modeled in 1856, carved in 1861. Capturing a young woman who is so absorbed in her book that she has let her shift slip, the sculpture made Magni’s name and fame. For his contemporaries, it expressed the new artistic movement of verismo, or realism,19 challenging neoclassicism, quoting the classical nude in order to renew it. The girl is understood as working‐class (vernacular chair; floor rushes), and what she is doing – reading while disrobing – turns out not to be noble or aesthetic but patriotic and democratic: The Reading Girl may very well represent Italy itself, soon to come into maturity as a nation. In this regard, The Reading Girl fuses verismo concepts of truth to nature and close observation with emo‑ tional insight, all in service to a rising Italian patriotic sentiment.… In its livelier, more immediate, true‐to‐life aspects, it successfully appealed to a wide public and linked itself to the growing democratic vision of a united Italy.20



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Figure 2.3  Reading Girls: Magni’s sculpture (1861) and Roussel’s painting (1887) dramatize the democ‑ ratization of reading: one portends political emancipation, the other is a harbinger of the modern consumer; both depict ordinary people as realistic truth rendered desirable.

This is the democratic reader. Let us meet her later cousin: the fashionable reader. The painting is by Théodore Roussel (1847–1926). It was modeled by Hetty Pettigrew and exhibited in London in 1887. It caused an immediate stir. The critic for The Spectator (16 April 1887) wrote: Our imagination fails to conceive any adequate reason for a picture of this sort. It is realism of the worst kind, the artist’s eye seeing only the vulgar outside of his model, and reproducing that callously and brutally. No human being, we should imagine, could take any pleasure in such a picture as this; it is a degradation of Art.21

The degrading, brutal, callous and “vulgar outside” of the model seemed offensive to some at the time because here was a depiction not of classical aesthetics or divine nudity in the service of noble sentiments, but “a robust and healthy young woman, with a taste for current fashion,” as the Tate’s summary puts it. Here is an early portrait of the consumer – female, déclassé, modern, self‐absorbed, but nevertheless interested in something beyond her own sexuality, which is por‑ trayed but not proffered. She represents a flattened, naturalistic novelty; a democratization of the ‘classic’ subject of art for the mass‐media age. Among the fashions on show is what she is reading – of course, it is a magazine.

Readers as Makers This was the “common reader” whose literacy was such that by the mid‐twentieth century it had achieved “surplus value” or purposelessness, no longer confined to the needs of industrial capitalism, consumerism, or even democratic politics. From the mid‐twentieth century literacy was very widespread in the industrial trading democracies and in socialist countries alike. If you

30 Hartley did not have it, that could henceforth be understood to be a disorder, bringing social disadvan‑ tage. Sculpted “reading girls” might continue to delight the eye of the benevolent beholder (Figure 2.4), but now the purpose was to invoke empathy for the “inner struggle” of the dys‑ lexic child, to reduce the shame associated with inability to read, and to display works by dyslexic artists. One of these is multiple Oscar‐winner Sir Richard Taylor. With Sir Peter Jackson, he was responsible for the props, costumes, prosthetics, and animatronics used in The Lord of the Rings.22 The uses of literacy were no longer instrumental but manifold, nonlinear, and semiotically affluent. Readers were voters, citizens, the public, consumers, audiences; in addition, some were activists, advocates, educators, artists, scientists, radicals, revolutionaries, dreamers, mischief‐ makers, comedians, preachers, commentators, critics … and migrants. Public communication could no longer be modeled as a top‐down, center‐to‐periphery, command‐and‐control, one‐ to‐many process. The “multitude” began to find ways to “talk to itself,” to achieve some level of self‐organizing auto‐communicative group identity (Lotman 1990), and to give each other a helping hand. The uses to which the “receiver” might put public communication could not be restricted to or predicted by the intentions of the “sender.”

Bundling Readers Here, reading went in exactly the opposite direction of industrial efficiency. The division of labor and consequent proletarianization of artisanship in the factory system grew apace dur‑ ing the nineteenth century and it still continues with automation, expanding from manufac‑ turing to the service sector, and from national to global scale. But reading has gone the other way: proliferating out of all proportion to utility. Ordinary people, for whom reading was hard‐won but barely functional  –  for religion, work processes, or regulatory compli‑ ance – could now read anything the Republic of Letters might throw at them, limited only

Figure 2.4  Inner Struggle, by Sir Richard Taylor and Weta Workshop. Dyslexia Foundation, Christchurch, New Zealand www.ctct.org.nz/dde/exhibit.html. Source: photo: J. Hartley.



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by local accessibility and price (Flint 1993). While the economy was busy dividing produc‑ tive processes (as in Adam Smith’s pin factory), mass literacy was growing by bundling all kinds of novelties together, such that any one reader was confronted by a superfluity of semiotic abundance without obvious limits. The problem now was how to limit choice (cat‑ egorize and filter), and where to look for preferred reading (search and sample). The answer was the magazine. The magazine was also a solution to a tricky problem for producers. It helped them to sell uncertainty! It traded in novelty; stories, news, and ideas whose attraction for readers lay in not being known in advance. The magazine offered readers a heterogenous repertoire, not a “good,” under the unifying sign (masthead) of newness for a given we‐group. Choice was downstreamed from provider to user. Pre‐industrial forms of “novelty bundling” (Potts 2011), such as fairs and festivals, required people to attend in person. Literacy allowed novelties into the home, and at industrial scale. Periodical publications quickly adopted bundling at various levels: within the text, by genre (romance, action, etc.); by author (who do you like, trust, or admire?); or by pub‑ lisher (specialized imprints). Magazines played a vital role in stimulating attention to the supply of novelties and providing status signals that affected their value. They helped publishers to reduce uncertainties: they lacked knowledge of the market (demand follows supply when nov‑ elty is the product); they wanted people to pay attention to things that did not interest them or that they actively disliked (this is the founding skill of journalism); and they supplied incommen‑ surably different things – fact and fiction; story and image; news and pinups; politics and sport; freedom and comfort; economic information and children’s entertainment – often within the same covers, for the lowest price, in order to capture as many different segments of the potential market demographic as possible. Periodical magazines used their succession of pages to organize different sections and genres of content, sometimes purposed for the attention of different “family members,” or simply used to put regular features in predictable order. As periodicals, they could also sort material by season. It takes time to standardize such forms (just as it took time to sort out which pedal went where in motor cars), but over time an efficient set of “rules” was established for the convenience of both producers and consumers, who tend to school each other in what works, such that new players would adopt existing layouts. Competing titles would become ever more similar. The general market was extended by a “division of labor” (specialization) among magazine them‑ selves. Each household might purchase different magazines for different members and different purposes. Eventually, some newcomer’s experiment in breaking the rules with something new catches on, and a new paradigm begins. In short, the magazine was an early adopter of the branding and targeting techniques of the creative economy or “economy of attention” (Lanham 2006). It worked as a “social network market” (Potts et al. 2008) et al. 2008), where status (attained by copying style‑leaders) deter‑ mined price and where consumer choices were dictated by the choices of others in the system, called “entrepreneurial consumers” by Hartley and Montgomery (2009), a “function” that is now professionalized by “influencers” (Abidin 2016). Imperceptibly, a community (or numerous overlapping reading communities) of avid, entertained, well‐led readers becomes literate in the fuller sense; it learns the codes and it becomes easier for readers (consumers) to act also as writers (producers). Some people take the chance to raise their own voice, share their ideas, win an argument, or improve their skills in print. Because of the capital costs required, such participation typically takes an amateur or consumerist form – letters to the editor, sharing crafts and hobbies, household management (recipes), fan fiction, and jokes. It is by these means that group identities, a sense of who “we” are, can be maintained, a feature that was first textualized around social class (the “pauper press”), but soon expanded to encompass large‐scale communities of gender and nation, and specialized segments, as magazines proliferated for ever more tightly defined groups.

32 Hartley

From Shed to Dalston In the digital age, the cultural function of magazines – the storehouse on the edge of town – far exceeds the form perfected in print (although the brands and mastheads familiar from that era continue online, with mixed success). Readers are now writers, in their millions, on social media, DIY websites, and through magazine‐maker apps, such as Issuu, Blurb, (USA), Jilster (Netherlands), Madmagz (France), etc. Good advice is on hand.23 What is the political effect of user‐led novelty‐bundling and networked two‐way commu‑ nication, to promote a sense of co‐subjectivity among people “like us”? It may be too soon to tell, but a straw in the wind has been captured by one of the online successors to print periodicals, a “hyperlocal” news site (Hargreaves and Hartley 2016, pp. 142–152). This one is called Loving Dalston (in east London). It is run by David Altheer, a journalist made redun‑ dant by Rupert Murdoch’s prestige title The Times.24 In June 2017, someone tipped it off that a feature film called Forgotten Man, shot in East London and featuring a cameo role by actor‐model Jerry Hall, was screening at the East End Film Festival in the nearby Hackney Picture House. The reason why that became news was not just that that Jerry Hall (60) is married to Rupert Murdoch (86), the Australian‐American media tycoon with a big printing works in Waltham Cross, nor that the couple came over from “his Mayfair pad” in their “tycoon‐comfy” Range Rover to watch the film. The newsworthy bit came at the end of the film. It starred not the power couple themselves, but an anonymous member of the audience. Loving Dalston takes up the story: Alas, things did not go altogether well. Leaving as the lights went up … they were spotted by a young Corbynista [Figure 2.5] in the near‐full house. Murdoch paused in his shuffle towards the exit as a loud voice rent the air: “We are the majority now, you [James Blunt]!” Except he used a single word.25

Figure 2.5  “We are the majority now.” Media mogul encounters the audience. Source: Hetty Einzig @HettyEinzig (Twitter). Photo courtesy of Hetty Einzig.



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Was the trip to Dalston a metaphorical re‐run of “Death Cab for Cutie”? Will Rupert Murdoch soon be a “Forgotten Man” in another anonymous London suburb? Let the last word (not the rude one)26 go to the anonymous young representative of a new reading public: “We are the majority now.” That is what comes of reading magazines for 150 years. The tables are turned.

Notes 1 A good way to gauge just how little common ground there is in terms of content is to contrast different “top 10” lists of magazines, such as those based on circulation (e.g. http://gazettereview. com/2016/08/top‐10‐best‐selling‐magazines‐world; or http://www.trendingtopmost.com/ worlds‐popular‐list‐top‐10/2017‐2018‐2019‐2020‐2021/entertainment/most‐read‐ magazines‐world‐best‐selling‐famous‐newspapers‐cheapest‐expensive) compared with those selected by editorial taste (http://www.theworldsbestever.com/category/magazines‐2; or http://www.themontrealreview.com/world‐best‐magazines.php). 2 See: http://www.ancient.eu/parthenon. 3 In psychology, it is called the Dunning–Kruger effect: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/ 07/the‐internet‐isnt‐making‐us‐dumber‐its‐making‐us‐more‐meta‐ignorant.html. 4 “More than half of the world’s population now (2017) uses the internet. More than half the world now uses a smartphone. Almost two‐thirds of the world’s population now has a mobile phone. More than half of the world’s web traffic now comes from mobile phones. More than half of all mobile connections around the world are now ‘broadband’.” Source: https:// wearesocial.com/special‐reports/digital‐in‐2017‐global‐overview. At the same time, more than half of the world’s population live in cities. Source: http://www.un.org/en/ development/desa/population/publications/pdf/urbanization/the_worlds_cities_in_2016_ data_booklet.pdf. 5 Original publication by the literary publisher Chatto and Windus; the paperback edition was published by Penguin in 1959. The 2009 Penguin Classics edition was issued as Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working‐Class Life. 6 Such an enterprise could not be accomplished in one book. It required an entire field – cultural studies – to acquit the project. As ever in the way of these things, by the time cultural studies reached maturity it had forgotten what it set out to find. 7 See: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Angry‐Young‐Men. See also: https://www. theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/24/society, on Hoggart as “angry young man.” The film of Look Back in Anger contains the line: “You’re hurt because everything’s changed,” referring to the protagonist’s middle‐class father‐in‐law, “and Jimmy’s hurt because everything’s stayed the same,” referring to the working‐class (but college‐educated) protagonist. The line sums up the sense of being caught between two equally unappealing worlds that marks the “angry young men” and the “kitchen‐sink” domestic drama of the time. 8 Burton’s obituary in The New York Times set the tone for the working‐class boy‐made‐good by describing Burton as “A plump, roughshod primitive who spoke no English up to the age of 10.” Burton’s native tongue was Welsh (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/ onthisday/bday/1110.html). He “made good,” reigning for a time as the most famous man in the world (with fellow Welshman Tom Jones), but the effect of his energy and talent on himself was toxic (a “career” already rehearsed by fellow Welshman Dylan Thomas). 9 “Like E P Thompson, another icon of the cultural studies brigade, he is supposed to have regretted that he never became a novelist” (Taylor 2017). 10 Quoted in: https://www.timeout.com/chicago/music/death‐cab‐for‐cuties‐ben‐gibbard‐interview. 11 Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Cab_for_Cutie. 12 What follows is indebted to the website of edwardlloyd.org: see http://www.edwardlloyd.org/ index.htm.

34 Hartley 13 Source: http://www.edwardlloyd.org/innovation.htm; and http://www.edwardlloyd.org/ LWN‐18921127‐jub.pdf. 14 Sources: http://newsprinters.co.uk/Who‐are‐we/Broxbourne‐site‐statistics; http://newsprinters. co.uk/Who‐are‐we/Knowsley; http://newsprinters.co.uk/Who‐are‐we/Eurocentral. 15 Steve Whitehead, managing director, Newsprinters. quoted at: http://newsprinters.co.uk/ About‐us. 16 Source: John Adcock at http://john‐adcock.blogspot.com.au/2015/02/edward‐lloyds‐200th‐ anniversary‐1815.html. 17 Source: Robert Kirkpatrick at http://www.edwardlloyd.org/biog‐kirkpatrick.pdf. 18 See: http://shop.russcochran.com/Sunday‐Funnies‐1‐2‐Sun‐Fun‐1‐2.htm. 19 Verismo is now best known as a term in opera; see: www.roh.org.uk/news/a‐blanket‐ term‐misused‐what‐is‐and‐isnt‐verismo. 20 Source: National Gallery of Art (USA): https://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/ art‐object‐page.127589.html. Another copy of this work is held in Milan, juxtaposed with a scul‑ ture that depicts a writing girl: http://www.italianways.com/la‐donna‐che‐scrive‐e‐quella‐che‐ legge‐tutte‐e‐due‐compiono‐lopera. 21 Source: www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/roussel‐the‐reading‐girl‐n04361: Tate Gallery, London, where the painting hangs: https://www.tate‐images.com/results.asp?image=N04361. The model was Hetty Pettigrew, one of three professional model sisters, who was about 20 at the time. She became Roussel’s mistress, and they had a daughter together. She died in 1953 (Wikipedia). Roussel, who was French but domiciled in England, died in 1926. 22 See: www.dyslexiafoundation.org.nz/richard_taylor.html. 23 E.g. Danny Miller in Creative Review, 2016: www.creativereview.co.uk/ how‐to‐launch‐a‐magazine. 24 See: http://lovingdalston.co.uk/2012/07/openness‐policy. 25 Story at: http://lovingdalston.co.uk/2017/06/rupert‐is‐wheeled‐in‐to‐hackney‐to‐see‐wife‐ jerrys‐movie‐when‐an‐angry‐punter‐calls‐him‐out. 26 It was the “C word” that made this story newsworthy. The Guardian, unlike others, chose to spell out the unprintable expletive: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ lostinshowbiz/2017/jun/22/rupert‐murdoch‐jerry‐hall‐‐cinema‐night‐hackney‐east‐end‐ welcome. See also: www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/23/rupert‐murdoch‐verbally‐ abused‐night‐hackney. Appropriately, The Big Issue carried the story, noting that the film Forgotten Man is about homelessness: https://www.bigissue.com/news/rupert‐murdoch‐ attends‐premiere‐film‐homelessness. On the etiquette of using the c‐word, see Emma Jane: www.abc.net.au/news/2019‐03‐09/feminist‐parenting‐and‐the‐c‐word/10871098.

References Abidin, C. (2016). Visibility labour: engaging with influencers’ fashion brands and #OOTD advertorial campaigns on Instagram. Media International Australia 161: 86–100. Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2e. London: Verso. Barabási, A.‐L. (2002). Linked: The New Science of Networks. New York: Perseus http://barabasi.com/ book/linked. Baran, P. (1964). On Distributed Communications. Santa Monica: RAND Corporation https://www.rand. org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_memoranda/2006/RM3420.pdf. Carey, J. (2000). Some personal notes on US journalism education. Journalism 1 (1): 12–23. Cavallo, G. and Chartier, R. (eds.) (1999). A History of Reading in the West. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Citton, Y. (2017). The Ecology of Attention. Cambridge: Polity Press.



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Curran, J. and Seaton, J. (2018). Power Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain, 8e. London: Routledge. Finkelstein, D. and McCleery, A. (eds.) (2002). The Book History Reader. London: Routledge. Flint, K. (1993). Reading practices. In: The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, 187–249. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Francis, H. (1976). Workers’ libraries: the origins of the South Wales Miners’ library. History Workshop Journal 2 (1): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/2.1.183. Harari, Y.N. (2015). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London: Harper. Hargreaves, I. and Hartley, J. (eds.) (2016). The Creative Citizen Unbound: How Social Media and DIY Culture Contribute to Democracy, Communities and the Creative Economy. Bristol UK: Policy Press. Hartley, J. (2008). Television Truths. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley‐Blackwell. Hartley, J. and Montgomery, L. (2009). Fashion as consumer entrepreneurship: emergent risk culture, social network markets, and the launch of Vogue in China. Chinese Journal of Communication 2 (1): 61–76. Hoggart, R. (1957). The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working‐Class Life with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments. London: Chatto & Windus. Kirkpatrick, R. (2016). Pennies, Profits and Poverty: A Biographical Directory of Wealth and Want in Bohemian Fleet Street. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace. Krisman, A. (1987). Radiator girls: the opinions and experiences of working‐class girls in an East London comprehensive. Cultural Studies 1 (2): 219–229. Lanham, R. (2006). The Economics of Attention. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Le Carré, J. (2017). The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life. London: Penguin. Le Masurier, M. (2009). Desiring the (popular feminist) reader: letters to Cleo during the second wave. Media International Australia 131: 106–116. Le Masurier, M. (2011). Popular feminism, the second wave and Cleo’s male centrefold. Feminist Media Studies 11 (2): 215–229. Lotman, Y. (1990). Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London & New York: I.B. Tauris. Luhmann, N. (2012). Introduction to Systems Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. Manguel, A. (1997). A History of Reading. London: Penguin. Mann, S. (1992). Immediate Family. New York: Aperture Foundation. McGrath, J. (2010). Review: The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working‐Class Life by Richard Hoggart. Popular Music 29 (2): 317–319. McRobbie, A. (1978). Jackie: an ideology of adolescent femininity. Discussion Paper. University of Birmingham, Birmingham: http://epapers.bham.ac.uk/1808. Miller, D. (2009). Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press. Oakeshott, M. (1975). On Human Conduct. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Owen, S. (2007). Richard Hoggart as literary critic. International Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (1): 85–94. Potts, J. (2011). Creative Industries and Economic Evolution. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Potts, J., Cunningham, S., Hartley, J. and Ormerod, P. (2008). Social network markets: A new definition of the creative industries. Journal of Cultural Economics 32(3): 167–85. Rauch, A. (2001). Useful Knowledge: The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sternadori, M. (2014). Editor’s reflection: diversity in magazine research. Journal of Magazine & New Media Research 15 (2): 2014. https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Summer2014/ SternadoriReflection.pdf. Taylor, D.J. (2017). Entertaining the masses: The Uses Of Literacy 60 years on. New Statesman (18 June). http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/06/entertaining‐masses‐uses‐literacy‐ 60‐years. Thompson, E.P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. London: Gollancz. Williams, R. (1961). The Long Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

3

Social Scientific Approaches to Magazine Research Berkley Hudson and Carol B. Schwalbe

Introduction Social scientists study people, their behaviors, and the institutions they have created. Historians analyze the fine‐grained details of human societies, while sociologists focus on contemporary social structures and the sweep of broad movements. Anthropologists examine the cultures, languages, and customs of societies around the world and the problems they face, such as poverty, overpopulation, and warfare. Linguists specialize in cognitive and social aspects of human language, while communication and media scholars focus on people’s face‐to‐face and mediated interactions. This chapter surveys methodological and theoretical approaches that sociologists, critical scholars, historians, and other social scientists have used to study the magazine form. The media and mass communication are too important for any single discipline to claim. Indeed, much disciplinary blurring occurs. As much magazine research crosses disciplines, it is not easy to map clear‐cut lines. Magazine research has appeared in a range of books and journals. The names alone reveal a vast landscape: American Periodicals, Critical Military Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Health Promotion Journal of Australia, International Journal of Business and Social Science, International Journal of Humor Research, Literary Journalism Studies, Journal of Black Studies, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and even Pediatrics. We have plumbed databases, including Academic Search Complete, Communication Abstracts, Google Scholar, and PubMed. We examined the archives of the Journal of Magazine Media. Using the keyword “magazine” and the name of a social science discipline, we retrieved hundreds upon hundreds of articles – too many to reference here. Selection, not compression, guided us as we focused on recent scholarship, with a nod to classics. May these lead you to deeper explorations of social science approaches to magazines.

Historical and Literary Approaches Kurowski (2008, pp. 206–207) quotes President George Washington: “I consider [magazines] such easy vehicles of knowledge, more happily calculated than any other, to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people.” To this day, media historians explore variants of Washington’s ideas about the nature of magazines. The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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Among the early magazine historians referenced by Holmes (2009), Mott published a set of studies, beginning with the colonial era and ending in the mid‐twentieth century. Volumes two and three of A History of American Magazines won Mott (1938) the 1939 Pulitzer Prize in history, a rare recognition for media research. Outside the USA, Greenop (1947) charted the history of Australian magazines. As a follow‐up to Mott’s work as well as to Peterson’s (1964), Tebbel and Zuckerman (1991) surveyed the long view with The Magazine in America, 1741– 1990. White’s (1970) encyclopedic history of Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 analyzed the social, political, and economic forces that have shaped women’s magazines since 1693, when The Ladies’ Mercury grappled with what would become the genre’s staple: relationship problems. Braithwaite (1995), the founder‐publisher of Harpers & Queen, looked at Women’s Magazines: The First 300 Years from an industry perspective. Considerable research has also focused on the various eras that have been referred to as the “golden age” of magazines. Examples include Abrahamson’s (1996) history of the American postwar periodical and Hume’s (2008) exploration of how muckraking magazine journalists of the Progressive Era flourished at the same time the magazine industry cultivated its readers as consumers. Hinnant and Hudson (2012) outlined diverse niches found among 5500 American magazine titles around the turn of the twentieth century. Combining legal and historical approaches, Sumner (2018) detailed how in the 1960s the Saturday Evening Post found itself in a messy libel suit, eventually settled by a landmark US Supreme Court decision in 1967. In a more contemporary study, Jenkins (2016) followed Greenberg’s (2000) earlier work in exploring city and regional magazines’ importance to the imaginations of local communities. Other scholars have focused on communities of interest rather than geographic communities by exploring the histories of significant magazines, including Rolling Stone (Draper 1990), Life (Wainwright 1986), and Seventeen (Massoni 2016). As a measure of academic interests, Eberhard (2005) reviewed papers presented at three journalism educators’ conferences and discovered that 13 of 84 media history papers focused on magazines. Years later, the American Journalism Historians Association conference testified to that proclivity by awarding honorable mention for its dissertation prize to Jeremiah Favara’s (2017) study of diversity seen in military recruiting advertisements in Ebony, Sports Illustrated, and Cosmopolitan. In the past three decades, scholarship has increasingly analyzed the historical relationships of magazines and longform writers and authors, many of who started at newspapers and evolved into magazine literary journalists. Key examples include Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century (ed. Sims 1990), A Sourcebook of American Literary Journalism: Representative Writers in an Emerging Genre (ed. Connery 1992), A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form (Hartsock 2000), and Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe? How New Journalism Rewrote the World (Weingarten 2005). Book‐length critical studies and anthologies highlight how magazines provided homes for writers who developed styles and stories as compelling as novelists and short story writers. One early example came in 1973 with The New Journalism, edited by Wolfe and Johnson. Additional volumes followed: Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties (Hayes 1987), The Nation 1865–1990: Selections from the Independent Magazine of Politics and Culture (ed. vanden Heuvel 1990), and Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction (ed. Sims and Kramer 1995). Other compendiums include the correspondence of Hunter S. Thompson (2000) in Fear and Loathing in America; The Gay Talese Reader: Portraits and Encounters (Talese 2003); and Lillian Ross’s (2015) Reporting Always. In a journal example, Literary Journalism Studies devoted its Spring 2012 issue to Thompson, originally championed by Scanlan’s Monthly and Rolling Stone in the 1970s. Inspired by Agee and Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Stott (1973) relies on literary history and cultural analysis, shot through with magazine examples. Via a newly discovered manuscript, the 2013 publication of Cotton Tenants (Agee and Evans; Summers, 2013) reveals how Fortune editors in 1936 rejected Agee and Evans’s reporting and p ­ hotography

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that graphically recorded the Great Depression as seen in the lives of three Alabama sharecropper families. An editor’s role in shaping public discourse and cultivating a rambunctious stable of writers in the 1960s era of cultural change received analysis from Hudson and Townsend (2009) in the case of editor Willie Morris and Harper’s. Scholars have also begun to more fully explore literary magazine journalism published in languages other than English. Examples include Alexander and Isager’s (2018) Fear and Loathing Worldwide: Gonzo Journalism Beyond Hunter S. Thompson and Keeble and Tulloch’s (2012, 2014) two‐volume Global Literary Journalism: Exploring the Journalistic Imagination.

Political Economy and Critical Approaches Much research points to the role of magazines as guardians of various social hierarchies of power. Ohmann (1981) proposed that the explosion of magazines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries helped to create a culture of consumption tied to capitalism. Kitch (2015) highlighted political economy theorists who viewed magazines as vehicles of power. McCracken (1993), following Williamson (1978), identified a narrative in early 1980s women’s magazines that conflated readers’ desires and calls to buy products, thereby guaranteeing hefty circulations and fat profits. Brasted (2018, p. 13), analyzing advertisements in Life from 1942 to 1945, revealed an emphasis on creating frugal and patriotic US consumers dedicated to “service, thrift, and utility.” Most critical research on magazines has explored the gendered status quo. Research in the discipline known as magazine studies started with feminist scholars and gender‐based studies (Holmes 2007). Along with historical studies of magazines, this area remains one of the most robust areas of magazine research in recent decades. Sociologist Goffman (1979) pioneered a template of critical gender analysis in his canonical Gender Advertisements, which considered how images of men, women, and children were used to promote consumer items, such as automobiles, cigarettes, liquor, and mattresses. Likewise, in a study of ads in Ms., Playboy, and Newsweek from 1972 to 1989, Klassen et al. (1993) found that women, when also pictured with men, were portrayed in “traditional” poses, although that characterization declined over the years. Other feminist researchers have observed the prevalence of model‐thin bodies in magazines since the 1950s (Luff and Gray 2009), findings that continue to provide support for sociologist Tuchman’s (1978, p. 3) description of “the symbolic annihilation of women by the mass media,” including women’s magazines. In her seminal book The Feminine Mystique, Friedan (1963, p. 18) chastised women’s magazines for nurturing the belief that “women do no work except housework and work to keep their bodies beautiful and get and keep a man.” Friedan (1963), who freelanced for women’s magazines early in her career, understood the power of mass media to shape ideas about women’s roles as wives and mothers. Similarly, Ferguson (1983, p. 184) argued that both US and British women’s magazines have long promoted an oppressive “cult of femininity.” An influential collection of early feminist essays by McRobbie (1991), who scrutinized British teen magazines and the way adolescent girls make sense of them, asserted that teen girl magazines serve as “boy bibles” and therefore contribute to constructions of both femininity and masculinity. A decade later, according to two content analyses by Johnston and Swanson (2003a, 2003b), popular magazines still projected a distorted image of women as mothers, confining their essentially white, middle‐class aspirations to children, home, and garden. These perceptions of white womanhood contrasted with black women’s changing constructions of themselves, as revealed in influential African‐American women’s magazines over six decades (Rooks 2004). Some researchers have turned the spotlight on women’s magazines in specific countries. Johnson and Lloyd (2004) revealed how Australian women’s magazines of the 1940s and 1950s tried to make an innate connection between women and the home. Clear (2016) drew on two



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Irish women’s magazines to illuminate women’s changing lives in the 1950s and 1960s. More recently, Davidenko (2018) showed how increased exposure to global beauty ideals affected depictions of the female body in two Russian women’s magazines. With a critical‐cultural and historical approach, Frederick (2006) developed insights about 1920s Japanese “ladies magazines” (fujin zasshi) representing a range of audiences captivated by literature, domestic interests, or even radical political viewpoints in the Ladies’ Review, the Housewife’s Friend, and Women’s Arts. Applying discourse analysis and using focus groups with readers, McLoughlin (2017) argued that feminism is commodified to serve the interests of South Asian magazine publishers and advertisers rather than their female readers (see also Machin and Chen, Chapter 19). Feminist writers have criticized women’s magazines for brainwashing “women into believing their only value lies in fulfilling their femininity” (Aronson 2010, p. 33). In support of this claim, Weibel (1977) found that women in magazine ads were portrayed as passive sex objects, physically beautiful, and dependent on men. Mishra and Kern (2015, p. 1) combined cultivation and critical theories to show how “advertisers continue to reinforce hegemonic ideals of beauty and body through weight‐loss advertising.” Yet, since their early days, women’s magazines have maintained a cultural relevance because of their heterogeneity and ability to embrace contradiction (Ballaster et al. 1991). By providing a diversity of perspectives, from feminism‐related articles to “hot sex tips” and reader contributions, women’s magazines have influenced a multifaceted view of gender identity, according to media historian Aronson (2010). Hermes (1995) and Gough‐Yates (2002) expanded the field of research beyond feminist concerns – to the autonomy of an enlightened reader. Hermes analyzed how and why women engage with magazines. Gough‐Yates argued that changes in women’s titles in the 1980s and 1990s were driven not only by political, cultural, and economic factors but also by the editors’ desire to get closer to readers, leading to a focus on consumer lifestyles. Although much research has centered on magazines’ constructions of femininity, masculine representations have also been studied (Benwell 2003, 2004; Crewe 2003). Lewington et al. (2018, p. 243) concluded that “hegemonic ideals remain dominant in the construction of Australian masculinity” in Men’s Health magazine. Exploring tensions between masculine viewpoints and women writers, Cortés‐Martínez et al. (2018) relied on feminist theory to textually analyze the Colombian men’s magazine SoHo.

Sociological and Cultural Approaches In the 1920s sociologists such as Robert E. Park pioneered the study of mass media in the United States and Europe and its role in community building (Waisbord 2016). In recent years the migration of mass communication research to journalism schools has left sociologists studying everything in popular culture “except the media” (Williams 2015, p. 208). At the same time, media sociology now “situates communication and media research within the dynamics of social forces and links them to questions about order, conflict, identity, institutions, stratification, authority, community, and power” (Waisbord 2016, para 1). A Harvard‐trained sociologist and historian, Michael Schudson (1989) synthesized media sociology by identifying five alliterative words  –  rhetorical force, resolution, retrievability, retention, and resonance  –  all found in magazines. Research on gatekeeping, one of the most enduring media sociology theories, began some 70 years ago. Social psychologist Lewin (1947) coined the word “gatekeeper” to describe how a wife or mother decided what food ended up on her family’s dining table. White (1950) applied Lewin’s concept to journalism by studying how an experienced wire editor decided what news to select and what to discard. Television and, later, online and other news scholars updated White’s work and Breed’s (1955) research on newsroom socialization, although considerable gaps still exist in research about magazine newsrooms in the USA and globally (Holmes 2012;

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Tunstall 1970). Outside the USA, Moraña (2008) has highlighted how the Argentinian magazine Caras y Caretas developed advertising and editorial content reflective of societal pressures, including immigration and the growth of a middle class between 1898 and 1910. In a contemporary use of the concept of gatekeeping, Jenkins and Vos (2019) consider the “journalistic voice” in magazines.

Magazines’ Construction of “The Other” Western media have a known propensity to engage in Orientalism, as indicated, for example, by the absence of visual depictions of Iraqi and American women in US print and online media, including news magazines, during the Iraq War (Keith and Schwalbe 2010). Perhaps the most influential work in this area has been done by cultural anthropologist Catherine Lutz and sociologist Jane Collins (1993) in Reading National Geographic. Through a synthesis of theoretical perspectives – from reader response and Marxist materialist to reception and feminist – Lutz and Collins zeroed in on how photographs of faraway people and places in National Geographic reflected middle‐class American tastes that, in turn, shaped readers’ perceptions of distant cultures as an “exotic” world. Lutz and Collins’s work, along with Pauly’s (1979) study of the National Geographic Society, inspired other critiques. Rothenberg (2007) argued that the magazine disseminated imperialist ideology and perpetuated stereotypes of non‐Westerners, smoothing the way in the public’s mind for US hegemony abroad. In a study of coverage of the Philippines between 1898 and 1908, geographer Tuason (1999, p. 35) looked at National Geographic for the “ideological undercurrents … that … legitimated US government policies toward its newly taken colonial and quasi‐colonial possessions.” Other works focused on the National Geographic Society’s promotion of white male polar explorers (Bloom 1993), the production and distribution of mass‐ produced maps (Schulten 2001), depictions of the Arab world (Steet 2000), and the dissemination of institutionalized racism, sexism, and anti‐Semitism (Abramson 1987).

Ethnicity, Race, and Identity Emblematic of research on ethnicity, race, and identity are studies analyzing how magazines represent Asian Americans, Latinas, and African-Americans. An (2013, p. 154) highlighted the stereotyping of Asian Americans in magazine advertisements from 1955 to 1975 “as technically competent, hardworking, and business‐oriented,” especially after the enactment of 1965 federal immigration rules. Johnson (2000, p. 243) analyzed how Latina magazines shape identity and reflect societal trends: “Latinos in the United States are forming an identity that is based on Spanish and embellished by Spanish, but not dependent on Spanish.” Comparing issues from the 1970s with those from the 1990s, Woodard and Mastin (2005) assessed the cultural reliance on negative stereotypes about African-Americans and women in Essence, which targets well‐to‐do black women. Haidarali (2005, p. 17) analyzed the contrasting use of post‐World War II advertising models on the pages of Life, which had a mostly Caucasian audience, and Ebony, which was aimed at African-Americans: At the outset, Ebony provided a racial corrective to its prototype Life; its glossy pages displayed prosperity, consumerism, and “Brownskin” beauties, thereby sustaining dominant ideals and furnishing proof of middle‐class African Americans. While Ebony [see case study in this volume] exaggerated the reality of economic attainment, the impact of these images on the African American psyche cannot be overstated.

In addition, Colfax and Sternberg (1972) concluded that advertisements from 1965 to 1970 in Reader’s Digest, Look, Life, and Ladies’ Home Journal contributed to negative racial stereotyping of African-Americans.



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Psychological and Media Effects Approaches A large body of literature focuses on how magazine content affects or tries to affect audiences’ attitudes and behaviors. For example, Huhmann and Brotherton (1997) sought to understand how advertisers appeal to consumers’ guilt, and Hong et al. (1987) discovered that Japanese ads contain more emotional appeals than US ads. Al‐Olayan and Karande (2000, p. 80) considered the “cultural implications of creative strategies” in comparing what makes for effective magazine advertisements in the USA versus the Middle East. The intended and unintended effects of magazine editorial content have been studied even more frequently. For example, considerable research has emphasized how adolescent girls’ exposure to magazines might influence their sexual attitudes and practices. A robust body of literature has analyzed how teen girl magazines promote ambivalence about sexual issues (e.g., Carpenter 1998; Duffy and Michael Gotcher 1996; Duran and Prusank 1997). Joshi et  al. (2010) took a broad view of contradictory messages about sex and sexuality by examining ambivalence in relationships and gender roles in Seventeen from 1997 to 2007. Brown and her colleagues (2006) were pioneers studying media effects on violence and aggression, nutrition and behavior, including unprotected sexual relations, smoking, and drinking. Brown and Witherspoon (2002, p. 153) wrote: “The media depict a world in which unhealthy behaviors such as physical aggression, unprotected sex, smoking, and drinking are glamorous and risk‐ free.” In a subsequent study of more than one thousand adolescents, both Caucasian and African-American, L’Engle et al. (2006, p. 191) concluded: “Media may serve as a kind of sexual ‘super peer’ for adolescents seeking information about sexuality.” Much research has also focused on magazines’ neoliberal discourses about health and fitness, which emphasize readers’ individual responsibility for their well‐being (Jette 2006). Women’s magazines are especially known to encourage healthy behaviors (Barnett 2006; Lumpkins et al. 2012; Moyer et al. 2001). Their content has highlighted breast cancer (Andsager and Powers 2001), sexually transmitted infections (Clarke 2010), women’s lifestyles (Ytre‐Arne 2011), and overall health (Manganello and Blake 2010). A content analysis of Essence and Ebony suggested that research can shine light on developing “communication strategies that promote healthy weight and living” (Kean et al. 2014, p. 19). These messages can be contradictory. For example, Hinnant (2016, p. 225), in a close reading of health‐focused articles published in the Ladies’ Home Journal during the era of second‐wave feminism (1969–1975), found that “in covering issues championed by the women’s health movement, the Journal was neither always consistent nor always inconsistent with the movement.” Research has also documented magazines’ appeals to women’s desires to modify their bodies through cosmetic surgery (Lee and Clark 2014) or weight loss, suggesting that beauty and fashion magazines can become how‐to guides for anorexic girls and women seeking elusive ideals of thinness (Thomsen et al. 2001). The Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology devoted an issue to body image and eating disorders, including thin ideals in fashion magazines (Tiggemann et al. 2009). Other studies have also documented a link between women’s magazines and disordered eating (Field et al. 1999; Park 2005). Swiatkowski (2016) found that appearance frames dominate the content of fashion magazines, while both appearance and health frames are present in health or fitness‐oriented magazines, whether they are aimed solely at women or at men (Frederick et al. 2005). Other studies showed that women’s health magazines emphasize appearance as much as (Aubrey 2010) or more than (Willis and Knobloch‐Westerwick 2014) fitness. Jette (2006) explored magazines’ fitness narratives aimed at pregnant women, and Dworkin and Wachs (2004, p. 611) traced magazines’ role in emphasizing weight loss after childbirth and defining “pregnant women’s bodies as particularly unruly and in need of fitness discipline.” Magazine depictions of celebrity mothers, “a dominant fixture of women’s health and entertainment magazines” since the 1990s (Douglas and Michaels 2005, p. 113), were especially likely to perpetuate the notion that new

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mothers should immediately regain their pre‐pregnancy figures (Bedor and Atsushi Tajima 2012). The only exception to the narrative of strict, appearance‐driven body discipline is a study by Reynolds and LoRusso (2016), which found that six high‐circulation US women’s and fitness magazines framed nutrition and fitness in terms of convenience and health rather than appearance or weight loss.

Semiotic Approaches As a form, in print or online, magazines for centuries have offered opportunities for visual vitality – from woodcuts, cartoons, and illustrations to a range of design elements along with visuals and images, still and moving. As early as 1975, Millum helped to bring scholarly attention to the importance of visual communication in advertisements in women’s magazines. Marcellus (2006), via a semiotic analysis, studied the editorial copy and advertisements in three magazines – Forbes, Ladies’ Home Journal, and The American Magazine – and discovered that during the interwar era the preponderant image of a woman was the secretary, portrayed as a sexualized machine, with her individuality nullified and domesticity accentuated. More recently, the movement from print to digital has produced a torrent of magazine images with great potential for study (Hudson and Lance 2015). In this section, we look at examples of research methods, including the framing of war, analysis of magazine covers, and visual stereotyping.

Visual Framing of War The framing of war has long been a robust area for visual communication scholars. Framing, an increasingly popular theoretical and methodological approach in journalism studies, delves into how the media attract public attention to issues and place them in a field of meaning (Iyengar 1991; Jamieson and Cappella 2008). Magazines and other media influence people’s perception and recollection of war by selecting and emphasizing certain frames while downplaying or excluding others. Patterson’s (1984) study of Life, Time, and Newsweek’s coverage of Vietnam from 1968 through 1973 found that photographs of dead and injured US troops made up only a small percentage of coverage. Tsang (1984, p. 579), who examined Time and Newsweek during and after the Vietnam War, observed that foreign news photos were more likely than US photos to be “violent pictures” of conflicts and disaster. Griffin and Lee’s (1995, p. 821) content analysis of 1104 Gulf War images in Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report concluded that “[r]emarkably little of the photojournalistic coverage of the war … depicts actual combat activity of any kind.” Framing studies of the Iraq War revealed these tendencies. Schwalbe (2013) observed that US news magazines tended to focus visually on conflict, politicians, and human interest but neglected alternative viewpoints, such as protests, destruction, the Iraqi military, and the human toll. The lack of visual coverage of the injured and dead indicated a tendency of US media to sanitize war across platforms, including news magazines (Silcock et al. 2008). A visual framing study of the early weeks of the Iraq War revealed a government‐promoted patriotic perspective seen in media content at the outset of other US conflicts – from the Civil War through the Gulf War (Schwalbe et al. 2008).

Visual Analysis of Magazine Covers Magazine covers, which can provide a window into larger cultural issues, have been a favorite subject for visual analyses and framing studies in recent decades. Pompper et al. (2009, p. 273) used Rolling Stone covers “as a measure for examining the 1960s social equality movement in



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terms of representations of gender and ethnicity.” Kitch (2001) analyzed magazine cover illustrations, including those from Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Life, McCall’s, and Good Housekeeping. Other scholars have honed in on what has been excluded from magazine covers. A content analysis of 64 years’ worth of Life covers (1936–2000) determined that they failed to reflect America’s changing cultural demography; in the 1950s the only African-Americans appearing on the cover were sports figures, such as baseball player Jackie Robinson (Sumner 2002). Scott and Stout (2006) concluded that Time magazine’s covers emphasized Judeo‐Christian beliefs, and Daniels (2009) found that teen girl magazine covers include few images of women playing sports or working out, emphasizing only their shape and muscle tone. Magazine covers can also serve as political statements. Political theorist Entman (1991), who described framing as a way to bring context and meaning to a news story, noted the similar visual framing of two air disasters in the 1980s on the covers of Time and Newsweek. In the crash of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, both covers portrayed the Soviet Union as the responsible party, while neither magazine labeled a US Navy destroyer in the downing of an Iranian airliner. Pyka et al. (2011, p. 1) found that Der Spiegel “showed an increasing visual presence of national identity symbols on its covers following key historical events,” such as the Berlin Wall’s construction and, years later, the 2006 World Cup. Other scholars have identified dominant themes and anomalies in covers, such as with Life magazine’s portrayal of the Gulf War (Pompper and Feeney 2002) and uses of September 11 images (Spiker 2003).

Visual Stereotyping of Race Two notable cases of visual stereotyping in magazines in the past three decades merited research: depictions of the murder charges against celebrity O.J. Simpson in 1994 and portrayals of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. In the Simpson case, Finnegan (1999, p. 239) noted that Time and Newsweek used the same mug shot image of Simpson after his arrest, but Time’s cover was notably darker, reflecting “cultural preferences for lighter skin over darker skin (among some blacks as well as whites) but also into assumptions about good and evil, guilt and innocence.” The Obamas were satirized with a New Yorker cover cartoon on 21 July 2008. It depicted the president in a turban and tunic fist‐bumping his wife, dressed in camouflage, with an Afro and carrying an AK‐47. Of the Obamas’ cartoon, Rossing (2011) argued, as did Stewart (2013), that the image failed in part because of its unwillingness to address the stereotypes it aimed to critique.

Conclusion Recent books and articles devoted not only to magazine research but also to magazines themselves testify to a robust range of social science approaches – from case studies to critical and historical analyses. Magazine studies scholars have drawn from or developed a panoply of theories, concepts, approaches, and methods. These include reception analysis, cultural studies, cultivation theory, historical analysis, quantitative content analysis, surveys, oral histories, semiotics, framing, gatekeeping, ethnography, qualitative textual analysis, and longitudinal studies. Further testifying to the diversity of magazine research are works that may fall outside the realm of classic social science approaches, such as Hayes’s (2012) Visual Branding and Readership: A Comparative Case Study of Consumer Magazine Covers, which represents marketing and consumer research, and MacLeod’s (2018) American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation, which is a literary analysis. Gaps exist in what we discovered. We found few studies, for example, about digital influences on magazines. Nevertheless, scholars in the years to come can build upon this now‐decades‐old

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foundation extending across social sciences disciplines to fill gaps and to ask and answer questions about magazines as they evolve into new vehicles of storytelling through diverse platforms all over the globe.

Acknowledgment The authors extend thanks for research assistance from Ethan Schwalbe at the University of Arizona and from Daniel Christian, Annika Merrilees, and Emmalee Reed of the University of Missouri.

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Johnson, L. and Lloyd, J. (2004). Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife. Oxford, England: Berg. Johnson, M.A. (2000). How ethnic are U.S. ethnic media: the case of Latina magazines. Mass Communication & Society 3 (2–3): 229–248. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327825MCS0323_04. Johnston, D.D. and Swanson, D.H. (2003a). Invisible mothers: a content analysis of motherhood ideologies and myths in magazines. Sex Roles 49 (1–2): 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023905518500. Johnston, D.D. and Swanson, D.H. (2003b). Undermining mothers: a content analysis of the representation of mothers in magazines. Mass Communication & Society 6 (3): 243–265. https://doi.org/ 10.1207/S15327825MCS0603_2. Joshi, S.P., Peter, J., and Valkenburg, P.M. (2010). Ambivalent messages in Seventeen magazine: a content analytic comparison of 1997 and 2007. Journal of Magazine & New Media Research 12 (1): 1–20. https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Fall2010/JoshiPeterValkenburg.pdf. Kean, L., Laura Prividera, J.H. III, and Gates, D. (2014). Health, weight, and fitness messages in Ebony and Essence: a framing analysis of articles in African American women’s magazines. Journal of Magazine & New Media Research 15 (1): 1–25. https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Spring2014/ KeanPrividera.pdf. Keeble, R.L. and Tulloch, J. (2012). Global Literary Journalism: Exploring the Journalistic Imagination vol. 1. New York: Peter Lang. Keeble, R.L. and Tulloch, J. (2014). Global Literary Journalism: Exploring the Journalistic Imagination, vol. 2. New York: Peter Lang. Keith, S. and Schwalbe, C.B. (2010). Women and visual depictions of the U.S.–Iraq war in print and online  media. Visual Communication Quarterly 17 (1): 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 15551390903553614. Kitch, C. (2001). The Girl on the Magazine Cover: The Origins of Visual Stereotypes in American Mass Media. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kitch, C. (2015). Theory and methods of analysis: models for understanding magazines. In: The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research (eds. D. Abrahamson and M.R. Prior Miller), 9–21. New York: Routledge. Klassen, M.L., Jasper, C.R., and Schwartz, A.M. (1993). Men and women: images of their relationships in magazine advertisements. Journal of Advertising Research 33 (2): 30–39. Kurowski, T. (2008). An oral history of the literary magazine: the beginnings. Mississippi Review 36 (3): 206–211. Lee, S.‐Y. and Clark, N. (2014). The normalization of cosmetic surgery in women’s magazines from 1960 to 1989. Journal of Magazine & New Media Research 15 (1): 1–22. https://aejmcmagazine.arizona. edu/Journal/Spring2014/LeeClark.pdf. L’Engle, K.L., Brown, J.D., and Kenneavy, K. (2006). The mass media are an important context for adolescents’ sexual behavior. Journal of Adolescent Health 38 (3): 186–192. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jadohealth.2005.03.020. Lewin, K. (1947). Frontiers in group dynamics II: channels of group life; social planning and action research. Human Relations 1 (2): 143–153. https://doi.org/10.1177/001872674700100201. Lewington, L., Sebar, B., and Lee, J. (2018). ‘Becoming the man you always wanted to be’: exploring the representation of health and masculinity in Men’s Health magazine. Health Promotion Journal of Australia 29 (3): 243–250. https://doi.org/10.1002/hpja.204. Luff, G.M. and Gray, J.J. (2009). Complex messages regarding a thin ideal appearing in teenage girls’ magazines from 1956 to 2005. Body Image 6 (2): 133–136. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. bodyim.2009.01.004. Lumpkins, C.Y., Cameron, G.T., and Frisby, C.M. (2012). Spreading the gospel of good health: assessing mass women’s magazines as communication vehicles to combat health disparities among African Americans. Journal of Media and Religion 1 (2): 78–90. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348423.2012. 688664. Lutz, C.A. and Collins, J.L. (1993). Reading National Geographic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. MacLeod, K. (2018). American Little Magazines of the Fin de Siècle: Art, Protest, and Cultural Transformation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Manganello, J. and Blake, N. (2010). A study of quantitative content analysis of health messages in U.S. media from 1985 to 2005. Health Communication 25 (5): 387–396. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236. 2010.483333.

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Viewing the Magazine Form Through the Lens of Classic Media Theories David Weiss and Miglena Sternadori

Introduction While the forms and formats of magazines have changed over time, in many ways their purposes, pleasures, and effects, both intended and unintended, have remained the same. This is certainly true when we consider the roles of magazines in setting political and social agendas, shaping public discourse, and influencing readers’ motivations for consuming news and entertainment content. The study of these contributions has a long history, one that is especially helpful in making sense of contemporary magazines and the parts they play in both public life and the lives of their readers.

Twentieth‐Century Media Theories: Overview In the late 1940s, several of the pioneers of mass communication research offered their takes on the roles and functions of media in society. Harold Lasswell (1948) identified mass communication’s three primary functions as surveillance of the environment, correlation of components of society (interpretation and editorializing), and transmission of the social heritage. Writing in the same volume in which Lasswell’s essay first appeared, fellow media‐studies pioneers Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton (1948) identified a set of “social functions” (p. 100) and dysfunctions (by which they meant consequences) of the media; chief among these were status conferral, the enforcement of social norms, and a phenomenon they called “the narcotizing dysfunction” (p. 105). In the 1970s – and, to a limited degree, in subsequent decades – other scholars expanded and refined the list of functions served by media and the consequences of those functions for their audiences. The 1940s and 1970s were also periods when other groups of scholars conducted foundational work that took the study of media and society in a very different direction. These researchers (among them, Herzog 1941, 1942; Katz et al. 1973a, 1973b) explored the media‐ related choices that audiences make, focusing on the uses to which audiences put the media in their lives and the gratifications that they seek (and, to varying degrees, achieve) from them.

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Their work on “uses and gratifications” instantiated a new paradigm of media‐and‐society scholarship – one still very much alive today – in which audiences are treated as agentic or “active,” making conscious choices about their media use, rather than as victims or recipients of effects foisted upon them by the media. Yet another wide body of literature on the theory of agenda setting, beginning with the work of McCombs and Shaw (1972), suggests that audiences are influenced by the media in perceiving certain issues as important, especially if they have little personal experience with them. In the light of these varying approaches to media and their audiences, how, then, might ­twentieth‐century theories of media functions in society, and of audiences’ media uses and ­gratifications, help us to understand magazines’ roles? In this chapter, we will consider the key components of several such theories and assess the role of the magazine form through their lenses. Some of the questions we will ask and answer in this chapter include the following: What are the unique functions of magazines in building or shaping public agendas? How and why do magazines contribute to the diffusion of political and social ideologies? Are magazines’ influences simply a manifestation of one or more of the functions posited by Lasswell, or of one or more of the social (dys)functions proposed by Lazarsfeld and Merton – or might they be d ­ istinct, supplemental functions or dysfunctions of their own? Is the construction of identities and ­lifestyles one of the uses to which readers actively and purposely put magazines, or can contributions to identities and lifestyles be seen as a gratification that readers get from magazine reading? And, finally, how can magazines published outside the global West contribute to our understanding of classic mass communication theories?

Functions (Purposes) The first function of media identified by Lasswell (1948) was the surveillance of the environment, which he likened to the role of a sentinel, “receiving and disseminating patterns” (p. 39) and, in doing so, “disclosing threats and opportunities affecting the value position of the community and of the component parts within it” (p. 51). Might this surveillance function be said to describe what magazines do when they, for example, construct consumer lifestyles? We would say yes. As one of us has shown elsewhere in this handbook (see Weiss Chapter 13), magazines are chock‐full of “news” from the world of products and services. However, magazines’ editorial staffs do more than passively “receive,” “disseminate,” and “disclose” such consumer information. Beyond merely informing, magazines also actively amplify and promote messages, including consumer messages, and exhort their readers to act upon them. These actions can be understood as elements of Lasswell’s second function: the correlation of the parts of society in responding to the environment (p. 39). A crucial component of such correlation is “affecting the content of what is said” (p. 42). Magazine writers do not merely pass along ostensibly neutral or unaltered consumer “information” to audiences; crucially, they shape it and encourage its adoption. Lasswell’s third function, the transmission of the social heritage from one generation to the next, may be the least helpful when it comes to explaining magazines’ construction of identities and lifestyles. Yes, magazines can sometimes serve, albeit unintentionally, as time capsules, capturing for eternity a visual and verbal record of the products on offer during previous eras; indeed, one of the pleasures to be gleaned from flipping through the pages of any 1950s issue of Life is seeing what that decade’s cars, clothing, and household appliances looked like. However, we would argue that magazine editors and writers do not think of the archiving of photos and descriptions of today’s consumer products for the edification of future generations as one of the primary purposes of their publications. By contrast, Lasswell’s surveillance and correlation functions can be understood to be at the heart of magazine producers’ job descriptions.



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Social Functions and Dysfunctions Lasswell (1948) used the term “functions” to identify the activities, described above, that media organizations perform. These activities might alternatively be described as their purposes or even their very reasons for being: one publishes a newspaper in order to provide information (“surveillance”) and opinion (“correlation”) to the public. In the same collection of essays in which Lasswell’s generally value‐neutral “Structure and Function…” essay originally appeared, however, two other theorists offered a starkly different and overtly critical view of the media, along with a correspondingly distinct use of the word function. In their chapter, “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action,” Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton addressed what they called the “social functions of the mass media” (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1948, p. 100). However, these social “functions” are better understood as effects or consequences of twentieth‐ century mass media systems and their ubiquity. Unlike Lasswell’s “functions,” those identified by Lazarsfeld and Merton are not intentional or purposive. Rather, they are social phenomena that occur as the unintended results of the “ubiquity and potential power” (p. 95) of media organizations and their content. Although unintended, these “social functions” – i.e., consequences – of media are also directly applicable to the understanding of magazines and their ability to contribute to their readers’ identities and lifestyles. The first of these is what Lazarsfeld and Merton called the status conferral function. As they stated quite simply, “the mass media confer status on public issues, persons, organizations, and social movements [and they] bestow prestige and enhance the authority of individuals and groups by legitimizing their status” (p. 101). By merely appearing in the media, one is deemed to be important. While Lazarsfeld and Merton did not list consumer products among the recipients of such status conferral, the result can be the same: consumer goods gain status when they are photographed and written about in magazines. Manufacturers and marketers avidly seek out editorial coverage – and, of course, buy advertising, which can lead to more editorial coverage (Rinallo and Basuroy 2009) – for this very reason, as evidenced by the increasing centrality of public relations to companies’ marketing efforts (e.g. Grunig and Grunig 2013). Having your product featured in a magazine article – or, even better, on a magazine’s cover – means your product matters; as Lazarsfeld and Merton put it, such recognition “testifies that one has arrived, that one is important enough to have been singled out from the large anonymous masses” (p. 101). And if a consumer product has “arrived,” it must be worthy of being incorporated into consumers’ lifestyles – and, via association, capable of conferring status onto consumers themselves. Lazarsfeld and Merton’s second “social function” is the enforcement of social norms. Despite what might appear to be the obvious application of this term to the study of magazines’ construction of lifestyles  –  surely, consumer magazines shape, mirror, and encourage current norms of behavior, including consumer behavior – its authors had something rather different in mind. Lazarsfeld and Merton argued that media “may initiate organized social action by ‘exposing’ conditions which are at variance with public moralities” (p. 102). In other words, “hard news,” by casting a spotlight upon, and thereby shaming, people who are truly social deviants (criminals, child molesters, racists, etc.), helps to ensure that the norms of proper behavior are upheld and reinforced. Does this “social function” of news reporting apply also to magazines and their influence on audiences? Perhaps, but only to a limited degree. For example, while overtly consumerist magazines (e.g. those devoted to fashion, cars, weddings, and so forth) undeniably heap praise upon products – and, by implication, upon the people who consume them – they rarely single out for disgrace in an overt way those individuals who fail to make certain purchases. Interestingly, however, shaming of “deviants” does occur in environmentalist, “ethical,” and anti‐consumerist publications. In these magazines, people – and, especially, organizations and governments – that

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violate publishers’ and readers’ shared norms (and, often, the law) are expressly held up for criticism, are made the targets of boycotts, and become the subjects of other forms of protest. (See, for example, the UK‐based Ethical Consumer magazine, whose publishers in 2016 introduced its own campaign to boycott Amazon “for its dodgy and unfair tax policy.”) Lazarsfeld and Merton’s third social function – or, as they themselves described it, the third “social consequence” – is what they called the narcotizing dysfunction of the mass media. As they explained, “it is termed dysfunctional rather than functional on the assumption that it is not in the interest of modern complex society to have large masses of the population politically apathetic and inert” (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1948, p. 105; emphasis in original). In short, their argument was that the sheer quantity of media content and its “flood of information”  –  in 1948! – “may serve to narcotize rather than to energize the average reader or listener. As an increasing meed of time is devoted to reading and listening, a decreasing share is available for organized action” (p. 105). Further, they argued, the contemporary reader or listener mistakes knowing about issues for doing something about them: His [sic] social conscience remains spotlessly clean. He is concerned. He is informed. And he has all sorts of ideas as to what should be done. But, after he has gotten through his dinner and after he has listened to his favored radio programs and after he has read his second newspaper of the day, it is really time for bed. In this peculiar respect, mass communications may be included among the most respectable and efficient of narcotics. (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1948, p. 106; emphases in original)

Do magazines, many of which focus exclusively on entertainment, celebrities, and consumer lifestyles, “narcotize” readers into political and social apathy? As Lazarsfeld and Merton noted seven decades ago, “the occurrence of this narcotizing dysfunction can scarcely be doubted, but the extent to which it operates has yet to be determined” (p. 106). Still, it is hard to imagine that a steady diet of People, Real Simple, Muscle and Fitness, Modern Bride, or Bowhunter motivates many readers to increase their political engagement or agitate for social change.

Uses and Gratifications What gratifications do media provide for their audiences? What are the uses to which audiences put media in order to achieve these gratifications? These questions are at the heart of what has come to be known as the “uses and gratifications” paradigm, which focuses not on effects (what media do to audiences) or on functions (the purposes or reasons for being that media organizations impute to their outlets) but rather on audience members’ own motivations and desires. As Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch showed, research on “the gratifications provided to their audiences” (1973a, p. 12) dates to the 1940s, when scholars investigated the pleasures sought from listening to radio soap operas (emotional release; escape from the drudgery of everyday life; moral guidance or role modeling; vicarious excitement) and quiz shows (matching wits with the on‐air contestants; feeling intellectually superior to those contestants). Subsequent studies revealed additional audience uses for media and the gratifications derived from these uses, including “to get information or advice for daily living, [and] to provide a framework for one’s day” (Katz et al. 1973a, p. 13). It is easy to see how magazines’ features on products and lifestyles deliver on these uses and gratifications. Katz and his colleagues identified other uses and gratifications that are perhaps even more directly applicable to consumer magazines: “to prepare oneself culturally for the demands of upward mobility” and “to be assured of the dignity and usefulness of one’s role” (p. 13). While few studies investigate the uses for and gratifications provided by magazines, specifically, those that do focus on this media form have borne out the more general, early findings. Towers, for example, in his 1986 article titled “Uses and gratifications of magazine readers”



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(Towers 1986), showed that the motivations for adults’ exposure to magazines included “surveillance factors” such as “get immediate knowledge of big news events” and “keep me informed about what is happening in my local community”; “interaction factors” such as “get information to pass on to other people” and “find issues affecting people like myself”; and “diversion factors” including “find products through advertisements” and “improve the quality of my lifestyle” (p. 45). These last two uses/gratifications suggest that at least some readers actively and purposely seek out magazines because they want the advice they offer on constructing lifestyles, particularly consumer lifestyles. In a similar study, Payne, Severn, and Dozier found that “magazines improve my lifestyle” was among the uses and gratifications cited by regular readers (Payne et al. 1988, p. 912). Likewise, Kim et al. (2015), who investigated uses and gratifications of fashion magazines among female readers in South Korea, found high agreement among their respondents that such magazines “improve me and help me try new things” (p. 187). Perhaps even more interesting, a study conducted in China among that country’s readers of American shelter magazines (those focusing on furnishings, home décor, interior design, etc.) found that Chinese audiences thought such magazines “should ‘be about lifestyle’ and ‘teach you how to live’” (Zuo 2005, p. 78; emphasis added). However, a subsequent study of female fashion‐magazine readers in China found that while “enhancing body image” and “preparing for future career roles” were among respondents’ motivations for reading such magazines, the “desire to satisfy consumerist needs” did not motivate the respondents (Liu and Rodriguez 2012, p. 1). These various findings suggest that the contribution to one’s (consumer) lifestyle may be a motivation for some readers, in some cultures, for certain categories of magazines, but that this contribution is not necessarily a universal use/gratification.

Identity and Social Cognitive Theory One theme running throughout more than 70 years of research on media effects, functions, and uses and gratifications is that of identity: The media show us who we are and teach us about who we could be, communication that can be simultaneously described as an effect (something media do to us), a function (an explicitly stated purpose of many publications and other media forms), a use (a purpose to which audiences actively put their media), and a gratification (a form of pleasure that audiences seek and expect from those media). Herzog (1941, 1942) found, for example, that soap opera listeners treated characters as role models for their own behavior and self‐presentation. McQuail, Blumler, and Brown, in McQuail et al. (1972), identified a “personal identity” category of uses/gratifications, a list that included “personal reference,” “reality exploration,” and “value reinforcement” (p. 155) among the motivations for watching television. Just one year later, Katz, Haas, and Gurevitch (Katz et al. 1973b, p. 165) found that “self‐identity” and “self‐growth” ranked high among the needs that audiences sought to have fulfilled by books and, to a lesser degree, by radio, television, newspapers, and film. Unfortunately, their study did not consider, or even mention, magazines. Bandura’s (2001a) social cognitive theory of mass communication, which originated with the famous Bobo doll experiment showing children’s tendency to imitate and expand on aggressive acts they have observed (Bandura et al. 1961), serves as the theoretical framework for a number of studies of magazines’ effects on identity. The theory posits that media of all kinds, including magazines, serve as socialization agents by presenting audiences with real or fictional role models representing what is socially acceptable and desirable. The findings of such studies, which establish fairly certain causality through experiments or longitudinal studies, are unsurprising in that magazine readers literally strive to resemble the men and women shown on magazines’ pages. Gender‐typed magazines reinforce their readers’ masculinity or femininity (Knobloch‐Westerwick and Hoplamazian 2012); reading gaming magazines makes White preadolescent boys want to

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be more muscular – just like their favorite (bulky) game characters (Harrison and Bond 2007); and viewing fashion magazine images of thin models increases women’s body dissatisfaction even when (and sometimes even more so!) the images include labels informing readers that they have been digitally enhanced (Tiggemann et al. 2013). In other cases, magazine readers may be more subtly influenced  –  not by a desire to mimic certain perceived role models but rather through engaging in a parasocial interaction with the person featured on the magazine’s cover (e.g. Wasike 2018). These findings, however, ought not to be interpreted as suggesting that magazine readers are passive followers rather than agentic audience members. Bandura (2001b) himself emphasizes human agency in social cognitive theory: “sociostructural factors operate through psychological mechanisms of the self system to produce behavioral effects,” meaning that “people are producers as well as products of social systems” (p. 15). In the twenty‐first century, identity issues loom even larger in studies on the media’s – including magazines’ – effects, functions, and uses/gratifications, and such issues are understood to have more far‐reaching consequences. Perhaps this is not surprising, considering the number of media products, including magazines, whose target readers are defined by their identity markers. However, while the 1940s and 1970s research mentioned earlier explored media’s contributions to the construction or reinforcement of the identity of the individual, newer studies, particularly work on audiences outside the global West, concerns identity construction on a national, cultural, or societal scale, where – as Bandura (2001b) argued – individuals’ desires ultimately shape their social systems. In this line of research, too, the construction of a consumer, Western‐influenced lifestyle is inextricably imbricated with the development of identity. In her study of magazines targeting black South Africans, Laden (2003) argues that such titles “function as an agency of repertoire‐formation and repertoire‐transmission,” even as these publications have been “intertwined with the rise of a ‘South African’ consumer culture” (p. 191). Specifically, she shows how the nation’s consumer magazines “perform the task of cultural (re) ordering by codifying, disseminating, and legitimizing specifically urban, middle‐class repertoires for black South Africans living in urban(izing) environments” (p. 192). To Laden, such magazines are both “products of cultural and social change [and] vehicles of this change” (p. 193) as they contribute to the construction of a black bourgeoisie, a new social class defined in large part by its consumerism. This change is not purely altruistic, of course, as it crucially depends on the promotion and adoption of certain “middle‐class goods, lifestyles, and activities” (p. 194) that are now, in post‐apartheid South Africa, available to the country’s black citizens/consumers. In a somewhat similar vein, Peterson (2005), who analyzes magazines targeting children in Egypt, argues that  –  with their focus on computers, mobile phones, and other twenty‐first‐ century technological products – Egyptian children’s magazines render their readers as “simultaneously Muslim and modern, Arab and cosmopolitan, child and consumer” (p. 197), thus easing various tensions facing many Egyptian parents. Peterson believes that reading these magazines “allows children, and their parents, to imagine social presents and futures as Arab technocrats and consumers in a global world, connected to other consumers both ‘at home’ in the region and in the wider world” (p. 197). This phenomenon can be seen as an unintended effect of these magazines – or as a conscious motivation (use/gratification) for reading them. Indeed, Peterson concludes that children “use these magazines to construct hybrid identities and to make themselves modern” (p. 197; emphasis added). Of course, in doing so, Egyptian children and their parents are also using magazines not only to make themselves modern, but to construct themselves, their lifestyles, their individual identities, and their cultural identities as crucially dependent upon and defined by both consumption and sociocultural comparisons with the West.



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Agenda Setting The premise of agenda setting theory (McCombs and Shaw 1972) is that media coverage of sociopolitical issues and these issues’ attributes influence their perceived importance in the minds of audience members. Agenda‐setting effects are especially strong for so‐called “unobtrusive issues,” which refer to topics and areas of life with which most audience members have little or no personal experience – such as foreign policy, in the context of which Cohen (1963) first made the statement (later quoted by McCombs and Shaw 1972) that media “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about” (p. 13). The body of agenda‐setting literature has given no special attention to newsmagazines, in part because McCombs and Shaw’s (1972) seminal study established a strong correlation between the content patterns of newsmagazines and other news media, and possibly also because of Stone and McCombs’s (1981) findings of a time lag of several months in the agenda‐setting effects of newsmagazines. However, the few agenda‐setting studies that have focused on magazines offer some unique considerations about the role that periodicals play in local, national, and international sociopolitical agendas. One of these unique considerations is the notion of a photographic agenda established by images that gain wide cultural recognition after first appearing on the cover of influential weekly newsmagazines, such as Time, Newsweek, and Life (until 1972, when it became a monthly, disappearing from the magazine market in 2000). The magazine form is a natural setting for iconic photographs because magazines tend to have long shelf lives and the higher‐quality paper on which they are printed allows for a high‐resolution and artful reproduction of photographs. Magazine covers, whose most immediate goal is to sell the specific issue on the newsstands at any given time, have therefore also been studied as carriers of dominant ideologies and as cultural artifacts that set the agenda for major social trends and historical moments (e.g. Pompper and Feeney 2002; Scott and Stout 2006; Spiker 2003). Reflecting the significance of magazine covers (recognized also in popular culture, as in the 1973 hit single “Cover of the Rolling Stone”), the entire Fall 2002 issue of the Journal of Magazine and New Media Research was dedicated to “the art and science of magazine cover research” (Johnson 2002). A prominent example of a newsmagazine’s cover image garnering wide public attention is National Geographic’s 1985 photograph of the “Afghan Girl” – an adolescent in a red headscarf, her penetrating green eyes looking directly at the camera – who came to symbolize the plight of refugees fleeing then Soviet‐occupied Afghanistan (Perera 2008). In 2002, when National Geographic was finally able to find the Afghan Girl, verify her identity with the help of an FBI forensic expert and biometric technologies, and publish a cover image of her as an already grown‐up woman, the new photo “function[ed] rhetorically to refigure the public understanding of, and attitudes towards, current biometric and identification‐based policy” (Schwartz‐ DuPre 2007, p. 433). In the same year, the agenda‐setting (or perhaps just compassion‐inducing?) effects of the “Afghan Girl” cover image on the magazine’s audiences were at last measured, though only in monetary terms: “according to the figures cited on its website, the National Geographic’s readers donated some US$22 million in 2002, in response to the magazine’s ‘Afghan Girl’ appeal” (Perera 2008, p. 87). Of similar magnitude in public discourses in the USA is the photographic agenda set by Time magazine. Its widely anticipated Person of the Year (POY) issue has routinely acted as an agenda setter by dedicating the award to and picturing not a single individual but a group or a composite image, such as “The Silence Breakers” in 2017, “The Protester” in 2011, or even the “Hungarian Freedom Fighters” in 1956. The magazine’s POY cover story does not simply push certain individuals or groups of people into the public spotlight, but it also constructs their cultural relevance. As Bishop (2013) noted in regard to the magazine’s “Protester” POY issue, “while Time’s chief purpose was to celebrate the success of recent protests in an attempt to satisfy its

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readers, it ended up also providing a how‐to guide for socially acceptable protest” (p. 7). In the context of environmental issues – which can be just as unobtrusive to many audience members as wars in faraway places – the POY issue has been found to attract the attention of congressional committees (i.e. policymakers, who can be considered elite audience members), but it has less influence on raising the salience of pollution among the general public than news stories published in The New York Times (Jenner 2012). The power of a newsmagazine’s photographic agenda stems from its inherent realism: Pictures of a bird soaked in oil or of beaches covered in tar offer apparent evidence and may permit the inclusion of ideas that are contrary to those presented by sources who seek to minimize the importance, or the importance of certain aspects, of the issue. (p. 276)

The second unique consideration in regard to magazines is that they occasionally participate not only in agenda setting, but also in agenda building, described by Lang and Lang (1983, p. 58) as “a collective process in which media, government, and the citizenry reciprocally influence one another in at least some respects.” The latitude afforded to magazines in terms of subjectivity and even advocacy in their coverage can thus influence policymaking. As Haveman (2004) notes, this function is inherent to magazines, which “promote discourses—principles, symbols, and ideas—that social groups use to deal with social problems” (p. 24). Strodthoff et  al. (1985) report on the role of four magazines, two special‐interest titles (Audubon, Environment) and two general‐audience titles (Time, Saturday Review) on “the crystallization and diffusion of an ideology of social change (environmentalism) and the translation over time of this doctrine into a unified realm of substantive concerns” (p. 134). By content‐analyzing more than 3000 articles from the four magazines from 1959 to 1979, Strodthoff et al. identified three stages of environmental ideology diffusion (disambiguation, legitimation, and routinization) as well as a steady increase in the coverage of environmental concerns  –  first in the special‐interest magazines and then in the general‐interest titles. The period of greatest increase in environmental coverage coincided with a period of institutional change at the federal level, and although the authors do not claim causality, they note the following: The most prominent clustering of federal environmental policy decisions (i.e., National Environmental Protection Agency, 1969‐Environmental Protection Agency, 1970), signifying institutional change, was preceded in time by the period of greatest increase in both relevant content and doctrinal information in special‐interest magazines. It was followed by comparable increases in relevant and doctrinal content in general‐audience magazines. (p. 146)

In other words, while national newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post tend to legitimate what is “news” for less prestigious, regional, and local news organizations (Shoemaker and Reese 1996), among magazines, specialized periodicals appear to precede more prestigious and general‐interest publications in legitimating issues of importance (Strodthoff et al. 1985). In the course of history, some magazines have been created with the primary intent to diffuse or popularize an ideology by serving as “official organs or newsletters to promote oppositional political ideas” (Forster 2015, p. 5). Other magazines have performed similar functions without necessarily being “official organs.” Progressive magazines, such as Ms. and Mother Jones, emerged to serve as voices of the social justice movement in the USA in the 1970s. Ms. had an agenda‐ building mindset from its very beginning. It was created specifically with the promise to popularize an ideology of gender equality and “weaken women’s resistance to feminism” – though, within two decades, market and social pressures forced it to abandon its status of a mass magazine and leave the newsstands (Farrell 1998, p. 16). However, Ms. Magazine’s original platform



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of popularizing feminism is very much alive and well in today’s mainstream women’s magazines, which routinely cover political issues, sexual and domestic violence, and popular feminism next to beauty and relationship advice (Sternadori and Hagseth 2014). Outside the global West, in Hungary  –  a country described as a “haven for the alt‐right” (Schaeffer 2017)  –  the “bombastic” political magazine Barikad (Bar!kad) published until 2017 by the right‐wing Movement for a Better Hungary (Krausz 2017) has recently transitioned into a seemingly general‐interest news site (alfahir.hu), whose coverage continues to espouse right‐wing, populist, and nationalistic themes. Another prime example of how a magazine has played a role in agenda building is related to the US Anabolic Steroid Restriction Act of 1989. Participants in one congressional hearing preceding the passage of this legislation were provided with a 1988 Sports Illustrated article titled “The Nightmare of Steroids” to “read as background,” and the resulting discussion about protecting America’s youth mirrored the article’s main theme (Denham 1997, p. 267). In another hearing, a member of the US Olympic Committee credited a letter to the editor published in Sports Illustrated as the catalyst for her decision to propose legislative action in the state of Delaware. Furthermore, some of the sources quoted in the magazine articles were also invited to testify at congressional hearings on the same subject. Denham concludes that “while one magazine can hardly be credited with driving the legislative agenda, it can be credited with helping to build that agenda” (p. 267). The prominent role of Sports Illustrated in policymaking is reminiscent of Abrahamson’s claim (Abrahamson 2007) that “the editorial content of magazines is specifically designed by its editors and looked to by its readers as something that will lead to action” (p. 670) – as quite literally happened in the congressional hearings about anabolic steroids. On the other hand, it is difficult to find support for Abrahamson’s claim that “in most cases, the editors and writers of magazines share a direct community of interest with their readers. They are often, indeed literally, the same people. There is no journalistic distance” (p. 669). In this case, the editors of Sports Illustrated and members of Congress are clearly not the same people, but it is worth noting that the two groups are highly similar in that they belong to social elites and occupy positions of power from which they can assess the danger and judge the (im)morality associated with various social issues. In a global context, some scholars have argued that newsmagazines that have international editions, such as Newsweek, contribute to the “shaping of international public opinion” (Tanjong and Gaddy 1994, p. 3). However, in the case of Newsweek in Nigeria, Tanjong and Gaddy identified only a weak positive (and statistically nonsignificant) rank‐order correlation between the magazine’s coverage of international issues and its audience’s priorities, leading them to argue that members of Nigeria’s educated elite – who also happen to be Newsweek’s readers – are resistant to agenda setting effects because they are “widely traveled and widely read” (p. 12). Western expectations that magazines will speak in ways that can be easily understood by their readership communities and will work to humanize social issues, including stigmatized diseases such as HIV/AIDS, also have not held up in African contexts (Pratt et al. 2002).

Gatekeeping Magazines play a role not only in the diffusion of ideas and setting/building of agendas within public discourse, but also – and often more obviously so – within specific industries and niche fields of interest. In that sense, magazines and their editors are professional gatekeepers in ways that extend the traditional theory of media gatekeeping proposed by White (1950), which posits that journalists’ selection of stories does not accurately match the distribution of information in the real world but is instead “systematically biased, driven by a combination of organizational

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factors, news norms, and audience interests” (Soroka 2012, p. 514). Magazines, which before the age of the Internet could publish new content only once a week or once a month – and also, more importantly, tend to have more limited sets of advertisers than other media (Nijholt et al. 2014; Shoemaker and Vos 2009) – have offered particularly strong examples of topic and story selection that cannot and do not match complex external reality. Shoemaker and Vos’s review of the literature points to examples of magazine gatekeeping in the form of avoidance of certain topics (e.g. the health risks of smoking) or favorable editorial coverage of major advertisers (e.g. fashion designers). A more distinctive perspective on magazine gatekeeping is offered by studies that describe gatekeeping efforts not simply in response to financial pressures but rather as a reflection of an influential editor’s worldview, and therefore shaping and even determining the agenda of an entire industry or field. A prime example is Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, who serves as a gatekeeper of fashion trends (Weiss 2014). As the editor of a major fashion publication, she is not simply standing at the gates of the fashion industry saying “yes” to some designs and “no” to others; rather, Wintour is an active participant in conceiving the designs that then begin to make their way to the proverbial gate and in conferring status to those who pass through the gate: By creating events intended to discover new designers, and then nurturing, advising, and providing jobs for those designers, Wintour is directly involved in developing the material content of the fashion industry: new designs. This material content is then translated into the editorial content of her magazine. Wintour is thus engaging in a complex, multi‐phased version of agenda setting: in addition to shaping audience priorities and preferences through the act of including or excluding content from a publication, she also actively works—behind the scenes and well before the moment of publication—to make possible the creation of the very materials that her magazine uses as content. She sets an industry’s agenda, not merely her readers’ agendas (p. 18).1

While there may be only one Anna Wintour, Weiss (2014) notes that the “flouting of neutrality/ objectivity is the norm for virtually all fashion publications” (p. 19). The result is a powerful effect that may be invisible to most media consumers but is present regardless well beyond haute couture, whose trends trickle down to determine the designs of the mass‐produced clothes sold in department stores. A magazine’s act of gatekeeping sometimes is intended to maintain and perpetuate the periodical’s own status as a power broker and agenda setter. Rolling Stone, which “fills a place of mythical power in American popular culture” and whose often sexualized covers are able to “bestow power upon B‐list performers who are struggling for success” (Lambiase 2005, p. 4), has routinely published letters to the editor by readers who are either praising or criticizing its covers. The war of words encouraged by the magazine editors through the letters of readers – carefully selected to ensure that they claim to be “speaking for other imagined readers” (p. 8) – therefore only imbues Rolling Stone’s covers with additional cultural significance. A little over half of the readers’ letters analyzed by Lambiase (2005) were negative, suggesting that “the magazine is not afraid of printing critical letters about its covers” (p. 11) – recognizing, perhaps, that kindling controversies begets more sociocultural recognition and, ultimately, reinforces the magazine’s power to confer status.2 The gatekeeping power of the magazine form (and resulting industry agendas) is not necessarily as evident elsewhere. In the case of trade journals and managerial magazines in the Netherlands, Nijholt et al. (2014) observe that editors often make gatekeeping decisions about which managerial ideas are “fashionable” on the basis of standard news values, such as novelty, deviance, and proximity, as well as by gauging sources’ and contributors’ interest in a new idea: “There’s a hundred people in front of me and eighty want to talk about CRM3 – well, then I’m thinking CRM must be pretty hot” (p. 478).



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Conclusion In this chapter, we assessed the roles of the magazine form through the lenses of several foundational twentieth‐century media theories; namely, those theories that purport to delineate and explain media’s purposes, media’s social functions and dysfunctions, and audiences’ media uses and gratifications. We also considered the unique functions of magazines in building or shaping public agendas, the role of magazines in contributing to the diffusion of political and social ideologies, and their contributions to the construction of identities and lifestyles. Finally, we looked at ways that magazines published outside the global West contribute to our understanding of classic mass communication theories. In doing so, we have presented evidence showing: ●●

●●

●● ●●

●●

that some magazines can effect social changes by legitimizing a movement (e.g. environmentalism) or becoming the voice of a movement (e.g. Ms. Magazine); that some magazines may encourage conformity with the status quo – from the reinforcement of gender roles and extreme beauty standards to the global spread of consumer lifestyles; that some magazine content has at times spurred legislative action; that some magazines’ covers are privileged in that they define historical moments, bestow status and recognition on an individual or a group of people, or elicit vast amounts of sympathy and monetary donations from their audiences (e.g. National Geographic’s “Afghan Girl”); and that some magazine editors wield enormous sociocultural power, extending well beyond their basic agenda‐setting and gatekeeping functions.

Not yet mentioned but also worth emphasizing is the privileged position held by some magazines as carriers of radical ideas or novel intellectual currents. Unlike other media, certain magazines have been not only the objects of theory but also, sometimes, its subjects (i.e. participants in the development of theory). While the theories discussed in this chapter are mostly positivist and developed only through academic books and journals, some magazines have themselves been central to the development of other kinds of theories – literary, cultural, and critical. For example, writing about Canadian art and literary magazines, Davies (1995) notes that they have served as “the productive sites of creativity and discourse, much more than the mere academization and journalistic simplification of such discourse and energy” (p. 13). Examples from history abound. The French intellectuals Simone de Beauvoir and Jean‐Paul Sartre, whose views have reverberated across academic disciplines, started a magazine called Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times) in 1945 and frequently contributed to it (Boschetti 1988). Cultural theorist Stuart Hall has written for non‐academic periodicals, including Marxism Today4 and BOMB magazine5 (and has also contributed to newspapers, such as The Guardian6). American historian Jill Lepore,7 who is on the faculty at Harvard University, is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has written much that would fall under the umbrella of cultural history, such as her 2014 book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. And, of course, countless “little” magazines across the world continue to publish the work of intellectuals and activist writers, shaping cultural theory and cultural history in subtle ways that may never be widely known (e.g. Robbins 2016). In this chapter we have also considered the central question of what Abrahamson (2007, p. 667) has called “magazine exceptionalism”: Do magazines indeed hold a privileged position in shaping “the very social reality of their sociocultural moment”? – and, if so, is that position more privileged than that of the so‐called “newspapers of record,” such as The New York Times and The Washington Post? We are inclined to suggest that the best answer is the one that social

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scientists offer to just about any complex question: It depends. Indeed, Modern Bride is by no means more privileged than The New York Times or any major TV network when it comes to shaping culture and society, regardless of what it puts on its cover or who its editor is. Conversely, the extremely limited soapbox of The Plain Talk newspaper in Vermillion, South Dakota, will never even begin to approach the sociocultural power wielded by The New Yorker. The evidence we have presented in this chapter also suggests that the medium is not the message, and it never has been. Magazines are not special simply because they are magazines – that is, simply because they are published periodically, printed on glossy paper, subjective, activist, gossipy, entertaining, aimed at specialized audiences, or extra friendly when addressing their readers. Like newspapers, radio, television, and digital media forms, magazines, too, report on and interpret events, confer status, enforce social norms, narcotize readers, allow and disallow items to enter their “gates,” set and build agendas, and provide a variety of important uses and gratifications for their audiences. Yet some magazines do indeed enjoy a privileged position from which they can shape culture, society, or a certain sector of life – but only if and when the provocativeness, entertainment value, intellectual standing, esthetic quality, or artistic caliber of their content become recognized by their agentic audiences as worthy of their attention.

Notes 1 It should be noted that this process might be better described as a complex, multi‐phased version of gatekeeping. 2 A fitting example of a recent controversy was Rolling Stone’s 2013 cover featuring the Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture‐news/jahars‐ world‐83856. According to Adweek, the magazine’s newsstand sales of the “Boston Bomber” issue more than doubled (Bazilian 2013). 3 Customer relationship management. 4 See http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/index_frame.htm. 5 See https://bombmagazine.org/authors/stuart‐hall. 6 See https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/apr/20/stuart‐hall‐50‐years‐pop‐culture. 7 See https://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore.

References Abrahamson, D. (2007). Magazine exceptionalism: the concept, the criteria, the challenge. Journalism Studies 8 (4): 667–670. Bandura, A. (2001a). Social cognitive theory of mass communication. Media Psychology 3: 265–299. Bandura, A. (2001b). Social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective. Annual Review of Psychology 52 (1): 26. Bandura, A., Ross, D., and Ross, S.A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 63 (3): 575–582. Bazilian, E. (2013). Despite controversy, Rolling Stone ‘Boston Bomber’ issue is a hit on newsstands. Adweek. https://www.adweek.com/digital/despite‐controversy‐rolling‐stone‐boston‐bomber‐issue‐ hit‐newsstands‐151560 (accessed 22 March 2019). Bishop, R. (2013). The professional protester: emergence of a new news media protest coverage paradigm in time magazine’s 2011 person of the year issue. Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 14 (1): 1–19. (accessed 14 March 2019). https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Summer2013/ Bishop.pdf. Boschetti, A. (1988). The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and ‘Les Temps Modernes’. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Cohen, B.C. (1963). The Press and Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Davies, I. (1995). Theory and creativity in English Canada: magazines, the state and cultural movement. Journal of Canadian Studies 30 (1): 5–19.



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Denham, B.E. (1997). Sports Illustrated, the “War on Drugs,” and the Anabolic Steroid Control Act of 1990: a study in agenda building and political timing. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 21 (3): 260–273. Farrell, A.E. (1998). Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Forster, L. (2015). Magazine Movements: Women’s Culture, Feminisms and Media Form. London, UK: Bloomsbury. Grunig, L.A. and Grunig, J.E. (2013). The relationship between public relations and marketing in excellent o0rganizations: evidence from the IABC study. In: Public Relations and Communication Management (eds. K. Sriramesh, A. Zerfass and J.‐N. Kim), 93–118. New York and London: Routledge. Harrison, K. and Bond, B.J. (2007). Gaming magazines and the drive for muscularity in preadolescent boys: a longitudinal examination. Body Image 4 (3): 269–277. Haveman, H.A. (2004). Antebellum literary culture and the evolution of American magazines. Poetics 32 (1): 5–28. Herzog, H. (1941). On borrowed experience: an analysis of listening to daytime sketches. Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 9 (1): 65–95. Herzog, H. (1942). Motivations and gratifications of daily serial listeners. Radio Research: 3–33. Jenner, E. (2012). News photographs and environmental agenda setting. Policy Studies Journal 40 (2): 274–301. Johnson, S. (2002). The art and science of magazine cover research. Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 5 (1): 1–10. (accessed 14 March 2019). https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/ Fall2002/Johnson1.pdf. Katz, E., Blumler, J.G., and Gurevitch, M. (1973a). Uses and gratifications research. The Public Opinion Quarterly 37 (4): 509–523. Katz, E., Haas, H., and Gurevitch, M. (1973b). On the use of the mass media for important things. American Sociological Review 38 (2): 164–181. Kim, J., Lee, J., Jo, S. et al. (2015). Magazine reading experience and advertising engagement: a uses and gratifications perspective. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 92 (1): 179–198. Knobloch‐Westerwick, S. and Hoplamazian, G.J. (2012). Gendering the self: selective magazine reading and reinforcement of gender conformity. Communication Research 39 (3): 358–384. Krausz, T. (2017). A whole new Jew: the anti‐semite who turned out to be one of the Jews he despised.” The Jerusalem Post. http://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem‐Report/A‐whole‐new‐Jew‐478706 (accessed 18 March 2019). Laden, S. (2003). Who’s afraid of a black bourgeoisie? Consumer magazines for Black South Africans as an apparatus of change. Journal of Consumer Culture 3 (2): 191–216. Lambiase, J. (2005). Impressing the editor: rolling stone letter writers and their rhetorical strategies for getting published. Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 7 (2): 1–14. (accessed 15 March 2019). https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Summer2005/Lambiase.pdf. Lang, G.E. and Lang, K. (1983). The Battle for Public Opinion: The President, the Press, and the Polls during Watergate. New York: Columbia University Press. Lasswell, H.D. (1948). The structure and function of communication in society. In: The Communication of Ideas: A Series of Addresses (ed. L. Bryson), 37–51. New York: Harper and Row. Lazarsfeld, P.F. and Merton, R. (1948). Mass communication, popular taste and organized social action. In: The Communication of Ideas: A Series of Addresses (ed. L. Bryson), 95–118. New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies. Liu, Z. and Rodriguez, L. (2012). Psychological and social motives for fashion magazine use among Shanghai’s female college students. Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 13 (2) (accessed 13 March 2019). https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Summer2012/LiuRodriguez.pdf. McCombs, M.E. and Shaw, D.L. (1972). The agenda‐setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (2): 176–187. McQuail, D., Blumler, J.G., and Brown, J.R. (1972). The television audience: a revised perspective. In: Sociology of Mass Communications (ed. D. McQuail), 135–165. Middlesex, England: Penguin. Nijholt, J.J., Heusinkveld, S., and Benders, J. (2014). Handling management ideas: gatekeeping, editors and professional magazines. Scandinavian Journal of Management 30 (4): 470–484. Payne, G.A., Severn, J.J.H., and Dozier, D.M. (1988). Uses and gratifications motives as indicators of magazine readership. Journalism Quarterly 65 (4): 909–913.

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Perera, S. (2008). The gender of Borderpanic: women in circuits of security, state, globalisation and new (and old) empire. In: Women, Crime and Social Harm: Towards a Criminology for the Global Age (eds. M. Cain and A. Howe), 69–93. Oxford, UK, and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing. Peterson, M.A. (2005). The Jinn and the computer: consumption and identity in Arabic children’s magazines. Childhood 12 (2): 177–200. Pompper, D. and Feeney, B.J. (2002). Traditional narratives resurrected: the Gulf war on Life magazine covers. Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 5 (1) (accessed 14 March 2019). https:// aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Fall2002/PompperFeeney.pdf. Pratt, C.B., Ha, L., and Pratt, C.A. (2002). Setting the public health agenda on major diseases in sub‐ Saharan Africa: African popular magazines and medical journals, 1981–1997. Journal of Communication 52 (4): 889–904. Rinallo, D. and Basuroy, S. (2009). Does advertising spending influence media coverage of the advertiser? Journal of Marketing 73 (6): 33–46. Robbins, B. (2016). A starting point for politics: the radical life and times of Stuart Hall. The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/the‐radical‐life‐of‐stuart‐hall. (accessed 16 March 2019). Schaeffer, C. (2017). How Hungary became a haven for the alt‐right. The Atlantic. https://www. theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/how‐hungary‐became‐a‐haven‐for‐the‐alt‐ right/527178 (accessed 18 March 2019). Schwartz‐Dupre, R.L. (2007). Rhetorically representing public policy: National Geographic’s 2002 Afghan girl and the bush administration’s biometric identification policies. Feminist Media Studies 7 (4): 433–453. Scott, D.W. and Stout, D.A. (2006). Religion on TIME: personal spiritual quests and religious institutions on the cover of a popular news magazine. Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 8 (1): 1–17. (accessed 14 March 2019). https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Spring2006/Scott_Stout.pdf. Shoemaker, P.J. and Reese, S.D. (1996). Mediating the Message. White Plains, NY: Longman. Shoemaker, P.J. and Vos, T.P. (2009). Gatekeeping Theory. New York and London: Routledge. Soroka, S.N. (2012). The gatekeeping function: distributions of information in media and the real world. The Journal of Politics 74 (2): 514–528. Spiker, T. (2003). Cover coverage: How U.S. magazine covers captured the emotions of the September 11 attacks—and how editors and art directors decided on those themes. Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 5 (2): 1–18. (accessed 14 March 2019). https://aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/ Journal/Spring2003/Spiker.pdf. Sternadori, M. and Hagseth, M. (2014). Fashionable feminism or feminist fashion? Media Report to Women 42 (4): 12–21. Stone, G.C. and McCombs, M.E. (1981). Tracing the time lag in agenda‐setting. Journalism Quarterly 58 (1): 51–55. Strodthoff, G.G., Hawkins, R.P., and Schoenfeld, A.C. (1985). Media roles in a social movement: a model of ideology diffusion. Journal of Communication 35 (2): 134–153. Tanjong, E. and Gaddy, G.D. (1994). The agenda‐setting function of the international mass media: the case of Newsweek in Nigeria. African Media Review 8 (2): 1–14. Tiggemann, M., Slater, A., Bury, B. et al. (2013). Disclaimer labels on fashion magazine advertisements: effects on social comparison and body dissatisfaction. Body Image 10 (1): 45–53. Towers, W.M. (1986). Uses and gratifications of magazine readers: a cross‐media comparison. Mass Communication Review 13 (1): 44–51. Wasike, B. (2018). Gender, parasocial interaction, and nonverbal communication: testing the visual effect of sports magazine cover models. International Journal of Communication 12: 173–199. Weiss, D. (2014). ‘That’s part of what we do’: the performative power of Vogue’s Anna Wintour. Journal of Magazine and New Media Research 15 (1): 1–29. (accessed 15 March 2019). https://aejmcmagazine. arizona.edu/Journal/Spring2014/Weiss.pdf. White, D.M. (1950). The ‘gate keeper’: a case study in the selection of news. Journalism Bulletin 27 (4): 383–390. Zuo, H. (2005). Exploring factors affecting Chinese readers’ decisions on purchasing: American shelter titles in China. Publishing Research Quarterly 21 (4): 65–101.

5

Case Study Where Industry and Academy Meet Tim Holmes

It is not common for academics and practitioners to have a face‐to‐face conversation about what is happening to magazines, magazine publishing, and the evolving definition of a magazine. Academics tend to be preoccupied with the production of publishable research, which often seems irrelevant to editors and writers. Magazine journalists, on the other hand, are absorbed in the process of curating content and meeting deadlines; they rarely have the time and motivation to theorize about magazines’ place in society and culture or about what appear to be common‐ sense editing, staffing, and design routines. To glean what we thought could be original and unexpected insights from a conversation between scholars of magazines and longtime magazine editors, we organized an industry–academy roundtable at the fourth international Mapping the Magazine conference in Sydney, Australia, in December 2017. What follows are edited and rearranged highlights from the discussion.

Diversity Megan Le Masurier:  What kind of magazine research is most needed and most relevant at this time? Jim Shahin:  If you take a look at what is being done right now, especially in diversity studies, magazines lag way behind. We are seeing a real‐world laboratory right before our eyes in Teen Vogue. What is happening to Teen Vogue is so unusual in that a beauty magazine intended for teenage girls should be writing about diversity, should be writing about politics, and should be now gaining an audience as a result. I think that there is a thirst that has not been met by the scholarship community and certainly by the industry. Miglena Sternadori:  Jim, why should students care about diversity and why should we be doing scholarship on diversity? Jim Shahin:  It is almost our civic duty to create a workforce that is diverse. That helps us as both journalists and citizens understand our world better. It seems relatively clear to my mind that when Ferguson happened in the United States, suddenly we started seeing an awful lot of race stories, and Ferguson was a wakeup call, and there was a backlash. Not just from, say, the people who were opposed to reading about race, but also from people who said you are handling this poorly, you are sort of missing the point here, you are talking all around it. The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

66 Holmes And then The New Yorker hired quite a few minority journalists in the last two years since Ferguson. The Atlantic has also had a more diverse workforce added as well, and I think all of these things make for a deeper, richer, more complex texture to the writing about our current events and our culture. From a business standpoint, I will go back to Teen Vogue. It is not just about doing good; it is about doing well. What we are seeing is that diversity sells. Bringing it down to the bottom line … well, we can talk about all these grand ideas, but are they going to sell? We can put more women of color on the covers, more stories about race in magazines, certainly more stories about race on the web, and things seem to be going just fine. So, there are two things: one is doing stories that reflect a more broadly diverse culture, and two is having a workforce which, currently, woefully, woefully, needs people of color. It struck some of us as interesting that the media generally, and magazines specifically, kept talking about how white the upper‐education system was in Chicago or wherever it may be, and there was all this finger‐ pointing from the media and then they started seeing the fingers turning back at them. You saw, “Oh my gosh, well, we know that 12% of newspapers’ workforce is made up of people of color.” We don’t know about magazines because they don’t have the numbers. Which is amazing to me. At least there is a conversation. We couldn’t have even had that conversation two years ago because there wasn’t anyone being hired. Megan Le Masurier:  In his keynote yesterday, Tim (Holmes) gave us some extraordinary statistics about how male, how white, how private‐school educated the British journalism workforce was and he also noted that we have no stats for magazines because nobody seems to do that. But even before we get to magazines employing people, are we getting those students into the universities where we are training them? I think that is something we can actively do something about. Sharon Maxwell‐Magnus:  I teach a very diverse student body, but (to get a job), you have to get an internship; to get an internship, you have to take something on minimum wage. You have often to take out large loans. And for first‐generation university students in particular, parents and others are expecting a return on their investment. So leaving aside racial issues, discrimination, and biases, there is a real economical pullback on these students. Some research by universities in the UK shows that Black students are the most likely to have the largest amounts of debt, and that impacts them when you are having all of these unpaid internships. Peter, are you aware of the diversity at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), of the student body or of increased diversity of the students you accept? Peter Fray:  Coming from the industry, I tried a few times to recruit indigenous reporters, with limited success. There are a lot of indigenous reporters out there, and they are more visible now than before, which can only be a good thing. But it’s still like integrating them into what I feel like is a white patriarchal industry. That is where the shit hits the fan, and they often take the choice of “I can’t be bothered.” I would say that it’s a great shame on my part, because I was actively involved (in the recruitment effort), and those journalists seemed to stay around for a couple of years and then left. So there is a lot to be done in the structural sense and a lot to be done in the academy. I think the student body at UTS seems more diverse than I thought it would be, but it still has a long way to go. We have a lot of students who are second‐ or third‐generation kids from migrant families. A lot can still be done, but it needs to be across the industry, right? Tim Holmes:  It does vary from institution to institution. Some of that has to do with mounting levels of debt, and some of it, I’m sure, is cultural because certain people don’t think they can be journalists. It may be because they don’t see journalists who look like them, or it may just be that they need that return on that investment, and journalism isn’t going to give them that. Sharon Maxwell‐Magnus:  Certainly, for our students the role model is very important. It’s not fun to be the first of anything, it’s no fun. So, I think for our students, the more recent alumni we call back (the better). We used to have more senior alumni come back, and that just didn’t work for the students. They couldn’t empathize with them.



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Social Media, Analytics, and Creativity Megan Le Masurier:  Could you speculate about the role of social media and the disaggregation of content from a magazine as a whole – and what implications that might have for the future of the form? Jim Shahin:  I think all of us are trying to figure out ways to adapt to what’s occurring on social media and whether it is to form an entirely new track or include it in the overall instruction. Right now, at Newhouse, it crosses all disciplines, and it isn’t just about magazines. You have students from PR, from magazines, from newspapers in that social media class and within the courses themselves; for example, in my magazine editing class, there will be discussions and assignments and instruction on social media strategy, so this isn’t just about social media per se. The (2016 US) election afforded us a great opportunity to use social media as an analytical tool, which we did both in a day or two before the election and the morning after the presidential election to talk about voice, audience, and the different ways of approach. We looked at analytics on social media. So there is so much to talk about in terms of social media, and its influence on magazines. Megan Le Masurier:  Does (the reliance on analytics) actually mean that magazines will start following trends, rather than leading trends, which used to be one of their roles? Following on from that, what is the role of the editor now in this age when social media and analytics dominate? Jim Shahin:  On some level, what we are finding is that editors are using themselves as a part of the brand. Part of their job now is using social media as an effective tool. We see this especially in women’s and fashion publications, where there is a more intimate relationship between the reader and the magazine. You don’t see it quite as much with David Remnick (editor of The New Yorker). You will see him on social media, but not creating this personal brand you are seeing from fashion, beauty, and women’s magazines. I am also seeing a lot of senior and associate editors working with the digital side. So the platform becomes a very important part of the strategy, where it used to be a marketing tool for the stories. Peter Fray:  I guess what you’re talking about here is how analytics feed both content and product development. I think one of the great overarching trends over the past five years is the current realization that product and content have to sit together, and that is a great challenge for a journalist and a great challenge area of study for journalism scholars. So, when you say we are dedicating people to the Snapchat channel, I think, well, yeah, of course, because you have to chase that audience, and the way you chase that audience is the way you listen to that audience. I think that you lead and follow at the same time. So, you see often when a piece goes up and gets a high number of views, people sitting there on the dashboard saying, oh wow, that’s doing well; at that point you are listening, but you are also trying to affect the debate, and at some point that doesn’t work so you put something else up. So there is this constant A/B testing that is going on in digital environments that in theory should be creating a much more intricate relationship between the editors, journalists, and their audiences. Megan Le Masurier:  You know, that is interesting, Peter, because I was just thinking in the old days when I worked in magazines, we would actually “focus‐group” covers and we would “focus‐group” stories, and I know in America, they “focus‐group” everything – or used to, anyways – before an issue actually goes out. Being able to use analytics and social media as a more immediate guide, it’s actually different, maybe better. Peter Fray:  It’s better and quicker. On your point whether that means you grow into a follower, I still think there is an agenda‐setting role to pick the stories, and then there has to be a more humble role where we realize the stories we picked didn’t actually work. Which is the tricky bit.

68 Holmes Tim Holmes:  I think the analytics can be really useful for showing the kind of stories that are getting traction and engagement. You can see very quickly the kinds of stories, or the kinds of approaches to stories, that are getting the hits, and you can build your content around that. But I don’t think that’s following per se. I think if you just follow in that kind of blind way, you would lose the audience very quickly. It is a matter of teaching students to use those analytics in a constructive kind of way, rather than panic‐stricken “we just have to do more of this kind of story.” Megan Le Masurier:  And I think in the world of magazines, which is distinct from the world of journalism, there is a level of creativity in your choice of editorial content. Maybe what we need to teach students as well is how to read the cultural landscape and how to be editors. A lot of colleagues here are teaching magazine journalism, but we don’t seem to teach editing. And I don’t mean copy editing; I mean the skill of being an editor. There is very little scholarship about editing magazines. I am wondering, do we teach that, and should we? Jim Shahin:  We do teach editing. That course has changed a lot (to reflect) what it means to be an editor now. We just completed a survey among alums; we were asking them in great detail what they thought it was we should be teaching. The two top things were writing and editing – the fundamentals. It wasn’t coding or social media branding, it was basic skills. Because even if you are working in digital, or print, what you need to understand is voice, voice, voice, and audience, audience, audience. Peter Fray:  (Employers) want both. They want traditional skills and they want transformational skills, being able to talk about product, audience engagement, digital. I have lost count of the number of senior editors, publishers, that have said to me, I would die for a journalist that could code. I don’t think that means they want every graduate to be able to code, and I am sure we are not going to be producing such people, but I think it really means to me to sit in the same room as the tech and the desk people and not be asking, what is the journalist doing? And I think that is the single biggest challenge that we face. Kathy Watson:  I am an old‐fashioned journalist, and I remember when editors would say to us, “Just because some readers write letters, don’t assume that is the body of your readership.” Could the same argument be applied to analytics? Do they really represent the totality of our readership, or just a vocal active part of that readership? And if there is a danger to that, might we be swayed too far that way – hearing what the noisy people want, rather than what the whole readership wants? Megan Le Masurier:  I think what you have brought up is something interesting, and it’s the role of the editor of the magazine. I think it is different for print and online; online, you have a different set of metrics and information to guide you, but I think what is fantastic about print is that you get the old reader letter, and you can ignore the noise. Tim Holmes:  The problem with that analysis is that in print it’s still magic, but in digital you get numbers, and those analytics are seen by people who make decisions about the business. So you are trying to compare alchemy versus analytics. In this day and age, analytics are going to win. So what’s the case for alchemy? Megan Le Masurier:  I think the case is the history of magazines and the wonderful magazines we have – all ruled by alchemy and really good editing. I think it’s a specific skill, and what worries me is that we are devaluing it. David Abrahamson:  I think in the magazine world, story ideas are the currency of the realm; the person sitting next to you and the two new staffers may have better skills to offer, but if you can produce actionable story ideas, that is where you will connect in the superiors’ eyes. I love the word alchemy. I have been in an awful lot of conversations where people don’t talk about editing, but they talk about curation, and curation is processing something that has been put in front of you, analyzing it. We start with ideas; students need to understand they have to be willing to put their ideas out there on the table with others and talk about why one is better than the other. It is very alchemic.



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Megan Le Masurier:  That experience, for everyone who has ever been at a magazine and been editor, is that sense of, and I’m talking pre‐analytics, (that) was the most creative and also very difficult role just in terms of choosing content, and commissioning content, and putting content together. Audience member:  That brings us back to teaching magazines. We actually pair up a magazine editing class with a writing class so the students are working together in an editor/writer relationship. A good editor recognizes a story with a fresh angle and helps the writer craft that story and find the holes and plug the holes. Where I wanted to go with this was, that we are all in terror of creating students that are a mile wide and an inch deep. They can’t learn everything from us in these classes. I have a class with 25 students, 12 journalism students, 12 design majors and one photography major, and they are the staff of the magazine. So even though they aren’t all doing everything, they are working with someone who is doing that thing and they have to all be doing that all together, synergistically, for a specific audience. David Abrahamson:  First of all, making magazines is pathologically collaborative. On the skill side of it, I don’t see how you couldn’t rely on anything other than doing. They have to actually experience it and learn by trial and error. That’s kind of how these things are absorbed. As long as we seem to keep those two items and ideas in mind, we won’t go too far off. Jim Shahin:  I think this idea of collaboration is so important. It is fundamental (to know) how to take that story and make sure that it is right for this magazine. In magazines, it is not only about a good story, but about a good story for a niche audience. What makes GQ distinct from Esquire? What makes one sports magazine different from Sports Illustrated? You have to have a good story, but it also has to speak to the audience that you are trying to reach, and that, to me, gets into that alchemy that we were talking about. It gets into editorial judgment.

Post‐Truth and Information Disorder Megan Le Masurier:  Could I have this conversation go in a different direction now? Could we talk about the word of the year: “post‐truth” or “post‐fact” journalism? Jim Shahin:  We run a lot of stuff on fact‐checking in our (magazine) editing class, and we consider that still very important. The students are interestingly very old‐fashioned when it comes to fact‐checking. They don’t like this idea of digital self‐correction. This past electoral season (2016), we did what we call external and internal fact checking. The external fact checking was all about political facts, and publications that fact‐check what public officials are saying. We compared various fact‐checking organizations to each other. A number of them would start from here: “Isn’t a fact just a fact?” and so you get them to talk about interpretation. Then we get into the internal fact‐checking, which is making sure that everything that goes into that story is accurate, but not to the extent that you are working as a teammate for that writer. So having to fact‐check a story for the magazine was internal. Megan Le Masurier:  Peter Fray established Politifact Australia1 a few years ago, but now he is a professor of journalism practice, and I am going to ask him to talk about fact‐checking, post‐fact, truth, because that is quite his thing. Peter Fray:  I could talk about this all day, but a couple of things about fake news, just to get this out of the way: fake news, as we all know, has been with us forever. There is nothing new about fake news. What is new is that there is now a business model that enables it to happen at a greater rate. If you go back to the first (of Jim’s points), external, what you find mostly when you do fact‐check politicians is that they don’t tend to outright lie all the time. What they do tend to do is take a shortcut and cut the corners off. They use facts, but they will take the corner off the qualifier, so instead of going from A to B, they go to A to C, and at that point you get a

70 Holmes sort of half‐truth. If you apply the same criteria to what journalists do, it’s possible that some people have lost trust in journalists because journalists also take shortcuts. I have been a journalist for 30 years, but I am as guilty as anyone. This is a hypothesis, but maybe a lot of people, a lot of our audiences, think that we go from A to B to A to C. And if we apply the same standards that we apply to politicians to ourselves, then they won’t think that. Show them what you did, as the reporter. Tell the audience how you got to this point. Let them in on your decision making. Why did you do this, then, and where, and why? You know all of this is easy to do in a digital environment because all you do is write a sort of a sidebar or link to something to explain to your audience the decision making behind what you are doing. It’s about transparency and being accountable. Who is this person who wrote this story? How do I get in touch with them? All these are things and tools that we in the industry and the academy can use and teach now that enable us to beat off this sort of fake news. Megan Le Masurier:  Can I bring in Susan (Currie Sivek) and Sharon (Bloyd‐Peshkin), who gave a fantastic paper yesterday about their research into fact‐checking and the difference between online and print? Susan Currie Sivek:  Magazines in the States have a long history of thorough fact‐checking. We looked at what they have done online. Nobody can check all that stuff, and the stuff that does get checked is usually the most objective facts: how do you spell the name, what date was it, the locations, but not the exactly what they are talking about, the subjective facts, the did‐you‐ provide‐enough‐material‐to‐support‐the‐conclusion‐that‐you reached and all the subtleties in between. I love what you said about transparency, and I think the media have a really bad problem. We are not only despised by Donald Trump; we are despised by a lot of people. They just mistrust the media, and a lot of studies show our own institution is a lot worse than a lot of institutions that we think are a lot worse than we are. I think we need to move people into our zeitgeist. They need to understand why we do what we do and that what we do has a value, socially, culturally, and I think that’s our big challenge. Megan Le Masurier:  The kind of journalism that works against challenges, like the theories of gated communities and information bubbles, is town‐square journalism, so I think the crisis facing journalism is – where is the town‐square that people from different bubbles all come to? Maybe we need to start arguing toward this idea of peer review2 or Politifact as the only thing that starts to provide some sort of common ground between the left and the right, and the over there and over here, and can say there has been some sort of proper process going on the table that is solid. I think that is a challenge journalism needs to reinvent, a town‐square common ground, and that is the crisis post‐truth points us to. Tim Holmes:  I think you can find a town square, and I think you can find it on Facebook. I’m a member of a group,3 It Only Happens In Swansea, Swansea being the city in Wales where I live. Most of the time most of it is about where there are speed cameras, or “I have lost my cat and here is a picture of it; can you find it?” But around the time of Brexit, it was full of Brexit debate, and some of it was absolutely coming from the fringes, and some of it was well argued but from a point of view I didn’t agree with, and lots of back and forth. It wasn’t a place where anything was going to get resolved and nobody was going to agree with me and I wasn’t going to agree with that person, but it was airing all of those issues. It has now gone back to cats and dogs comments, but it was interesting, and an indication that things weren’t going to go the way anybody expected. So I think you can find it there. Audience member:  When I talk to my students about the horrors of the sanctity of fact they just kind of stare at me and say, “Oh, there he goes again.” When the public discourse and the public sphere becomes completely depleted (because of a focus on) entertainment, which is clearly what has been happening for more than a generation or two, I hate to say this, the students don’t seem to mind that, and it doesn’t seem to really matter if it’s true or not, if it’s kind of interesting and they can send it on to a friend. I am with you, but the town square may be an antiquated concept.



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Student in the Audience:  I just want to say, as a student, that I definitely don’t think students don’t care about facts anymore. I think we definitely do. Early in the year, I was overseas both in the UK and in the States just after Brexit and as Trump was coming up very strongly, and we were asking a lot of taxi and Uber (drivers) locally (about) their thoughts on it, and I was quite shocked that it was a lot of older people that were voting for Brexit and the same with Trump. I spoke to a lot of people that were intelligent, well‐rounded people that liked him, and I sort of thought from what they were saying, it wasn’t that they didn’t care about him blatantly lying or anything like that, it was “we are in a time of crisis,” and that was just the solution. Us young ones were quite shocked at how they disregarded (the truth).

Transparency, News, and Magazines Miglena Sternadori:  I have been thinking for a while that the standards of magazine writing and editing and fact checking don’t really apply to newspapers, and when I have actually enforced fact‐checking on my students, there is a lot of resistance from all kinds of newspaper people, who say that they cannot call sources and verify a quote. This is very much along the lines of concerns that Sharon mentioned yesterday, and if you do actually verify a quote, you can discover wrong context. Many of us here might have been quoted by student media, and I don’t know about your experience, but mine has been pretty disastrous, and a simple call would have really changed that. So it seems to me that older people may be more cynical about so‐called facts. Just to give you an example from what I have heard from people, many people have been misquoted in the wrong context or they have seen the wrong story in The New York Times, like the Sandy Hook shooting. First, we thought the shooter was the son of one of the teachers and then he wasn’t, and then this happened and that happened, and it was not accurate. People have seen stuff that coffee is bad for you, coffee is good for you. Pluto is a planet, no, Pluto isn’t a planet. Now Pluto is a dwarf planet. I think the general audience doesn’t understand that difference between a fact and a category. You know Pluto’s mass hasn’t changed, but how we categorize Pluto has. The lack of context you see in news, the lack of interest in verification and explanation, I really, very much blame, on hard news. Sharon Maxwell‐Magnus:  I am really glad you have taken us here, because what you are talking about is why slow journalism now exists. It comes down to that we cannot forget the issue of temporality and speech and the fact that we are not going to slow it down and that there are pockets around the world that are just saying that’s actually the answer, and when you said we should blame hard news, I kind of agree with you. Then it becomes a question we all have to ask ourselves, which is, how much news do you need, and do you need it now? Audience member:  But that is where transparency comes in. If we can educate people and have them understand, this is what we know right now, and as we learn more, the story will evolve, and we make it clear that we will come to a more solid conclusion. We need to educate people about what is journalism and how it works, and how we are doing our jobs and what their role in it is, and this is the time for that, considering the amount of crowdsourcing and the amount of user‐ generated content. This is the time to pull back the curtain and make journalism something people embrace and own rather than the high priesthood that has been so isolated from consumers. Sharon Maxwell‐Magnus:  And I think that’s something Peter was talking about when transparency came up, because transparency has come to mean a lot of things, but one of them within journalism studies and journalism debate is that the journalists acknowledge that. So, instead of distance hard news, objective, I’m‐not‐really‐here journalism, they really go “look, sorry, this is what I’ve got now, and I need to get it out, and it is limited” – just being a bit humble.

72 Holmes Audience member:  On the same topic, I think our political reporters in Australia are so dependent on their leaks from inside – how can you fact‐check that when it’s all this internal stuff, and the question is, do we need to protect this person? We are not going to tell you where this stuff is coming from. That is our little secret and exchanges of information, and I don’t think we are going to get buy‐in on that. Peter Fray:  You make a great point and I can rewrite in my mind a conversation with someone only yesterday who had a job offer (that revolved) around what leaks could he get, and all about his contacts, and that is the currency of the press gallery. How many people in cabinet will talk to you is absolutely one of the currencies of the press gallery, and you are worth more if you have more of them. So, I think therefore, and I am going to be a bit idealistic here, it’s not just about the sources. When we were doing Politifact, one of the things you do in the Politifact method, is that you actually name who is speaking to you, so often you might be speaking to a press secretary and you name them. I had ministers and opposition leaders pulling me aside and asking why I was naming the press secretary … people have a right to know who spoke to me, and they say, no no, you just say “a spokesman for,” and when I say no, they get really angry. I think the question is then whether there is a way of motivating people to be more transparent. We may have reached this historical moment where there is an actual business model behind being transparent that might supersede the business model of not being transparent, of being opaque. I know I sound very idealistic, and it would take a very courageous editor to enable that to happen, because you, of course, would lose stories. And then we would all be in slow journalism by default.

Box 5.1  Roundtable Participants David Abrahamson: professor of journalism at Northwestern University ­ (USA); former magazine editor and writer Peter Fray:  professor of journalism practice at the University of Technology Sydney; former newspaper publisher, editor, and writer Tim Holmes:  senior lecturer in journalism, media, and culture at Cardiff University (UK); former magazine editor and writer Megan Le Masurier:  senior lecturer in media and communication at the University of Sydney; former magazine editor and writer Sharon Maxwell‐Magnus:  senior lecturer in journalism at the University of

Hertfordshire (UK); former newspaper and magazine editor and writer Jim Shahin:  associate professor of practice at Syracuse University; former magazine writer and editor; current food columnist for The Washington Post Susan Currie Sivek:  associate professor in journalism and media studies at Linfield College (USA); freelance contributor to magazines and websites Miglena Sternadori:  associate professor in journalism and creative media industries at Texas Tech University; former daily and weekly newspaper reporter/writer (Bulgaria/ USA). Kathy Watson: former lecturer and doctoral candidate at the University of ­ Greenwich (UK)



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Notes 1 The now‐defunct Politifact Australia (https://www.politifact.com/truth‐o‐meter/article/2013/ may/12/politifact‐expands‐australia) was established in 2013 as an offshoot of the Politifact project run by the Poynter Institute (https://www.politifact.com). It should not be confused with the Australian political marketing service of the same name (https://politifact.com.au). 2 An organization that already acts as a form of peer review of news organizations worldwide is NewsGuard, created by longtime journalists Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz. NewsGuard can be installed as a browser plugin, providing an immediate assessment of the credibility of each news site a user accesses through that browser: https://www.newsguardtech.com/how‐it‐works. 3 For a discussion of Facebook groups as Metazines see Holmes Chapter 1.

Part II

Magazines as Dynamic Organizations

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Sex, Power, and Organizational Culture in the Glossy Magazine Industry Nicholas Boston

Introduction One of the most impactful and widespread contemporary movements for social change in the workplace  –  at interpersonal, organizational, and industrial levels  –  has been the MeToo movement.1 Enabled by hashtag virality (Wang et  al. 2016), MeToo encourages, supports, and mobilizes women to break silences on incidents of sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and/or sexual violation perpetrated against them. The perpetrators have overwhelmingly been prominent heterosexual men who are alleged to have acted on the strength, and with the assurance, of holding direct or indirect power over the actual careers or career prospects of the women they targeted. In the words of one professional woman of color who came forward with an accusation of rape against her former employer, a media‐industry mogul, “It was a quid pro quo: ‘I have power, you want access, sleep with me – or I’m going to be really mean to you the next day. And there will be consequences’” (Coscarelli and Ryzik 2017). Initially, women reported instances of abuse and identified the abusers by name via social media, using the hashtag #MeToo. As the movement gained momentum, producing tangible results, such as the termination or resignation of some perpetrators from their high‐ranking positions (Almukhtar et al. 2018), more cases began to be reported through the executive and human‐resource channels within organizations. These, too, in turn, were publicized in the mainstream media (Gabler et al. 2017). Some men have also come forward to report incidents of inappropriate advances made toward them by powerful colleagues or figures in their industries (Bernstein 2018). The industry at the epicenter of the MeToo movement has from the beginning been the US media, broadly defined to encompass film, broadcast and print, both entertainment‐ and information‐based. Indeed, the spread of the phenomenon has been dubbed the Weinstein Effect, after film producer Harvey Weinstein, against whom accusations of rape and sexual harassment were first publicly made by a string of actresses prominent in Hollywood and other film industries in October 2017, in articles published in The New York Times (Kantor and Twohey 2017) and The New Yorker (Farrow 2017). Soon thereafter, allegations of sexual misconduct began to surface against executives and elite creative/knowledge workers at the apex of the broadcast and print media industries. In July 2018, roughly eight months after the allegations against Weinstein, triggering the effect named after him, the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI), a New York‐based think tank The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

78 Boston focused on workplace issues, published the report “What #MeToo Means for Corporate America” (Spangler 2018). The report, based on a survey of industry practices across eight ­professions2 conducted by the National Opinion Research Council (NORC) at the University of Chicago, found that sexual misconduct was most widespread in the media industry, where it had been experienced by 41% of women and 22% of men. The survey polled 3213 college‐educated employees aged 21–65 currently working full time in white‐collar occupations in January 2018. Responses were weighted to be representative of the US population. When interviewed about the report’s findings, Ripa Rashid, co‐president of the CTI and one of the lead authors of the study, said: “In media, the power dynamics are more skewed than in other industries” because it “is a very relationship‐driven industry, where rewards in terms of money, visibility, and influence are controlled by a few gatekeepers” (Spangler 2018). In the magazine industry, MeToo has manifested in allegations made against several influential fashion photographers (a lawsuit filed against one of them) who are regular contributors to magazines owned by the two corporations leading the glossy magazine sector, Condé Nast and Hearst (Abelson and Pfeiffer 2018; Bernstein et  al. 2018; Schneier 2018). Anna Wintour, editorial director of Condé Nast, and editor‐in‐chief of Vogue, one of the corporation’s most valuable properties, acted quickly to distance the organization from the accused. In a press release, she stated, “Today, The New York Times reported allegations of sexual misconduct against photographers Mario Testino and Bruce Weber, which they have challenged or denied. … Abuse of power has gone on for too long in so many places – including in Washington, in Hollywood, in broadcasting, journalism, Silicon Valley, and last but not least, in fashion, where many young women and men have spoken up about manipulation and coercion on go‐sees, on shoots, and in other working environments. I’m proud to say that Condé Nast is responding, here and internationally, with a new Code of Conduct, a set of guidelines for outside contributors which has emerged after bracingly honest discussions – with model advocates and agents, stylists, photographers, hair and makeup artists, set designers, and many of our own editors” (Wintour 2018). With these developments, it is crucial that magazine‐industry scholars take seriously the organizational structures and practices at the nexus of sex, sexuality, power, and organizational culture within magazine‐publishing organizations. In this chapter, then, I explore amorous, libidinal, and sexual energies and flows at Condé Nast Publications (CN). The empirical data are drawn from an ethnographic study of the organization conducted in 2008, 2015, and 2018. By “amorous,” I am referring to erotic or romantic attachment or pursuit. Between “sexual” and “libidinal,” often taken as interchangeable in meaning, I draw a distinction based on perspective. The sexual here represents the space of the object, the “who” that is seen or is purposefully on display and sparks desire in another. The libidinal, by contrast, represents arousal and responsiveness experienced by the perceiving subject. Where verbal interaction occurs, libidinal currents are often the result of more than simple physical attraction  –  they can reflect a response to another’s locution, charisma, expressivity, sense of humor, mannerism, and so forth. Like other researchers who have conducted ethnographies from an organizational‐behavior standpoint (Collinson and Collinson 1989; Ouroussoff 2001), I arrived at the conclusion that sexuality is a significant prism of analysis only long after the fieldwork period had concluded. This is surprising to consider as Condé Nast functions so overtly on economies of appearance, desire, and bodily display; it is, in Wacquant’s phraseology, “a body‐centered universe” (Wacquant 1995, p. 66). And this, I believe, to some extent explains why I was blind to the libidinal. While I took note as a participant observer or was told by informants in interview and informal dialog of the libidinal flows in the organisation and the creative industries in which it is embedded, the sheer corporatization of sexual desire, and, furthermore, its co‐articulation with discourses of aspiration, functioned to disguise sexuality as a necessary node of inquiry. As Hearn and Parkin note of ­sexuality in the organization, “first you see it, now you don’t” (1995 [1984], p.15). I will first outline the theoretical framework which grounds this study and will then present the fieldwork material as a smorgasbord of libidinal tastes and flows articulated and observed at Conde Nast.



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Theoretical Framework Theoretical models relevant to this phenomenon that have been deployed in existing literature can be grouped into two categories. I will add two more, which I believe to be relevant and useful. In the first category are theories of capitalist labor extraction based on affect, esthetic, emotion, immateriality, and sexualization, as they are termed. In the second category is work on sexuality in organizations. The categories I will add are, first, the Bourdieuian concepts of bodily capital and erotic capital, and, second, the concept of the gaze as articulated by Lacanian theorists of visual culture. I will show how bodily capital and the gaze articulate mechanisms involving valuation, agency, reception, and instrumentalism that are central to the work relations and organizational culture in the glossy magazine industry with Conde Nast as case study. This constellation of theoretical models, with the exception, of course, of the material I  introduce here, has been taken up by scholars in the sociology of media (Gill 2008; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2008, 2010; Kennedy 2009; Terranova 2000, to name a few) and in organizational behavior and human resource management studies (Williams et  al. 1999; Witz et al. 2003; Warhurst and Nickson 2009). An aim common to these theories is to comprehend those arrangements of labor in and through which the worker’s inner or intimate self is appropriated as a product, where material gain is facilitated through immaterial displays, evocations, or suggestions. I will first outline the key contributions of each of these categories of texts, expressing at the end why I believe bodily capital and the gaze deserve a place alongside them. The first category of literature, immaterial labor, is a theoretical paradigm articulated by Hardt, Lazzarato, Negri, and Virno, a cohort of Italian (and one American) Marxist sociologists. It originated in a series of articles in the 1990s, focused on the burgeoning information and symbolic economies. Writes Lazzarato Immaterial workers are primarily producers of subjectivity. If production today is directly the production of a social relation, then the “raw material” of immaterial labour is subjectivity and the “­ideological” environment in which subjectivity lives and reproduces. The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control (for the production of mercantile relationships) and becomes directly productive, because the goal of our postindustrial society is to construct the consumer/communicator – and to construct it as “active.” Immaterial workers (those who work in advertising, fashion, marketing, television, cybernetics, and so forth) satisfy a demand by the consumer and at the same time establish that demand (my emphasis). (Lazzarato 1996, p. 142)

One can readily see from the passage I have italicized above the allure of this concept for the study of creative and media industries. Hardt and Negri, in their 2000 book Empire, altered the definition of the concept by incorporating references to affective labor, a concept growing out of characteristically Autonomist Marxist articulations of unaccounted for, “backstage,” and support work made to seem commonplace – hence unremunerative. This definition implicitly engaged with an idea of disposition or feeling as work put forward by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild in The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (2003). Hochschild defined a valence of occupational skill and practice, which she termed “emotional labor,” as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” (p. 7). This mode of labor, with its crucial focus on intersubjectivity and self‐presentation, Hochschild observed, is most discernible in the (feminized) service industry and caregiving professions. Some theorists interested in applying these models to studies of modern‐day service‐industry labor within organizations insisted that a key problem remained: the body. The body, as both object and subject, evades interrogation. While highly important to pinpoint the affective turn in capitalist logic, they argued, one cannot, particularly when addressing the creative industries, lose sight entirely of the body, for, simply put, it is actual bodies doing the affecting and ­emoting.

80 Boston This purported lack of attention to bodily display and maneuvering led scholars researching organizations and industries in which appearances matter most to devise a theory of immaterial labor that does not, as one cornerstone text in this effort puts it, “retire the corporeal aspects” (Witz et al. 2003). Esthetic labor thus arose as a conceptual apparatus. While scholars of the cultural industries have shown less of an inclination to pursue the esthetic labor route – which would ultimately lead them to analyses incorporating embodiment that are more robust in their accounting of sexuality (for exceptions, see Entwistle (2002, 2009) and McRobbie (2002)) – researchers in management and organization studies have had little choice but to do so given the proliferation, banalization even (in the form of “demonstration effects,” or, put another way, copycat popularization), of what Witz et al. term the “style labor market.” This market is comprised of: “[…] designer retailers, boutique hotels and style bars, cafes and restaurants, for example” (2003, p. 50), which “since the 1980s […] have sought market differentiation via image, initially through design interiors, but increasingly through making‐up” (du Gay 1996) the embodied disposition of employees. These employees are thus increasingly regarded by employers as an integral  –  literally animate – component of the service produced (p. 34).

Finally, there is sexualized labor. Warhurst and Nickson’s multi‐tiered 2009 article “‘Who’s got the look?’ Emotional, aesthetic and sexualized labour in interactive services” charts the ­analytical evolution of these interrelated theories. “The analysis revisits existing literature on emotional labour, organizational aesthetics and workplace sexuality, noting the common concern in this literature with employee’s appearance or looks” (Warhurst and Nickson 2009, p. 385). Given the persistent presence of the body, they argue, there is an ­inescapable need to more clearly elaborate how embodiment figures in emotional labor. Hence, they introduce the term “sexualized labor,” within which they isolate two poles: sexualization that is “employee‐driven,” such as office romances, and that which is harnessed or routinized by management for profit, as in the case of the restaurant chain Hooters, whose waitresses are required to wear a sexually provocative uniform. Both poles, Warhurst and Nickson write, “can involve consensual and coerced ­sexualization. Bridging the two poles is sexualized work. This work is not inherently sexual but can be imbued with sexuality for a number of reasons” (p. 386). The second category of theoretical literature is, as noted, work on sexuality in organizations. Emerging largely in the 1980s from schools of organization and management studies in Britain, the “sexuality in organization” paradigm sought first and foremost to affirm an acknowledgement in human resource management theory of sexual currents operating in corporations. While remaining attuned to issues such as sexual harassment, which commonly come to mind at the mention of the interface of sexuality and employment, and which, by comparison, were allowed to at least be publicly discussed, scholars were primarily concerned with the ways in which ­organizations construct sexuality. This construction, it was claimed, relied on the strategically deployed assumption of a naturally occurring split between public and private overarching all social relations (Hearn and Parkin 1995 [1984]). Much of the early work builds on the notion of “coming out,” of making sexuality visible against the hegemony that would keep it separate not only from organizations, but public life and interaction broadly. Given the time of production of these texts – the 1980s – this stance is understandable. The academy was in the very nascent stage of its encounter with what would become gay and lesbian studies,3 which emphasized at that time the psychology and sociology of visibility and the various dimensions of the activist project and language of “coming out.” In fact, Hearn and Parkin refer to scholarship on non‐normative sexual identities as “gay liberationism” (p. 56). Foucault had just been published, queer theory was only barely on the horizon, and feminism was addressing other questions. The seminal text here is Gibson Burrell’s (1984) Sex and Organizational Analysis. Burrell traces from the Industrial Revolution onward the weeding out from organized work by



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management of all things sexual on the belief that sexuality hinders production. Simultaneously, Burrell argues, there was a containment of sexuality outside the organized workplace. Not surprisingly, this anxiety, he argues, over time got coded as a taken‐for‐granted notion that sexuality in the organization was not being suppressed but that it simply did not exist, that it was unthinkable. This Burrell calls the “desexualization of labour,” and notes via empirical studies of vastly differing organizational environments, the variety of strategies workers have pursued to resist it. To more extensively theorize a modern‐day relation of sexuality to organization, Hearn and Parkin followed in 1984 with Sex at Work: The Power and Paradox of Organisation Sexuality. They identify four vectors in and through which “organization sexuality” is made manifest. The first vector is “as movement and proximity,” referring, for example, to physical gender segregation in office spaces and the resultant allure of workers to transgress these boundaries, as well as the gaze of employees. This vector overlaps an observation Hochschild made in a 1996 article, “The emotional geography of work and family life” about “an ever‐replenishing courtship pool at work,” which, coupled with “the desegregation of the workplace, and the lengthened working day also provide opportunity for people to meet and develop romantic or quasi‐romantic ties” (1996, p. 27). The second vector Hearn and Parkin propose is “as feelings and emotions.” They note the inevitability of a plethora of desires arising between and among persons “thrown together” in companies and the need for researchers to critically consider the effects of members’ management of these emotions on organizational culture. They also note that the formal response in work organizations to this dynamic is the scripting of official policies framing as “unprofessional” everything from liaisons between employees, particularly of mismatched status, to preferential treatment granted based on such attachments. However, they argue that there exists in organizations “a well‐defined ‘erotic ranking’, in which status and power derive partly from physical attraction between individuals, although this is rarely explicitly acknowledged” (pp. 136–137). Third, there is “organization sexuality as ideology and consciousness,” which primarily means the implicit and explicit promotion, “in managerial assumptions, organisational subcultures, harassments” (Hearn and Parkin 1995 [1984], p. 137) of a normative sexual orientation in the organization – typically patriarchal and heterosexual – crowding out all others. However, the authors add that “heterosexual ideologies can also incorporate within them major contradictions…sexual ideologies vary in the manner of their articulations, in both their explicitness and observability, and in their (self‐)consciousness” (pp. 137, 139). The fourth and final vector, and one which is particularly salient for the present chapter, is “language and imagery,” which deals with the use and output of information and communication ­technologies in the “creation of an illusory sexual environment around any given product” (p. 141). Not surprisingly, Hearn and Parkin cite organizations in the fields of advertising and publishing as sites in which this vector can be most readily discerned. At the time of their writing, they bemoaned the absence of explicit studies of sexuality in organizations. After ­culling from the academic literature, they conclude by acknowledging the epistemic value of “popular and cultural sources,” which, they say, go underutilized by academics. They write: “Topics such as the stereotyping of secretaries, women’s and men’s sexual self‐image, ­clandestine relationships, and sexual fantasy are given more regular attention in these cultural resources than they are as significant organisational processes within the academic literature on organisations” (1995[1984], p. 39). Extending these threads, Hearn, Sheppard, Tancred‐Sheriff and Burrell state in the ­introduction to the 1989 volume of essays The Sexuality of Organization: “The very actions of organizing and being organized may carry a sexual cachet – be, in some senses, sexual” (1989, p. 25). In the project of inserting sexuality into organizational and management discourse – re‐eroticization, as Burrell put it (1992) – what begins to arise through the 1990s is a bifurcation of critical attention paid to the implicit sexual currents in organizations (a theoretical exercise), and the working environments in which sexuality is explicitly tied to production, such

82 Boston as “dating agencies, strip joints, pornographers and fashion houses. These are clear embodiments of the sexual power of the work organisation in action” (Hearn and Parkin 1995, p. 7). Furthermore, greater emphasis came to be placed on distinguishing between sexual harassment and consensual sexuality in the workplace, with a stronger focus on the latter. Asserting in a 1999 article that “the Weberian assumption that organizations progressively shed particularistic and irrational elements as they bureaucratize has deflected attention from love, sex and relationships at work,” Williams, Giuffre, and Dellinger launch an argument that “sexual behaviors must be understood in context, as an interplay between organizational control and individual agency” (1999, p. 73). There is a specific reference made to the magazine publishing industry, and particularly Condé Nast: “Magazines and news organizations frequently commission surveys on workplace flirting, dating, and marriage, but this kind of study has more to do with titillating readers and expanding sales than generating reliable information about work organizations” (1999, p. 78). Further down in the piece, the authors note the utility of popular media for acquiring reports from the front: they reveal that they consulted newspapers and magazines as sources of information to gauge the sexual climate in various workplace settings. But they do not make the subsequent step of exploring media organizations themselves as institutions that produce discourse and visuals in the sense of Hearn and Parkin’s vector of “language and imagery.” Dellinger and Williams (2002) and Dellinger (2004) turn their attentions to sexualization specifically in the popular magazine-publishing industry. Both articles are based on comparative ethnographic work carried out by Dellinger at a men’s pornographic magazine and a feminist women’s magazine. In the former article, the authors “characterize the distinctive workplace cultures in the editorial departments at the two magazines as analogous to the ‘lockerroom’ and the ‘dormroom’, and explain how editors take this culture into account when deciding whether a behavior constitutes sexual harassment” (Dellinger and Williams 2002, p. 242). The latter piece explores the ways in which male workers in a division within these media organizations assumed to be neutral and “rational” – the accounting department – perform their jobs and their masculinity differently at the different publications, which Dellinger (2004) describes as “safe” (men’s magazine) versus “embattled” (women’s). Hancock and Tyler (2004), meanwhile, use lifestyle magazines to make the claim that management discourses of efficiency and effectiveness infiltrate domestic sexual life through the circulation of consumer print media. What has not been addressed in the existing literature is how the exercise of managerial power is inflected with sexual desire or amorous sentiment, as the informant’s narrative that opened this chapter suggests. Here, I believe, it could be understood that the worker who is the object of desire is in possession of what Wacquant terms bodily capital, of which he or she may be, variously, conscious, unaware, or purposefully endeavoring to cultivate. At its core, this concept is helpful here, although there is a problem of intentionality. In CN, bodily capital functions as a currency that individuals acquire and trade in private transactions that are often not anticipated. The transactions unfold from haphazard points of contact as in Hearn and Parkin’s notion of people being “thrown together” in organizations. However, overarching these transactions is an esthetic economy of signs on and against which individuals can and do trade – the “abstract” capital of which Wacquant speaks.

Digitizing Desire The most central point of libidinal flows at Condé Nast is the production of editorial and what I term digitorial (i.e. Internet‐based production that converges with legacy print‐based production under the same magazine brand) content itself. There is a constant effort to imbue this content, whether textual or visual, with as much sensual appeal as possible, the primary register of which is sexual. This is neither new nor unusual in the glossy magazine world, as many scholars have noted (Crewe 2004; Gough‐Yates 2002; Jackson et al. 2001). Thus far, however,



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Figure 6.1  An instructional sketch to the coding and production team at Style.com emphasizes references to bodily attributes in the layout of a web page.

no attention has been paid to the vicissitudes and technical complications of this practice in the magazine world’s relationship with digitality. Figure 6.1 is a photograph I took during one Fashion Week of a sketch made by the managing editor at Style.com to describe to members of the coding and production team what a particular webpage was to look like. The focus on bodily attributes and physicality is inescapable. Written at the top of the sheet in capital letters are the words “hair,” “skin,” “makeup,” “eyes,” beside which is the template for the layout of the page. I was not myself present for the meeting, but was in a meeting with the same editor in the room later that day, which is where I saw it and inquired about it. The editor said: Another thing about web journalism is that you have to program, you have to build, all these things, and it takes a long time. So, we have a huge product backlog. You could say what our product team is going to be working on for the next two years, probably. So, that’s one of the frustrations of web journalism is that you can do really sexy things, but it takes quite a long time. (interview)

The editors, responsible for conceptualizing what that “sexiness” was to look like on webpages, perpetually engaged in discussions with engineers about the esthetic/technical bind of photo resolution, making sure the depth of appeal in print got effectively transposed online and onto the mobile app. There was a division of sensibilities and professional habitus in the workforce at Style.com into two groupings that I refer to as glitterati (the creative workforce) and digerati (the technical and “rational” workforce). Here, this split became more evident as both, under the same team, editorial, came to communicate to the product development team, or coders, the key elements the latter were to technically develop.

84 Boston In this particular meeting, which included another editorial staff member and two freelancers like myself, the editor spoke passionately about the importance of building out image navigation tools, such as slide shows, and finding ways to produce captivating advertisements. And here, sex as consumerist logic got articulated: One thing we want to do is get closer to that visual pop of print. Like, you know, it’s a cliché, but people read the ads. And advertising is sex. That’s all it is. In fashion, at least. Who was it that said, “Oh, you know, I’m the anti‐fashion photographer because, like, I don’t shoot models and make them all super orgasmic looking…”

The more junior editor present called out, “Juergen Teller,” to which the editor speaking ­nodded in agreement, almost with annoyance, and kept on talking. No, houses and campaigns just do sex differently! Does everyone respond to stimuli the same way? No! And people pay a lot of money for these ads. If we could create an experience that was a little bit closer to giving this kind of pop, I mean advertisers would like that, but readers would like it, too.

Digitizing Sexual Play At the time of my fieldwork, Details magazine4 had been given the mandate by CN directors to develop a branded website to which online traffic would be directed from the existing men.style. com, formerly the shared destination for GQ and Details readers. In April 2009, I visited Details’ editor‐in‐chief, Daniel Peres, to discuss this and other challenges facing his publication. In Peres’s office, the shelves were practically bare, except for awards he and the magazine had earned over the years, and a modest selection of books, one of which was, conspicuously, Castration: An Abbreviated History of Western Manhood. Throughout our conversation, Peres made clear that the magazine’s ethos was to “play” on sexuality, to be blatant but not vulgar, voyeuristic yet non‐objectifying, and somehow normalizing in its coverage or articulation of sexualities. The publication regularly ran stories about stigmatized sexual practices, tastes, or subjectivities, such as partner swapping, men negotiating heterosexual anal intercourse, and “the fag stag”: a heterosexual man who has a disproportionate number of gay male friends. These narratives engaged with political debate on the issues only so far as to escape being lumped in with the vulgarity of the lad magazines. The greater tone of the text tended to oscillate from playfulness, to confession, to a kind of haughty recklessness. The publication reminded its readers that, owing to their station in life, income bracket, and quality of education, they were insulated from harm or disgrace, and were entitled to indulge in transgressive behavior at low risk. “It’s a phase you’re going through, so why not enjoy it?” This was the formula that had distinguished the magazine’s raison d’etre from that of GQ within the Condé Nast empire. Peres articulated it this way: We need to stick with what we know best and that is tapping into the male psyche and the, sort of, great many insecurities of men. And sexuality is certainly a big part of that … but not the only part. We have talked about launching things online that are very related to the way we approach sexuality and the present‐day relationship between gay and straight, the way we approach that in the magazine. We’re really trying to figure out how to harness that and have it have a strong appeal online.

The latest issue of the magazine to be published at the time featured a story about a pre‐­ operative transgender person, and Peres invoked the piece. “That guy has a girlfriend,” he  said. It was his example of the kind of editorial position‐taking the magazine uses to attract  its readers, who are male, economically advantaged, fashionably post‐sexual, and



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slightly left‐of‐center professionals. It had taken a while to hit upon a formula that demonstrated success in print; now, Peres was obliged to figure out how to extend this reach to the digital platform. The conceptualization of Details.com was the latest episode in the magazine’s long history of editorial self‐reinvention along a landscape of sexual taste-making overlaying consumerism. The Pulitzer‐Prize‐winning author Susan Faludi outlines Details magazine’s multiple corporate and workforce changes in her 1999 book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. Paying close attention to the work biographies of editors and the influence of their tenure on organizational culture, she traces the magazine’s origins in the 1980s as an independent, underground fanzine chronicling New York nightlife with a strong infusion of gay content, to being bought and ­converted into a resolutely heterosexual men’s magazine by Condé Nast, to then being multiply reincarnated by CN into a publication that cast gender fluidity into a grab bag, which, Faludi argues, doubled as a shopping bag: If drag queens had used “style” to challenge an oppressive society, Details was using it to reassure men that they needn’t challenge society just because it had put their expectations on the economic and social skids, that wearing the trappings of a life denied them could be satisfaction enough. Moreover, Details suggested that its readers use the drag ethic not to question ­oppressive sex roles but to succumb to a role as oppressive as the gender yoke: that of consumer. The original Details had employed a gay sensibility to mock, play with, or dismiss socially or corporately endorsed styles. But certain style‐conscious corporations and their allied ad agencies soon realized that such a sensibility, stripped of its political content, could be a Trojan horse. From its belly might come the images that would turn a nation of young men into colonies of slavish male shoppers (Faludi 1999, p. 516).

Bodily Capital […]I was a 24 year‐old gay boy and I was … I look back at pictures of myself and I’m like, “Uh, I was pretty cute”. And [editor in chief] clearly had a thing for me. And I could tell. The boss had a crush on the 24‐year‐old … I’m saying that I think that’s why I got access to the boss and mentored by a person. He really mentored me and he taught me how to write. He taught me how to be a good writer. He really did, he really pulled me aside and mentored me. In meetings in his office he would hand pick stories for me. I mean, I got this incredible greased, uh, it was like Chutes and Ladders: somehow, I skipped several steps because [editor in chief] wanted me to. All I know is that I felt like I was special and I got special treatment and it was really life‐changing for me. So that when [I approached other editors for assignments], I knew how to write a cover story, because [editor in chief] taught me how to so that I could then pitch one and I had clips to back it up because I got mentored by a man who seemed to have a thing for me. I’ve never said that out loud before, really, truly, to anyone besides my close friends. But, I think, in spirit, it answers a question. It answers the question of access, which is that it is often about proximity that some people don’t seem to be able to get access, while a few do. The important thing is, there seems to be lots of different kinds of proximity behind that. Anyway, that’s my sort of … anyway, now I’m rambling.

The above quote is taken from a formal, recorded interview I conducted with a senior staff writer at one of CN’s most prestigious magazines. The interviewee (whom I’d never met before and had approached on Facebook for an interview) and I became very comfortable in each other’s company, and he expressed himself freely. It was out of this sense of ease that he made the above revelation. I had asked him to describe his work biography. What had prepared him for a career in magazine journalism? The interviewee started out by talking about personal ambition and how he’d worked hard to master journalistic skills. He then slipped into proposing a theory of how interplays between these calculated steps and a random, unanticipated attraction a powerful editor expressed toward him figured decisively in his career trajectory.

86 Boston What is striking about the informant’s statement, in some senses more than the actual point he is making about libidinal energy in the exercise of managerial power, is his move to downplay his experience: “anyway, now I’m rambling,” he says self‐deprecatingly. This statement is indicative of the pressures to be “taken seriously” in corporate milieus where “seriousness” necessarily precludes conduct of a sexual or amorous complexion, even as, paradoxically, such conduct is everywhere present, in shades both coercive and consensual: NB:  Did you have an affair with [editor in chief]? Writer:  No. I really, really, really … it took all of my strength. (Laughs and looks away.) Oh my God, you don’t even know how close it came to, like, really screwing it up. Because he would get drunk and sometimes at a nightclub or at a party he would totally put the moves on me. Anyway, but I, but that – whoo!

Yet, for researchers, as we saw from the literature, the libidinal is still not regarded as a legitimate enough prism through which to analyze organizational relations. As Brewis and Linstead (2000) note in the book Sex, Work and Sex Work: Eroticizing Organization, sex is subject to rejection “in the discursive construction of organizing because it is sexual, and hence illegitimate” (p. 1). Hearn and Parkin, pioneers in the study of sexuality in organizations, noted in their first text on the subject that “… it would be mistaken to say that we chose this area of research: it was the one most difficult to avoid. The issues studied are there, like it or not; they do not vanish through not being studied” (1995 [1984], p. xi.). Sexuality, as some feminist, race, and queer theorists have long noted, is imbricated with race and class, the three not easily disentangled for the purposes of neat categorical analysis (Butler 1993; Collins 1990; Hall 1997; Spivak 1988, to name a few). However, not much research ­carried out on organizations in the Global North has taken such lessons on board. I have endeavored in the analysis of libidinal flows at CN to use my participant observation, wherever possible, to corroborate, challenge, or further complexify assertions made and stories told to me by my informants. But this comparative framework is admittedly a precarious one, dependent to some degree on chance, and therefore resisting operationalization. Simply put, if an informant relays their impression to me that Manager X is sexually drawn to blonds and privileges them in the workplace, how is that impression to be tested and converted in the writing‐up process into knowledge of the subject? To my interviewee’s comment that he was “rambling,” I responded: NB: No, no, you’re not rambling at all. I mean, so much of this stuff is so mystified, but at the same time not, and so it’s very much like the story that you just told. It’s very much like an open secret. It’s kind of like everybody knows how it goes, but it’s not really talked about through officialdom. I mean, how do you then say: “Ok, well, how does HR function?” You know, I could go to Condé Nast tomorrow and sit down with an HR director, and she is, of course, going to present all these EEOC5 policies about hiring and so on and so forth but that’s not really how it happens. I mean, you’ve got HR and then you’ve also got who’s actually on the masthead, who is going to express their opinions about who they want or prefer to have present in their midst.

The informant’s response to this statement produced an ever‐more intriguing conceptual shift. Writer: I was just going to say that [editor in chief] and a lot of people like him – there’s a lot of people like him out in the magazine world – just seem really ill at ease with the whole, with black culture. I just sense that they’re totally ill at ease around black folks. I think if I had been a black guy, he probably wouldn’t have been attracted to me. That’s just me guessing that [editor in chief] doesn’t have a thing for… I don’t know, maybe.

Another example of the centrality of bodily capital at CN became evident to me when the editor with whom I was working at Style.com went off on maternity leave. She ended up being



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permanently replaced by the woman who was substituting for her. I learned of the transition through a former Style.com employee whom I encountered by chance in a restaurant. He took the opportunity to fill me in on the back story on the new editor. Her name was respected in fashion journalism (I, myself, was previously familiar with her byline), and her editorial talent had never been questioned. But, the informant told me, she was thought of as lacking in social skills. She was considered humorless as a colleague and exacting as a manager whenever she had played editor in the various posts she had held at respected industry publications. Her nickname, a homophone of her actual name, was “Ana Agony.”6 In the informant’s appraisal (which followed a rather clichéd, some might argue, sexist, ­formulation) the replacement was a mass of contradictions: she was physically beautiful but emotionally dead; talented and creative in her own writing, yet deficient in the emotional intelligence to stop herself from impairing other writers’ creativity by making petty demands as an editor. The informant’s conclusion: Ana had been an ugly duckling. “Ana realized at some point in her adult life that she was beautiful,” the informant said (field notes, February 2009), based on some confession he claimed to have once received from Ana herself. She had become conscious of possessing bodily capital but was unskilled at deploying it. The private Ana, the one you would experience in her beautiful prose and astute analysis was the humanistic Ana, the one, alienated by plain looks, had turned inward, self‐caring (Foucault in Martin et al., 1988) and creative, whilst the public Ana, the one who was cold and uncharitable, was the one who, armed with the weapon of beauty, lashed back at her past tormentors in a world where beauty could quite ­possibly double as armor.

Consensual Sex Patterns How do intimate relationships figure, if at all, into achieving and maintaining organizational power? This is a delicate and difficult question to address. However, there are indications. On one of my first fieldwork visits – to interview the stylist and editor Simon Foxton at his office off Hanover Square in London in the summer of 2008 – the topic of industry couples arose. “I’m working with Ronnie Cooke Newhouse right now on a project for Topshop,” he said, noting how demanding the American expatriate creative director of Topshop, whom I had never heard of at that point, was. Following the requisite praise spoken of Cooke Newhouse’s professionalism and creative vision, Foxton mentioned her marital status: “And she’s the wife of Jonathan Newhouse” (interview July 2008), the chairman of CN’s international editions, including British Vogue. Foxton regarded and described the two as a “power couple” in the fashion industry: Cooke Newhouse presiding over a key jurisdiction in the retail and marketing sector; her husband controlling the most desirable consumer media platform in the publishing sector. Williams, Giuffre, and Dellinger (1999) note that “research on marriage patterns in particular occupations is also a potential source of information on the scope of consensual sexual behavior” in organizations. It also reveals how these consensual sexual patterns are deeply intertwined with various kinds of power, including organizational power. Journalist David Brooks recognized this association in noting the sociocultural significance of The New York Times’ wedding announcements: “Unabashedly elitist, secretive, and totally honest, the ‘mergers and acquisitions page’ (as some of its devotees call it) has always provided an accurate look at … a chunk of the American ruling class” (Brooks 2001, p. 14). Surveying The New York Times Weddings and Engagements for Condé Nast employees is revelatory. I searched the online database for announcements using the keywords “Conde” and “Nast.” The results, in the hundreds, stretch back decades and include announcements for some of the company’s now quite influential editors, publishers, and members of the Newhouse family, including Jonathan Newhouse and Ronnie Cooke in 1995. While I did not undertake a close and systematic reading of these announcements, I identify in them two readily discernible

88 Boston trends that serve to further illuminate patterns of both inter‐ and intra‐organizational ­intimacies between employees at Condé Nast, as individuals and as members of social/ occupational groupings. First, there are numerous examples of employees marrying within the company, across publications and divisions. One example of this that took place during my fieldwork period was the 26 September 2009 nuptials of Alexandra Jordan and Joshua Stinchcomb. Ms. Jordan, 26, will keep her name. She is studying for a master’s degree in psychology at Columbia Teachers College. Until July, she was the associate manager of brand development in the marketing department of Vanity Fair, a Condé Nast magazine. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Stinchcomb, 36, is the executive director of the digital business group at Condé Nast, where he oversees advertising sales for its male‐oriented Web sites. He graduated from Middlebury College and received an M.B.A. from New York University. (http://NTimes.com retrieved)

Another example: the 22 October 2010 union of Amanda Novak and Edward Smith V. The bride and bridegroom work in New York in advertising sales for Condé Nast publications. She is the director for American fashion sales with Vogue; he is a sales director for financial and energy companies with The New Yorker. (http://NYTimes.com retrieved)

Couplings such as these are to be expected at Condé Nast, a corporation populated by t­ housands of employees handling a multitude of tasks. Nevertheless, the announcement of these workplace romances’ outcome in marriage, furthermore that they are offered to the public as social accomplishments in The New York Times, underscores the theoretical literature’s assertions that, contrary to generic organizational discourse and sometimes stringent corporate policy, libidinal flows, multiply manifested, are very much standard within organizations. There are also, most directly, other cultural industries in the interlocking media and universe. Take, for instance, film and television, and consider Daniel Peres and his wife, the actress Sarah Wynter. Wynter has graced the covers of both American non‐Condé Nast magazines and international editions of Condé Nast publications in her native Australia. When she and Peres wed in Australia in 2005, the wedding planning company that handled the reception and which has arranged wedding events for several high‐profile Australian actors and performers enjoying international recognition, such as Hugh Jackman and Dannii Minogue, announced, “When Australian actress Sarah Wynter married Details magazine editor, New Yorker Dan Peres, two cultures became one. It was the perfect combination of Sarah’s beauty and style and Dan’s attention to detail” (Trumpet Events 2005). Intimate relationships can also play a role in hiring practices and worker mobility. In an interview I conducted with Henry Finder, editorial director of The New Yorker, he sagely acknowledged how his career trajectory and personal romantic relationship had been intertwined. Early into the interview, Finder brought up the name of his partner of two decades, the then Princeton philosopher K. Anthony Appiah. Finder, before joining The New Yorker, had been an editor at Transition, a journal based in the African-American Studies department at Harvard University, an institution where Appiah had once taught. NB:  How did that transition to Transition take place? Was it an interest on your part in looking at a different set of ideas, or was it a happenstance sort of thing? HF:  Yeah, it was kind of happenstance. I needed a job, I guess. And, uh, it was, uhm, my partner is Anglo‐Ghanaian and, you know, so there was some interest in that area and Skip was, uhm – we are his kids’ godparents of theirs that sort of social nexus….



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NB:  You’re godparents of Skip Gates’ kids7? HF:  Yes, via my partner, Appiah. And, it’s just that’s the world that I was in. That’s where the, sort of, institutional support would come from.

Further Research It is remarkable to note the extent to which sex and sexuality are under‐researched as constitutive and normative categories in the organizational cultures of the glossy magazine sector of the media industries. This chapter has offered insight into interrelations of sex, power, and organizational culture, by first reviewing the (modest) extant literature addressing sexuality in the organization, followed by empirical findings from an ethnographic study of a leading global corporation producing glossy magazines, Condé Nast, Inc. By focusing attention on magazine production practices, as opposed to representations found in magazine artifacts, the chapter positions itself epistemologically as a scholarly acknowledgement of organizational cultures and logics that figure in the backdrop of the MeToo movement. Further research is required to explore the extent to which sex and power, or at least agency, are imbricated in work environments within the glossy magazine industry.

Notes 1 For an explanation of social movements in the sense in which I use the term here, see “Introduction: The Field of Social Movement Studies,” by Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani in The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements. 2 People who have been sexually harassed by a colleague, by industry. 3 The City University of New York instituted the first gay and lesbian studies program in the world in 1986. 4 Details magazine folded in 2015. As of the time of publication of this volume, the website www.details. com directs readers to www.gq.com. 5 The EEOC is the US Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, a federal agency that acts to enforce laws against discrimination in the workplace. 6 This is a pseudonym that preserves the meaning in the actual nickname. 7 Henry Louis “Skip” Gates is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

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7

Slow Magazines The New Indies in Print Megan Le Masurier

Introduction If you walk into WH Smiths or Barnes and Noble, magazines will be shelved under familiar ­categories: women, men, travel, food, people, homes (shelter), gardens, sport, fashion, craft, wellbeing, lifestyle, nature, news/current affairs, politics, and “special interest.” Such stores ­provide a mapping of a generally mainstream interpretation of our public and private lives, ­featuring magazines in which the editorial and design approaches tend to be tradition‐bound and conservative and the circulation is generally in decline. Now, imagine an alternative magazine store, where small‐scale, beautifully designed print magazines subvert, critique, and sometimes utterly confound these mainstream categories by using the magazine format to provide alternative representations of the ways we live, think, and create. These shops do exist in the “creative cities” of (mainly) the West: Magculture (London), Magalleria (Bath), Papersmiths (Bristol), Under the Cover (Lisbon), Athenaeum (Amsterdam), Coffee Table Mags (Hamburg), Magnation (Melbourne, Auckland), Beautiful Pages (Sydney), Do You Read Me? (Berlin), and Bouwerie Magazines (New York), to name a few. The way stores categorize alternative magazines tends to be ad hoc. Here you might find Flaneur (Berlin), a travel magazine whose every issue is based on a single street; Apartamento (Barcelona), a biannual interiors magazine about how people really live and the stories they have to tell; Riposte (London), a women’s magazine with no fashion, no beauty, and no relationship advice – just feminist‐infused journalism about new ideas and interesting women; Vestoj (Paris), a thematic magazine about fashion, with very few visuals and much analysis; Fathers (Warsaw), a men’s magazine about the experiences of fatherhood; Sirene (Milan), about the ocean in all its aspects, printed on paper made from recycled algae; MacGuffin (Amsterdam), a magazine about one object (such as rope or sinks) per issue; Off Screen (Melbourne), about the human side of technology; Anxy (San Francisco/Berlin), about mental health as it is experienced; or Benji Knewman (Riga), a difficult‐to‐define magazine that takes the reader on a search for the perfect day through the experiences of its fictional editor Benji. As the production of small‐scale alternative magazines has escalated over the past 15 years or so, these magazines have come to be known as indies. Other terms were floated in the early twenty‐first century as some commentators began to notice the increase in the making of printed

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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magazines by a small group of collaborators operating outside of mainstream magazine ­publishing – hyzines (Andersson 2002), microzines (Leslie 2003), and style magazines (Renard 2006), among others. Since then, “indie” or “independent” has become the preferred term used by the makers, the stores, distributors, trade publications (Jamieson 2015; Leslie 2013, 2016), and annual conferences such as Indiecon (Hamburg) and The Modern Magazine (London). The aim of this chapter is to explain the possibly surprising rise in the number of indie magazines being made and read in the digital twenty‐first century, a time when print was meant to be dying and screens were to take over our working and personal lives. Just as in book publishing and in the mainstream industry of “magazine media,” print has proved to be resilient, if part of a broader media ecology where digital and print co‐exist. The extent of the indie magazine phenomenon is not really quantifiable. There are no figures to be had. The indies escape auditing organizations whose focus is mainstream titles. And as new indie titles are launched, other titles cease publication. Some, such as Kasino A4 (Helsinki 2005–2009), burn brightly, then die. Others, such as The Gentlewoman (London, 2010) or  Kinfolk (Portland, now Copenhagen, 2011) develop sustainable business models and ­profitability to rival niche titles in the mainstream. Steve Watson, who runs the indie magazine distributor Stack (London), offers a guesstimate of “not tens of thousands” of titles globally. “Anecdotally, I will tell you we have never had as many independent magazines, never seen as many new launches; it’s on fire. But I can’t point anyone toward any useful numbers because of the nature of the magazines” (Watson 2016a). How might we explain this phenomenon? Very little scholarly literature exists about the indie magazines in print (Le Masurier 2012; Hamilton 2013; Oakes 2009). This chapter will explore the rise of the indies in terms of materiality, temporality, creativity, neoliberalism, and utopia. It will draw on recent scholarly literature in these areas and on interviews conducted with indie makers by the author. The “research archive” is the author’s personal collection, as no global public collection exists, and has evolved over the past 10 years via purchases at specialist magazine stores and online ordering via the websites for individual titles. First, though, an attempt at definition.

What Is an Indie Magazine? In a sense, there have always been independent magazines. One of the first magazines in Britain, the Gentleman’s Magazine, was independently made by its editor Edward Cave in 1741 (Holmes and Nice 2012). In America, the first magazines were similarly independent, such as Noah Webster’s American Magazine of 1788 (Gardner 2012). Over the centuries there have been any number of independently produced magazines and periodicals, from literary reviews; late‐nineteenth‐century Russian samizdats; the art magazines of futurism, dada, and surrealism; the little magazines of literary modernism; the graphic‐design magazines such as Émigré; the influential British independent style magazines of the 1980s and 1990s, The Face, Arena, i‐D, Blitz, Dazed & Confused; to the eccentric shelter magazine from New York, Nest (1997–2004). The phenomenon I am discussing here is different. Although many indie makers talk of inspiration being drawn from the late‐twentieth‐century British style magazines mentioned above, the current production of indie magazines has appeared in a different context: as a reaction against the dominance and speed of digital communication technologies in working and everyday lives, and the predictability, limitations, and compromises of mainstream magazines. The printed magazine acquires another aura and meaning in the twenty‐first century, one that the term “indie” seeks to capture. Having said that, it is important to remember that “indie” is a fluid term. Not every indie magazine adheres to the same characteristics. As a result, the question “what is indie?” preoccupies those involved in the making, selling, distributing, and reading, perhaps, of indie

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magazines. At the annual conference for indie magazine makers, Indiecon, held in Hamburg, these are some of the answers from 2016 (http://www.indienet.de/#tab‐conference): ●●

●● ●● ●●

“Real Indie for me is non‐capitalistic. Not focused on money, but spirit.” (Joachim Baldauf, Vorn Magazin, Munich) “Making meaning rather than money.” (Sam Cooney, The Lifted Brow, Melbourne) “Inventing your own universe and rules.” (Agnese Kleina, Benji Knewman, Riga) “Indie is creating alternative public spheres.” (Sebastian Pranz, Froh!, Cologne) And from 2017 (http://www.indiefirst.de):

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“Indie means finding your motivation in challenging the status quo.” (Ryan Fitzgibbon, Hello Mr., New York) “Indie is disconnecting from the system to find freedom.” (Ibrahim Nehme, The Outpost, Beirut). “Indie is a carte blanche for radical creativity, for making magazines that verge on art. It means trying out subject matters and storytelling that readers didn’t even know they were interested in. It means forging audiences rather than following them.” (Kati Krause, Anxy, San Francisco/Berlin). “Being independent means highlighting stories and showing perspectives that are not bound to financial interests or sensationalist requirements.” (Justinien Tribillon and Isabel Seiffert, Migrant Journal, London/Paris)

We get a sense here that to make an indie magazine is to stake a place outside the structure of “big” corporate media organizations, to critique mainstream magazine approaches to their subject, to offer quite different interpretations of what a magazine can be about, and to be in complete control of content and creativity – where an original vision of editorial and design is primary and making money is secondary. For Watson, the most convincing answer is simple: “the makers are the chiefs. The people who are financially responsible for the magazine are also involved in the editing, writing, designing…” (Watson 2016a). Within the scholarship about indie cultural production, the answers are not dissimilar. Perhaps the most persuasive and rigorous definition of independent media comes from James Bennett (2015). He maps independent media as operating across several sites: industrial, formal, rhetorical, and sociopolitical. Independent media operate with “freedom from (excessive) state regulation or commercial imperatives”; they “mobilise an ensemble of particular aesthetic and taste codes… challenging, innovative, radical…” with an emphasis on authenticity. In explaining the sociopolitical site, Bennett notes that independent media provide a space for critique, but because they are “not entirely free from the market they are not always radically political… unlike alternative media” (Bennett 2015, p. 3). This is a useful distinction. The term “alternative media” is fraught  –  Atton and Hamilton call it “infuriatingly vague” (Atton and Hamilton 2008, p. 1) – and has traditionally been used to describe media that exist in opposition to mainstream corporate practice and structures. But “alternative media” also carries an activist political connotation. “In contrast to independent media, alternative media tend to be leftist, if not socialist, in orientation and predominantly take the form of initiatives in journalism or informing and mobilizing a political public” (Bennett 2015, p. 12). While some scholars of alternative media would not agree with the narrowness of this definition (see Bailey et al. 2008), for my purposes here maintaining a distinction between indie and alternative media will allow for a focus on indie magazines, rather than alternative magazines, as an object of study. It is also important to distinguish between DIY zines and the indies. Zines are non‐ professional, not made for profit, often hand‐drawn, photocopied or Riso‐ed, with very small circulation, and tend not to be sold in the magazine stores described above (Duncombe 1997).



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They also tend to take the self as their subject matter rather than look outward to society and culture (Atton 2002, pp. 54–55). David Hesmondhalgh describes the roots of the term indie – a shortening of independent – in mid‐1980s music in Britain: “… no music genre had ever before taken its name from the form of industrial organisation behind it” (Hesmondhalgh 1999, p. 35). So, too, indie magazines are partly defined by their mode of organization – “the makers are the chiefs” – and in this relationship between culture and commerce, culture comes first, but commerce still matters. Indie music was “based on new relationships between commerce and culture” (p. 35), an observation that includes a recognition that to be completely autonomous from commerce is not really possible – for indie music, film, or magazines. Most makers would say they are not primarily driven by the desire for profit. And yet these magazines are made for sale, indeed at quite a steep price, well above most mainstream magazines. Most makers want to earn enough money from the sale of their magazines (and other related revenue streams) to continue to the next issue, and some have dreams of becoming financially sustainable businesses in the longer term. As Heath and Potter convincingly argue, this apparent paradox or contradiction between the need to sell and the ideal of creating an alternative to mainstream media is not really a contradiction at all in a capitalist consumer economy (Heath and Potter 2004). Apart from making magazines to be given away for free, a model that new indie magazine Broccoli (Portland, 2017–) (“A magazine created by and for women who love cannabis”) is experimenting with, funded by brand partnerships, or adopting a DIY zine‐like bartering model, which no indie magazine I know of has tried, there is no escape from the overarching context of consumer capitalism in which these magazines are made and sold. This unforgiving setting forces them to be funded in a variety of ways – from Kickstarter campaigns to high cover price to paid (and carefully chosen) advertising, brand partnerships, events, sale of merchandize, and even grants from cultural organizations. In his study of indie film, Geoff King argues that to define indie production in terms of its industrial organization alone is too literal and limiting. “Indie suggests a particular sensibility or set of sensibilities” (King 2014, p. 2) with “authenticity” as a vital marker of indie status (p. 11). Michael Newman points to another meaning: “… ‘indie’ has become a buzzword, a term whose meanings – alternative, hip, edgy, uncompromising – far exceed the literal designation of media products that are made independently of major firms” (Newman 2009, p. 16). For Jefferson Hack, the co‐founder of Dazed & Confused (now Dazed) (1991–, London): The independent way is a way of keeping the magic alive, because as soon as publishing becomes only in the aid of commerce and power, then creativity and decision‐making becomes about the formulas of success and not invention. The process becomes a means to an end. (Verderi and Pryor 2016, p. 7)

Dazed, an example of extraordinary independent magazine media success, is no longer just a print magazine. Dazed Media, while classified as independent in the sense that it is still owned by Hack and Rankin, is a company that produces other magazines (Another, Another Man, Hunger), as well as owning Dazeddigital.com and Dazed Studio, which creates luxury and lifestyle brand campaigns. If we hold to the definition that “the makers are the chiefs,” we will find that it falls apart in the face of a multimedia empire like Dazed or, indeed, Monocle or Vice media, where the chiefs cannot possibly be involved in all the making. While these media brands would claim to be independent, it is difficult to claim them as “indie.” These magazines have expanded beyond the characteristics that the indie makers identify with and are almost part of the mainstream, in organizational structure if not in attitude. Indie culture, writes Newman in his discussion of indie film, “derives its identity from ­challenging the mainstream. This challenge is figured primarily from an economic distinction between modes of production. ‘Indie’ connotes small‐scale, personal, artistic, and creative; ‘mainstream’ implies a large‐scale, commercial media industry that values money more than art” (Newman 2009, p. 16). Jeremy Leslie also argues that the term “independent” defines “a

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clear distinction from the mass, mainstream magazine market” (2015, p. 11). Mainstream is an amorphous term, used loosely, but remains a statement about what indies intend not to be. Bailey, Baarts, and Carpentier define mainstream media as having the following characteristics: large‐scale and directed toward homogeneous audiences; state‐owned or commercial organizations; hierarchically structured and staffed by professionals; and carriers of dominant discourses and representations (2008, p. 18). Independent or alternative media are supposed to be the opposite of this. In her study of indie music, Empire of Dirt, Wendy Fonarow states that “defining a category like indie is not only problematic for scholars who seek to understand culture; it is also difficult for community members themselves” (Fornarow 2006, p. 25). With magazines, however, “community” is a curious concept. The consumption is not like the experience of a music concert, as reading is done privately. Tim Holmes, in his “General Theory of Magazines,” states that “magazines foster community‐like interactions between themselves and their readers, and among readers” and that “magazines develop a bond of trust with their readers” (Holmes and Nice 2012, p. 7). Increasingly, in mainstream magazines this previously organic or imaginative connection has developed into IRL (in real life) events. So, too, with the indies. The makers connect with each other through initiatives of the indie magazine stores, who host launches and talk‐based events  –  such as Jeremy Leslie’s annual Modern Magazine conference in London, the distributor Stack’s indie magazine awards, the U Symposium run by Singapore indie magazine Underscore in 2015 and 2016, or the annual Indiecon in Hamburg (2014–) organized by indie magazine enthusiasts and makers. The original symposium for independent magazines was Colophon, held in Luxembourg in 2007 and 2009. Mike Koedinger, Andrew Losowsky, and Jeremy Leslie were the founders, which led to two books, We Love Magazines and We Make Magazines; highly visual celebrations of early‐ twenty‐first‐century indie publishing. In Bristol, a small haven for indie magazine publishing, BIP (Bristol independent publishers) “banded together to help showcase the wonderful things happening in Bristol publishing, and to prove that some of the best UK magazines aren’t coming out of multi‐national print houses – but small studio spaces, back rooms and coffee shops” (http://wearebip.co.uk). The magazines – Pressing Matters, Lionheart, Lagom, Hop and Barley, Ernest, Cereal, Boneshaker, Another Escape, and Elbow Grease – are a loose collective who provide support and information for each other and are bolstered by the local Bristol indie magazine shop Papersmiths and by Bath’s Magalleria. This kind of community support, providing detailed information to each other about ­production and distribution, is illustrative of the non‐competitive nature of indie magazines. Kai Brach, for example, the founder of Offscreen (Melbourne), has a blog section of the Offscreen website containing “indie publishing field notes” with tips and advice to build a “sustainable indie publishing brand” (https://www.offscreenmag.com/blog). Brach has also established a Facebook group for indie publishers to share experiences and ask questions. One of the early indie makers, Danny Miller, who founded the film magazine Little White Lies in 2005 and now runs the London creative agency Human After All, produced The Publishing Playbook, a free Google docs guide to indie publishing distilling all he had learnt. This sense of non‐competitive collaboration and community is unheard of in mainstream magazine media. As Danielle Pender, founder of Riposte said: “I think there is a real community and people are really generous in sharing distribution contacts or advice, ways of making money… Personally, no good comes from being in competition or wishing ill of someone who’s doing something similar” (Pender 2016). The makers themselves build community with their readers by hosting launch parties, events, dinners, and workshops that often function as revenue‐building streams but also succeed in drawing readers out from the privacy of their reading. The story of Accent (London) is indicative. Before Accent appeared as a biannual print magazine in 2016, founders Lucy Nurnberg and Lydia Garnett started a website in 2011 exploring the theme of the magazine: “documenting



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lives outside the ordinary, people who live their lives to the full, they do not really listen to the rules, everyday heroes” (Nurnberg 2017). The pair then developed events – exhibitions, gigs, film screenings, parties, and talks. “We really built our audience and made a bit of a splash. The events were our way of having a presence in the world even though there wasn’t anything [print magazine] to see,” said Nurnberg. In the early years of Kinfolk magazine (2011–), the founders organized “community gathering” events, such as dinners and campfire cooking, in various locations around the world, designed to bring the Kinfolk community in touch with each other. Agnese Kleina, founder of Benji Knewman, began Benji Dinners in 2016 in Riga, a combination of food, music, and storytelling from the magazine. We work on the possibility of creating a different world… a new event of the universe of Benji Knewman – comfort food… at every launch we blow up the printed story into 3D… I have invited a classical music composer to write music for six stories out of Benji and will be played at the venue with real musicians… not anymore the voices in your head when you read, there will be real actors  reading… and invite your actual readers to bring that community together. (quoted in Watson 2016b)

Community is also built online. Websites such as Stack, magpile, magculture, and magheroes are filled with text, audio interviews, and updates on the latest information in independent magazine publishing. There is what I have termed a “global niche” of readers (Le Masurier 2012), not located in particular territories but dispersed globally by interest in the topic and approach of various indie magazines. Distributing these magazines around the globe is a way to survive financially when the pool of interest is incredibly niche. As Masoud Golsorkhi, founder of Tank (London), explains: Tank is an acquired taste, but it is globally spread … the people who like Tank tend to be roughly the same percentage of the population wherever you are in the world. There aren’t that many of them in any single country, but add all the countries together, and you have a viable magazine. (Golsorkhi 2007, p. 15)

There is one more aspect to note about indie as a cultural category of media production and consumption. Newman draws on Bourdieu to argue that indie criticism of the hegemonic mainstream serves a taste culture “perpetuating the privilege of a social elite of upscale customers” (Newman 2009, p. 17). The oppositional stance that defines indie culture is one key to its status as a source of distinction, a means by which its audience asserts its superior taste. …the indie audience makes authenticity and autonomy into aesthetic virtues that can be used to distinguish a common mass culture from a more refined, elite one. (p. 22)

No matter how well‐intentioned many indie magazines are, be they politically radical like Lumpen, Jacobin Review, Weapons of Reason, Real Review, K/D, The Outpost, Kosovo 2.0, Ladybeard, and Mushpit, or offering alternative visions of how we might live and think, like Lagom, Apartamento, Benji Knewman, Rake’s Progress, Anxy, and The Idler, the preponderance of makers are white and middle class, and the language is overwhelmingly English. There can be accusations of elitism here: who can afford to buy these magazines? Indeed, who can afford to make them? Even though the barriers to entry for making a magazine have been lowered, democratized if you like, and although recently there have been some exceptions to the general “whiteness” of indie magazine makers – for example, OOMK (London), gal‐dem (London),1 Curry (Calcutta), and Lost (Shanghai)  –  these magazines are predominantly the creations of those we could call the “precariously privileged.” This idea will be developed further in the ­section on creativity.

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Materiality One answer to the question of why the phenomenon of indie magazines in print has exploded in the past 10–15 years is a simple “because we can.” Just as DIY zines appeared in the 1970s because of the technologies of photocopying, and websites and blogging appeared in the 1990s and 2000s because of easier usage of computer technology and the internet, the once‐­complicated process of making a magazine in print is no longer that difficult. InDesign, the almost ubiquitous Adobe software, is no longer as difficult as earlier design software such as Quark, even if makers need to learn as they go. Printing has become cheaper, especially if outsourced to China, although many makers prefer to work closely with printers who are happy to do small print runs and indulge experimentation with size, format, inks, and paper stock. “Independent magazines indulge in their very magazine‐ness,” writes Leslie. “Reversing the manufacturing commoditisation of the mainstream… For them, a magazine is as much as anything an object, a physical item endowed with qualities that appeal to multiple senses – smell, sound, touch as well as sight” (2016, p. 11). “Print is not dead,” states the opening editors’ letter of every issue of London‐ based Delayed Gratification, which began in 2010. “For all the wily charms of the digital world with its tweets, feeds, blogs, and apps there is still nothing like the pleasure created by ink on paper.” Anja Charbonneau, the editor‐in‐chief of Broccoli, refers to a disenchantment with online media. “There’s definitely the energy of exhaustion around the digital space, especially when you are talking about something that’s really sensory and creative” (quoted in Ettachfini 2017). As David Sax writes, “The haptic variation from one printed page to another helps stem the feeling of information overload” (Sax 2016, p. 111). This making of an object that can bring ideas and information into a tangible manifestation that will exist as an artifact and an archive was a common thread in my interviews with indie makers. James Cartwright, editor of Printed Pages (London), mentioned the concept of permanence. “The magazine came about because we found that we couldn’t achieve all we wanted with just a website. There were stories that needed to be somewhere more timeless than the endless scroll of a website” (quoted in Jamieson 2015, p. 49). Conceived as an integrated whole, the indies are carefully curated so that more is left out than included. Controlled flow of content (flat planning – the visual page plan of a magazine) is vital, in a highly visible and contained way that websites, in their endlessness, cannot offer. The reader surrenders to the taste of the editor and pays to go on a journey with them for each issue. In the best magazines, the feeling is one of completeness as you close the back page, and the physical and temporal possibility of return to these beautiful objects. It is vital to note that the printed indies could not exist without digital technologies and the internet, as many DIY zines proudly can and do. Despite the claim of David Sax that the resurgence of indies in print is part of “the revenge of the analog” (2016), that is not strictly true. While the printed object remains primary, indies are not purely analog. All indies have websites that serve as spaces for information about the magazine, posting select content, online direct sales of issues and often merchandize, and opportunities to subscribe. This allows the makers to retain 100% of the cover price, in contrast to mainstream magazine distribution companies, which can take 40% or more for each sale (and pulp unsold copies). Indies retain their back issues for sale as new readers stumble upon their existence, which also makes them more environmentally responsible. Most are printed on recycled paper and use sustainable inks. The indies also tend to have a strong social media presence, using Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to inform followers about work in progress, events, and issue launches. Another perhaps surprising reason for choosing the medium of print is the potential for profit. Although advertising dollars have migrated to the digital realm with mainstream magazine media, this money is spread thinly across digital platforms. Print magazines can still charge much more for advertising. And a print magazine with a specific niche of readers still has appeal for advertisers. The Gentlewoman (London), for example, is a successful indie magazine that sells



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out its 100 000 print run every quarter. Editor Penny Martin understands the economic value of paper in a magazine industry waylaid by attempts to find money via paid advertising on screens. “The truth is that in this industry, paper is so much more valuable than digital,” she said (quoted in Sax 2016, p. 112).

Temporality Indies in print can be understood as a slow, considered response to the ubiquity of digital media and the speed at which mediated information arrives in our hands. To slowly curate images, words, and design around a particular topic, to produce that information in the bound printed form of a magazine of high quality, is a contemporary act of rebellion that allows makers and readers to slow down and think in a less distracted, fragmented way. Many scholars and commentators have noted the effects of digital speed on our capacity to pay attention (Agger 2004; Birkerts 2015; Chayko 2017; Eriksen 2001; Gitlin 2007; Gleick 2011; Lanham 2006; Pettman 2014; Rosa and Scheuerman 2009; Webster 2014). Printed magazines offer limitations, and the experience of finitude. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end – a human desire or narrative need perhaps, embodied by these magazines at a time when surplus never‐ending digital information seems impossible to avoid. As Watson says, “when everybody has their own Tumblr, how do you differentiate yourself? When everything is coming at you with such speed and regularity, finding something that steps outside of that becomes special” (Watson 2016a). This context has given rise to arguments for slower media and journalism, and its realization in many publications (both digital and print) (David 2015; Greenberg 2013; Le Masurier 2015, 2016; Rauch 2015, 2018). Although most mainstream magazines have always had a different relationship to the news cycle, the much slower periodicity of the indies means they offer an escape from immediacy of information. The content remains interesting and relevant, way beyond the date any issue goes on sale. Tom Bettridge, until recently the managing editor of O32c (Berlin), says: “The term that I like to use, which I stole from Nietzsche, is ‘untimely’. In the sense that it’s not on time or late, it’s out of sync with time. It’s not futuristic, it’s not historical, it’s not current, it’s completely independent. That’s what indie is – being independent. It’s even autonomous of a news cycle” (Bettridge 2017). My working term for contemporary indies is “slow magazines.” By that I mean not just the literal fact of their slow production and periodicity (as annuals, biannuals, triannuals, quarterlies). The indies enact a critique of the fast, commercially driven production of mainstream magazine media. Print, in the twenty‐first century, has come to be associated with a slower pace of production and the quality of content that can result. Many of the makers embrace the term “slow” to describe their magazines. For Delayed Gratification, the philosophy of slow journalism has driven Rob Orchard and Marcus Webb’s quarterly indie magazine since 2010. It is a news and current affairs magazine based not on the speed of delivery but on careful, high‐quality journalism and presentation. “Last to breaking news” is the magazine’s tagline, and the question the editors ask as they cast their gaze over the past three months of news is: what really mattered? And while they have a website and a “slow blog,” quarterly print is the medium which offers editors, journalists, designers, and readers time to think and focus. Offscreen editor Kai Brach describes his magazine as “a slow, thoughtful counterbalance to the fast‐paced, buzzword‐heavy tech coverage” (https://www.offscreenmag.com/about). The biannual Ernest Journal (“for curious and adventurous gentlefolk”) refers to its content and process as slow journalism, “giving each feature the time and space it needs” (www.ernestjournal.co.uk/ernest). Editor Jo Keeling said: We see it more as the storytelling side of things and how you get the best out of people when you’re putting a story together over six months. For example, with the sea monsters feature, we introduced

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the writer and the illustrator and gave them three months to knock ideas back and forth, rather than just getting somebody to write something and then sending it off to an illustrator to draw something… So, it’s a real slowing down and being thoughtful about how you create stuff. (Watson 2014)

The tagline of The Alpine Review, a thematic 200‐plus‐page indie from Montreal, is “a slow magazine for turbulent times.” Founder and editor Louis‐Jacques Darveau stated: “When we launched this magazine, it was meant as a deliberately contrarian and slow way to understand and engage with a world going through what felt like unprecedented transitions” (https:// thealpinereview.com/renewal‐and‐regeneration). In the editor’s letter for the first issue, “Anti‐ fragility,” Darveau explained how the magazine took an entire year of “mindful reflection… actually taking the time to look, listen, and question” (2012, p. 5) to come into being. “We started The Alpine Review as an attempt to understand those tremors from a long‐term point of view – to look at how our immediate moment is shaped by the past and will shape us in the future. Here, we don’t breathlessly report on the things driving everybody else’s traffic” (https://thealpinereview.com/about). The magazine has only had three issues since it began in 2012 and is now in hiatus. Ryan Fitzgibbon, founder of Hello Mr. (“for men who date men,” which has recently ceased publication) talked of the way printed magazines have become an escape from the “shouting match” of social media. Print is a medium that is “really intimate and very personal. It allows you to reflect at your own pace. Print allows people to, maybe, pause. The idea of slowness is threaded through all of that” (Fitzgibbon 2017a).

Creativity, Neoliberalism, and Utopia The generally young makers of indie magazines have grown up in the political economic context of neoliberalism (Dean 2009; Jones and O’Donnell 2017; Schram and Pavlovskaya 2018). Without security from social democratic infrastructures, there is an undeniable precariousness that accompanies working in often short‐term contracts or the “gig economy” of the creative industries (Banks 2007; Banks et al. 2013; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; McRobbie 2016). There has been an enormous amount of scholarship around the creative or cultural industries, and in the past few years much critique of what has been called creative labor (McRobbie 2016), venture labor (Neff 2012), and aspirational labor (Duffy 2017). There has also been a prominent discourse (Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011) or dispositif (McRobbie 2016) that valorizes creativity. McRobbie traces this back to the policies of New Labour in Britain in the 1990s, arguing that “the call to be creative is a potent and highly appealing mode of new governmentality directed to the young in the educational environment” (p. 14). McRobbie is highly critical of the neoliberal imperative to do it yourself and be entrepreneurial in the name of creativity and “doing what you love,” when the effect is to foster and normalize an environment of precarious work. Moreover, she argues, there is no guarantee that the bursts of intense work on creative projects (like making an indie magazine), usually funded by a myriad of other paying jobs, will lead to a less exhausting and sustainable mode of working. This model of creative work, underwritten by the incitement to be creative, she argues, is a way for the young and usually middle‐ class creatives to serve as “guinea pigs” for the “new world of work without the full raft of social security entitlements and welfare provision that have been associated with the post‐Second World War period” (p. 35). There is no question that the nexus of neoliberal entrepreneurialism and this imperative to “be creative” has created the conditions for indie magazines to exist and thrive  –  as has the declining amount of permanent jobs in mainstream magazine media. These precariously privileged indie makers are far from unaware of the broader neoliberal political and economic context in which they work. As Charlotte Roberts and Bertie Brandes, founders of the feminist magazine Mushpit, said when we were discussing McRobbie’s arguments, “you’re fucked if you



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do and fucked if you don’t” (2016). This is an important observation. While these generally young makers understand the insecurity and “self‐exploitation” involved in this type of work, especially when very few indie magazines are financially sustainable enough to provide a living income to their makers, the passion and idealism and pleasure the makers have in their magazines is tangible. The real‐world implication of McRobbie’s argument is unrealistic. Should they not make them? Should they down tools until the itinerant workers of the creative industries unionize and somehow demand security and sustainable working conditions? The indie magazine makers are prepared to spend time and money on using the medium of the printed magazine to embody the question “what if?” “What if?” is a question of possibilities (Duncombe 2011, 2017). “By asking ‘what if?’ we can simultaneously criticize and imagine, imagine and criticize, and thereby begin to escape the binary politics of negating critique on the one hand and blind faith on the other” (Duncombe 2017, p. 18). The indie magazines answer to this question is not always strictly political; often, the answers are explored in the realm of “lifestyle.” Their answers stem from the belief that magazines in print have the potential to offer a creative critique of mainstream and hegemonic interpretations of how we live and the opportunity to represent alternative ways of being, thinking, and living – and in a format and design that slows us down and demands our attention. What if we made a magazine that challenged the way we thought about our homes rather than buying the latest stuff to fill it (Apartamento), or questioned our relationship to celebrity (Accent, Dumbo Feather), or to food and drink (Gourmand, Drift), to gardens (Rake’s Progress, Future Fossil Flora, Plant Journal), or to 24/7 current affairs (Delayed Gratification, Real Review, K/D), or to women’s magazines (OOMK, Mushpit, Riposte, Ladybeard, Messy Heads, Mary Review), or our ways of representing gender and sexuality (Girls Like Us, Archer, Hello Mr.), or our perceptions of the Middle East (Bidoun, The Outpost, Brown Book), or perceptions of Eastern Europe (Kosovo 2.0, Kajet)…? Behind the motivation of many of the indie makers, following the work of Bennett and Strange (2015) and Duncombe (2011, 2017), is the belief in utopia. Not in the sense of a blueprint for the future, but an engagement with the question of “what is missing?” (Levitas 2003, 2011; Moylan and Baccolini 2011). As James Bennett writes: For many, media independence has come to mean working with freedom: from state control or interference, from monopoly, from market forces, as well as freedom to report, comment, create and document without fear of persecution… it is this rhetorical ideal that offers a utopian vision for a variety of independent media formations: impractical, unrealistic, impossible and yet, nonetheless, hopeful. (2015, p. 1)

At the Indiecon maker’s day in Hamburg 2017, I wandered around a hall bursting with indie magazines. I came across one called We Have Some Glimpse Of Hope. Its maker Johannes Fiola told me about his social experiment in Athens in 2015, where he lived for two months in a squat called Prosfygia in Exarchia, a self‐organized and non‐exploitative community of refugees. With their permission, he documented their experience and stories with photographs and Q&A interviews. The magazine is not particularly well‐designed, unlike the high standard of many indies, but the images and text are strong and moving. Fiola saw his magazine as a way of giving voice to some of the most desperate and voiceless people in Europe. He gave copies to those involved, a material object that embodied hope. “The will to fight back, and the idea that we have to create our own spaces in times of crisis is something I found in Prosfygia,” he writes in his editorial introduction to the magazine. “To understand the crisis as a chance for transformation, makes me believe that we have some glimpse of hope” (2015, p. 8). I bumped into Ibrahim Nehme, the founder of the now‐defunct biannual magazine The Outpost. A magazine of possibilities, made in Beirut from 2012 until 2016. “The premise was that we wanted to promote a new narrative on the Middle East and from the Middle East that countered the prevalent media narrative, basically a negative narrative of defeat and

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disappointment and war and traumas,” he said. “That is clearly part of the story but not the whole story” (Nehme 2017). The Outpost was structured around three questions: What’s happening? What’s not happening? What could happen? Nehme talked about the importance of the question “what if?” for his magazine, a question I had explored in my keynote lecture at the conference. He told me that The Outpost began with a two‐month Facebook campaign posting a different “what if?” question each day. “What if, for example, you could have lunch in Beirut and dinner in Gaza (because the border is closed), what if you could eat what you grow  – ­different questions about different possibilities that eventually the magazine would explore.” The Outpost was widely lauded, but made no money, and the process exhausted Nehme. The passion and rationale behind The Outpost, to change perceptions of the Middle East, will ­continue, but Nehme is not convinced print alone is the answer. He is exploring multimedia possibilities. “If you want to change the world, you have to be out there,” he said. “We have to tell our story from every possible platform.” After my lecture, Alexander Sangerlaub approached me with a copy of his magazine, Kater Demos, Das utopische Politikmagazin (the utopian political magazine). The magazine is in German only, a language I do not speak, so Sangerlaub kindly talked me through the content of his magazine and its aims. Each issue is based on a theme (democracy, work, media, surveillance – four issues so far) that is dissected via critical journalism about the way the world is, and investigations of what alternatives might be possible (Sangerlaub 2017). At the conference, Ryan Fitzgibbon, founder of Hello Mr., explained his motivation this way: The determination to make your voice heard, especially in today’s political climate, is what gets us out of bed. It’s what keeps us awake and what makes us persevere… As makers, we all have the luxury to choose to be independent, and we already have many advantages over people in the world who are voiceless. We all rise together when we use our privilege to lift others. (Fitzgibbon 2017b)

Not all the indie magazines are made with such utopian idealism to change the world. Some just want to change the way we think about gardening. There is talk that we may have reached “peak indie,” as Danielle Pender said at the Modern Magazine conference in 2017. And there is some criticism of new indies that are just following the aesthetic blueprint laid down by successful minimalist magazines such as the “slow lifestyle” magazine Kinfolk. Nehme calls these “white magazines” – by this, he is referring to the predominant aesthetic of white negative space and the blandness of content. “It seems every day there is a new magazine and it makes you wonder, what are we doing? … when everyone has the capacity to make mindless magazines, it defeats the whole purpose of slow journalism” (Nehme 2017). As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the motivations of the indie makers are not all the same. But, as Steve Watson said, “By and large, people aren’t making indie magazines about ephemeral things. They’re making magazines about stuff they really love and cherish and believe in. You work on it for ages, you make it perfect, you print it, and it lasts” (Watson 2016a).

Note 1 See Esther Egbeyemi Chapter 30.

References Agger, B. (2004). Speeding up Fast Capitalism. Boulder: Paradigm. Andersson, P. (2002). Beyond magazines. In: Inside Magazines: Independent Pop Culture Magazines (eds. P. Andersson and S. Judith), 14–19. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press.



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Atton, C. (2002). Alternative Media. London: Sage. Atton, C. and Hamilton, J.F. (2008). Alternative Journalism. London: Sage. Bailey, O., Cammaerts, B., and Carpentier, N. (2008). Understanding Alternative Media. Berkshire: Open University Press. Banks, M. (2007). The Politics of Cultural Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Banks, M., Gill, R., and eds, S.T. (2013). Theorizing Cultural Work: Labour, Continuity and Change in the Cultural Industries. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Bennett, J. (2015). Introduction. The utopia of independent media: independence, working with ­freedom and working for free. In: Media Independence: Working with Freedom or Working for Free? (eds. J. Bennett and N. Strange), 1–28. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. Bennett, J. and Strange, N. (eds.) (2015). Media Independence: Working with Freedom or Working for Free? Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. Bettridge, T. (2017). Interview with author, 7 July, Berlin. Birkerts, S. (2015). Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press. Chayko, M. (2017). Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno‐Social Life. Los Angeles: Sage. Darveau, L.‐J. (2012). Welcome. The Alpine Review, No. 1. David, S. (2015). The slow media manifesto and its impact on different countries, cultures, and disciplines. Social Analysis 51: 107–112. Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Duffy, B.E. (2017). Not Getting Paid to Do What you Love: Gender, Social Media and Aspirational Work. New Haven: Yale University Press. Duncombe, S. (1997). Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. London: Verso. Duncombe, S. (2011). Imagining no‐place: the subversive mechanics of utopia. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=TyyzAxJRXIM (accessed August 2017). Duncombe, S. (2017). Opening up utopia. In: DIY Utopia: Cultural Imagination and the Remaking of the Possible (ed. A. Day), 14–22. Lanham: Lexington Books. Eriksen, T. (2001). Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age. London: Pluto. Ettachfini, L. (2017). Your first look at Broccoli, the magazine for women who love weed. Broadly (14  November). https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/gyj3x4/your‐first‐look‐at‐broccoli‐the‐ magazine‐for‐women‐who‐love‐weed (accessed January 2018). Fiola, J. (2015). We have to understand crisis as a chance for revolution. We Have Some Glimpse Of Hope 1: 6–9. Fitzgibbon, R. (2017a). Interview with author, Amsterdam, 1 September. Fitzgibbon, R. (2017b). The magazine that stands up in difficult times. Keynote lecture presented at Indiecon, Hamburg (26 August 2017). Fornarow, W. (2006). Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press. Gardner, J. (2012). The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gitlin, T. (2007). Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms our Lives. New York: Metropolitan Books. Gleick, J. (2011). The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. London: Fourth Estate. Golsorkhi, M. (2007). Interview with Masoud Golsorkhi. In: Sbook 4: A Southampton Solent University Graphic Design Research Project (ed. N. Long), 10–17. London: Art Books International. Greenberg, S. (2013). Slow journalism in the digital fast lane. In: Global Literary Journalism: Exploring the Journalistic Imagination (eds. R.L. Keeble and J. Tulloch), 381–393. New York: Peter Lang. Hamilton, C. (2013). Don’t look back: contemporary independent magazine publishing beyond the digital divide. In: By the Book? Contemporary Publishing in Australia (ed. E. Stinson), 43–58. Clayton, Vic: Monash University Publishing. Heath, J. and Potter, A. (2004). Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture. NY: Harper Business. Hesmondhalgh, D. (1999). Indie: the institutional politics and aesthetics of a popular music genre. Cultural Studies 131: 34–61.

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Hesmondhalgh, D. and Baker, S. (2011). Creative Labour. Media Work in Three Cultural Industries. Oxon: Routledge. Holmes, T. and Nice, L. (2012). Magazine Journalism. London: Sage. Indiecon (2016). The independent magazine festival. http://www.indienet.de (accessed 10 August 2019). Jamieson, R. (2015). Print Is Dead. Long Live Print. Munich, London, NY: Prestel. Jones, B. and O’Donnell, M. (eds.) (2017). Alternatives to Neoliberalism: Towards Equality and Democracy. Bristol: Polity. King, G. (2014). Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film. New York: I.B. Tauris. Lanham, R. (2006). The Economics of Attention. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Le Masurier, M. (2012). Independent magazines and the rejuvenation of print. International Journal of Cultural Studies 154: 383–398. Le Masurier, M. (2015). What is slow journalism? Journalism Practice 92: 138–152. Le Masurier, M. (ed.) (2016). Special issues on slow journalism. Journalism Practice 104 and Digital Journalism 44. Leslie, J. (2003). magCulture: New Magazine Design. London: Laurence King Publishing. Leslie, J. (2013). The Modern Magazine. Visual Journalism in the Digital Era. London: Laurence King. Leslie, J. (2015). Independence. 12 Interviews with Magazine Makers. London: magculture. Levitas, R. (2003). Introduction: the elusive idea of utopia. History of the Human Sciences 161: 1–10. Levitas, R. (2011). The imaginary reconstitution of society: utopia as method. In: Utopia Method Vision. The Use Value of Social Dreaming (eds. T. Moylan and R. Baccolini), 26–46. Bern: Peter Lang. McRobbie, A. (2016). Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Cambridge, UK: Polity. Moylan, T. and Baccolini, R. (eds.) (2011). Utopia Method Vision. The Use Value of Social Dreaming. Bern: Peter Lang. Neff, G. (2012). Venture Labour: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Nehme, I. (2017). Interview with author, Hamburg, 27 August. Newman, M.Z. (2009). Indie culture: in pursuit of the authentic autonomous alternative. Cinema Journal 483: 16–34. Nurnberg, L. (2017). Interview with author, London, 6 November. Oakes, K. (2009). Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Pender, D. (2016). Interview with author, London, 5 July. Pettman, D. (2014). Infinite Distraction. Paying Attention to Social Media. Cambridge: Polity. Rauch, J. (2015). Slow media as alternative media. In: The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media (ed. C. Atton), 571–581. London and New York: Routledge. Rauch, J. (2018(Forthcoming)). Slow Media: Why Slow Is Satisfying, Sustainable and Smart. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Renard, D. (2006). The last magazine in print. In: The Last Magazine (ed. D. Renard), 14–15. New York: Universe Publishing. Roberts, C. and Brandes, B. (2016). Interview with author, London, 5 July. Rosa, H. and Scheuerman, W.E. (eds.) (2009). High Speed Society. Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sangerlaub, A. (2017). Interview with author, Berlin, 7 September. Sax, D. (2016). The Revenge of the Analog. New York: Public Affairs. Schram, S.F. and Pavlovskaya, M. (2018). Rethinking Neoliberalism. Resisting the Disciplinary Regime. New York: Routledge. Verderi, F. and Pryor, J.P. (2016). We Can’t Do this Alone: Jefferson Hack the System. NY: Rizzoli. Watson, S. (2014). Exploring issue one of Ernest. https://www.stackmagazines.com/alternative/ exploring‐issue‐one‐ernest (accessed December 2017). Watson, S. (2016a). Interview with author, London, 4 July. Watson, S. (2016b). Podcast: Agnese Kleina, Benji Knewman. https://www.stackmagazines.com/ alternative/podcast‐agnese‐kleina‐benji‐knewman‐magazine (accessed December 2017). Webster, J.G. (2014). The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

8

Magazines and Advertising in the Digital Age John Sinclair

Introduction While much attention has been given to the crisis of print in the digital age, the concern has been almost exclusively with newspapers, given their traditional responsibilities in democratic ­societies. Although magazines generally lack such gravitas, they, too, are threatened with ­ultimate annihilation, both as a commercial media model and as a cultural form, and if they are to sustain themselves, must deal with the challenges of the digital era in their own way. For both forms of print media, the crisis is about the loss of advertising, their economic lifeblood, given the fundamental shift under way of advertising expenditure into digital media, and especially to the platforms of Google and Facebook. This shift is also having a great impact on the advertising industry, as advertising agencies find themselves “disintermediated,” that is, dislodged from their traditional role as brokers between their advertiser clients and the media. The agencies’ response has been to open up a new sphere of business, “ad tech,” a set of commercio‐technical practices for the placement of advertisements, drawing on the internet’s capacity to generate commercially valuable data from its users. Meanwhile, although we can still see the array of print magazines in the convenience stores covering news and commentary; celebrity gossip; popular culture diversions; sport and outdoor pastimes; health and personal care; domestic activities and design; lifestyle, leisure and consumer interests; and other more specialized fields, much of these kinds of content have migrated to the internet, where they attract audiences for the advertisers that the magazines are losing. Magazine publishers have responded by shoring up subscription revenue that can replace the income once derived from advertising, and/or to launch online versions of their titles, to capture digital advertising revenue. This chapter will examine the new relationship that is developing between ad tech business on the one hand, and online magazines on the other. Ad tech has enormous advantages over print in the targeting and delivery of advertisements to online readers, making online magazines a prime case study in how the exploitation of user data has given rise to a new critical paradigm in media studies.

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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The Drive to Digital While it may seem that the advent of online magazines is a recent phenomenon, dating from about 2010, there is a substantial prehistory of hardware and software development that was needed to make possible this new technological and cultural form. Tony Quinn (2018) has provided a useful timeline, which begins in the 1980s, with subscription‐based online bulletin boards delivered via the various teletex systems used in different countries, while software companies soon forged ahead to develop programs for typesetting, page‐making, and photoshopping. In the mid‐1990s, some magazines became available on compact disk with read‐only memory (CD‐ROM), which was then the state‐of‐the‐art delivery technology, while many newspapers established websites, and were soon to put facsimile versions of themselves online. The turn of the millennium marked a new era for the internet, as it recovered from the dot‐com crash of 2000–2002, and greatly expanded the number of online users, enabled by user‐friendly software access to the World Wide Web. This also was the decade in which Google and Facebook became widely known internationally and began their rise to internet dominance. By 2006, many leading magazine publishers were putting facsimile versions of their titles online, with some even enabling mobile phone downloads. Interactive digital magazines soon followed, and became an established medium within a few years, with some leading former print titles such as U.S. News and World Report going digital‐only. The launch of the iPad in 2010 was decisive in facilitating access to magazines online, and the sector has greatly expanded ever since in the era of Web 2.0, which has also seen the extension of magazine content and advertising onto the various extremely popular social media platforms. The mainstreaming of internet access, and its affordances for online advertising, has presented both “legacy” newspaper and magazine industries with a crisis in their traditional business model, in which over half of the total revenue once came from advertising. While prestigious magazines can partly compensate by increasing their cover price, and charging more for subscriptions, the economics of such a strategy are not sustainable in the long term. Taking the comparative measure of cost‐per‐thousand (CPM), traditionally the basis on which advertising is bought and sold, Joseph Turow estimates that for major magazine publishers in the USA, the cost of producing quality content is around US$40 per thousand readers. Yet advertisers, he argues, can buy internet advertising for as little as US$2 per thousand, and are becoming disinclined to pay a premium for a magazine’s reputation when they shop for advertising, particularly, as will be explained, when they are buying their ad placement using technology (Turow 2012, pp. 115–122). However, even a venerable title with a limited cachet readership like the US intellectual monthly, The Atlantic, has shown it can successfully adapt in the face of the crisis by going “cross‐platform,” that is, integrating print and digital editions (Peters 2010). Such integration has been the predominant strategy for survival in the industry as a whole. Going digital‐only has proven to be an unstable strategic response: Newsweek, for example, went digital‐only, but soon brought back its print edition (Nicholas 2017). Leading international titles, such as Better Homes and Gardens or Women’s Health, have survived, not so much on their brand reputation, but by adapting to the digital era with an online presence tailored to attract particular kinds of target audiences that can be delivered to online advertisers (Sar and Rodriguez 2015, p. 181). On the other hand, some publishers have adapted much better than others, so the close management of cross‐platform transition matters. A significant example is the 2017 sale of Time Inc. (publisher of the august newsmagazine Time and its stablemates Fortune, People, and Sports Illustrated) to Meredith Corporation, better known for titles such as Better Homes and Gardens. Despite having an online presence, Time titles had remained reliant on falling print revenue. Meredith’s declared intention had been to shift the cross‐platform balance toward online advertising (Trachtenberg 2017), but within a few months put Time, Fortune, Money, and Sports Illustrated up for sale. In September 2018, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife bought Time, with



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the declared intention of maintaining it as “one of the world’s most important media companies and iconic brands.” Salesforce is a digital marketing company, but the acquisition of Time is the Benioffs’ personal project (Bloomberg News 2018). Meanwhile, Meredith retained People and other titles more compatible with its established brands (Smith 2018). “Cross‐platform,” it should be noted, now means more than a print magazine maintaining a lively website to drive traffic to itself. It also entails having an active involvement in cultivating a  readership via Facebook, Twitter, and other popular social media platforms, perhaps using video as well as image and text. Furthermore, given the massive worldwide take‐up of mobile phones, magazines now need to make themselves accessible via smartphone apps, as well as tablets, laptops, and desktops. Indeed, mobile advertising has emerged as the new competitive front, having become second only to television as the medium attracting most advertising revenue worldwide. The mobile‐accessed internet has additional attractions to advertisers beyond fixed computer access, notably location‐based advertising. The rise of the mobile has also favored the growth of video content, which is better adapted to small screens than banner advertising (WARC Data 2018).

Digital Disruption In the major national markets where media provision is predominantly given over to commercial interests, notably the USA, UK, and other English‐speaking countries, for decades there had been a relatively comfortable institutionalized relationship between advertisers, advertising agencies, and media. This integrated assemblage of interests has been characterized as the “­manufacturing/marketing/media complex” (Sinclair 2012). The basic business model has been that the media offers content that can attract audiences, and access to those audiences is sold to advertisers via the intermediary of advertising agencies. In the case of magazines, “publishers sell magazines to readers and then sell readers to advertisers” (Sar and Rodriguez 2015, p. 180). Apart from their “creative” role in devising advertising campaigns, advertising agencies traditionally have acted as brokers in such selling of audiences or readers. Publishers and advertising agencies in particular are finding that the former arrangement has been put under severe pressure by the advent of the dominant search and social media platforms on the internet – the buzzword is “disruption” – and there is a competitive casting around for new business practices adapted to the transformation, and consequently a new and constantly evolving business ecology. The advent of the internet has profoundly transformed the practice and even the meaning of media advertising, although it is important to appreciate the differences between the “old” advertising media, such as television and print magazines, and the “new” advertising medium of the internet. For example, traditional media advertising still counts audiences by measuring how many people watched a television program or bought a print magazine, and then assumes on the basis of those figures that those viewers or readers have seen the advertising content. In the case of print magazines, circulation is augmented by measures of “pass‐on” readership, the implicit claim being that even more people have seen an ad than sales figures would suggest. Digital advertising, however, counts audiences based on how many users clicked on an ad, indicative of at least some minimal engagement. The value of the internet’s capacity to hyperlink from one site to another, such as from a magazine to a retail site, should not be underestimated. The interactive capacity of digital advertising, the enabling of an advertiser to elicit a response directly from a prospective customer, and the data about users the internet can yield in order to target them, are all features that are immensely attractive to advertisers. This affordance is not without its problems, however, as outlined later below. Furthermore, whereas the old media deliver a sales message to a prospective consumer, that message has to motivate the consumer to respond at a later time and in a different place: for

108 Sinclair i­nstance, having seen a magazine ad, the consumer usually has to go to a store to buy the ­product, if the message’s “call to action” is to fulfill its purpose. With the internet, the consumer can respond to an advertising message then and there, such as clicking to add the product to a virtual “shopping cart” and paying online with a credit card. The point is not just that the ­internet thus eliminates delay and distance in such consumption transactions, condensing time and space, or even that it combines the functions of both advertising medium and retail store, but that it is an interactive medium, which has established itself as a site of transaction in its own right. Although it seems like Google has long been part of everyday life, long enough for “googling” to pass into the language, it is worth remembering that it has only been a public company since 2004. Since that time, Google has transformed advertising. Unlike the kind of creative ­advertising familiar to us from print magazines, or even display ads on the internet, Google has attained its internet pre‐eminence through being the market leader by far in search advertising. Search is a  distinctive new model of advertising that capitalizes on search behavior as an intrinsic and ­elemental form of interaction on the internet, as well as on the internet’s unique affordance of hyperlinking from one site to another. Search is a fundamental function that everyone needs to use the internet, for which we go to the services on offer from the main “search engines,” principally Google, with Bing and Yahoo! a long way behind. The basic business model of search rests on its ability to offer and sell advertising, but not on any platform other than on its own. Thus, instead of attracting an audience with the offer of information or entertainment content, as with traditional media like magazines, search engines attract users to their service itself, and match search queries to ads. In both cases, the audiences or users collected are then sold to advertisers. Google’s AdWords system sells advertisers the space that appears next to the results, with which it provides users when they search for a keyword. Advertisers must pay to bid for their position in the list next to any given keyword, and if a user shows interest by clicking through to an advertiser’s website, Google charges the advertiser on a “pay‐per‐click” basis. This system is attractive to advertisers, particularly smaller ones, because it puts the buying of advertising on to a performance basis and increases the calculability of their return on investment (ROI). Yet it is disruptive because it also enables advertisers to deal directly with Google, bypassing the media placement services that were formerly provided by an advertising agency. Once again, it is smaller advertisers most likely to take advantage of going directly to Google, so to the extent that some kinds of magazines, such as special‐interest recreational magazines, depend on small advertisers, they thus find themselves in competition with Google. However, large‐circulation mainstream titles are less affected, since Google has less to offer the big brand advertisers of such consumer mainstays as luxury goods and health and beauty products. Google’s largest advertisers are online retail and travel companies and other industries for whom direct‐response advertising is more relevant than brand or product advertising (Peterson 2014). This is a significant trend, which not only has implications for the sidelining of the agencies, but also suggests that advertisers are now more diverse than in the pre‐­ internet era of “mass” media, several of them being “new media” themselves. Apart from search advertising, there is display advertising, which has also become a taken‐ for‐granted part of our everyday online communication landscape. Internet display ads are increasingly sophisticated, though often quite intrusive: they float or expand across the page, or pop up while a desired page is loading, and take full advantage of the range of audiovisual effects that the internet offers, which more and more means video. Yet, however dull search advertising may look by comparison to the color and movement of display, that is where the money is. Although Google has shown interest in expanding its display advertising activities, especially with video on YouTube, acquired as a subsidiary in 2006, search remains its core business, or as a Google executive put it: “Search is still the most monetizable moment on the web” (quoted in Sinclair 2012, p. 60).



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While Google dominates search, social media advertising is the domain of Facebook, which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger as subsidiaries. As of 2017, global expenditure on digital advertising, excluding the substantial Chinese market, was an estimated US$100 billion, and 84% was claimed by the “digital duopoly” of Google and Facebook (Garrahan 2017). As with Google, advertisers can go directly to Facebook and bypass advertising agencies. However, Facebook does attract the large global consumer brand advertisers, and they, in turn, still require the creative services of advertising agencies. Either way, the value of these platforms to advertisers is in the targeting of likely sales prospects, with an apparent precision that legacy mass media cannot provide. Thus, while Google can offer advertisers data on users’ interests and activities as revealed by their search history, Facebook can also supply their location, age, gender, education, and other such information, which users have willingly surrendered, directly and indirectly. The two major issues presented by this digital duopoly’s rise – the advertising industry’s response and the access advertisers have now gained to internet users – will be discussed later in the chapter.

Fragmentation and Reintegration Critical observers of the new ecology have discerned within it trends toward the disintegration, and yet also the integration, of media and advertising (Hardy 2017). Turow argues that there has been a fundamental separation of the distribution of media content from its production: for instance, the content that search platforms make available has been produced somewhere else. Furthermore, there is a consequent decontextualization of content: “consumers no longer ­typically confront media products as unified branded products or programming flows” (Turow 2012, p. 117). The implications for magazines are that readers may merely “snack” upon individual items of content available online, as distinct from experiencing content within the enveloping tone and character of a print magazine, and that advertisers need to be convinced of the advantage of the latter. At worst, the internet has encouraged the proliferation of “clickbait”; that is, magazine‐like headings about celebrities, health, homemaking, or the like, characteristically found on social media platforms, designed to stimulate enough curiosity for a reader to click through to a website, where they will be served advertisements. The website owner, who could be a bona fide publisher or just anybody with a Google Adsense or Facebook Ads Manager account, is paid according to the number of “click‐throughs” that the clickbait attracts (The Onion 2018), sharing the ad revenue with Google or Facebook (Smith 2016). Much clickbait material is generated by a new kind of media production enterprise, the “content farm,” that employs freelance writers to produce thousands of daily celebrity, lifestyle, and soft news items compatible with advertisers’ purposes (Turow 2012, pp. 134–135). This kind of freely available but fragmented magazine‐style content available online is one of the most corrosive trends being faced by magazines in the digital era. In addition to the fundamental challenge to the integrity of the magazine as an economic and cultural media form, there are other problems. In the wake of the “fake news” scandal of the 2016 US Presidential election, an awareness of how clickbait content can be politicized and manipulated has emerged (Gelzer 2018). In particular, Facebook at this time was exposed as having had extensive user data accessed by a political data firm, Cambridge Analytica, provoking a massive backlash over trust and privacy issues (Granville 2018). Yet even before the reforms made in response to this scandal, Facebook, formerly a prime carrier of clickbait, had begun to exert some control over the sites it hosts (Martínez 2017). Another vulnerable fault in the system is “click fraud,” which refers to clicks coming from paid bogus users, or even electronic “clickbots,” rather than genuinely interested persons. Because the website owner is paid according to the number of clicks the site receives, there is both motivation and opportunity for individuals, and even organized crime, to game the system (Xi 2017).

110 Sinclair On the other hand, there is a discernible counter‐trend to this fragmentation of media and advertising. The integration of editorial material (news, entertainment, and information) with advertising in magazines and other media has been governed historically by a convention of “integration with separation” (Hardy 2017, p. 17), or what Henry Luce of Time magazine fame likened to “church” versus “state” (quoted in Turow 2012, p. 113). Editorial material was held up to be sacrosanct, never to be influenced by the advertisers, whose advertisements supported its publication (Turow 2012, p. 113). In practice, it is widely acknowledged that several kinds of magazines, including prestige titles, have been quite shameless over many years in running articles for their advertisers in the form of “advertorials,” for example, in a “special section,” or with a band of color linking article and ad on facing pages (Das 2016; Ju‐Pak et  al. 1995). With online magazines, there is instead “native advertising,” which, its advocates argue, is more than a digital advertorial. In an attempt to get beyond the intrusive banner and pop‐up ads of the earlier days of the internet, native advertising is subtly creative, enabling brands to be “immersive and reactive” (Turner 2014). Above all, native advertising conceals itself in plain sight, much more than the advertorial ever can do. Native advertising is “promotional messages paid for by advertisers that match the form, behavior, and user experience of the digital media in which they are disseminated,” and even when labeled, it is integrated in such a way that users may not recognize it as advertising (Hardy 2017, p. 19). While native advertising might be identified most obviously with online‐only magazines, such as Buzzfeed (Robischon 2016), it is also an option made available to advertisers in magazines of the caliber of Forbes and The Atlantic. In conjunction with the internet’s capacity to target users with personalized content, as will be considered below, “the violation of church‐state norms [becomes] routine” (Turow 2012). A broader perspective on the integration of media and advertising is provided by a traditional conceptual framework taught in marketing communications and public relations courses: the distinction between paid, earned, and owned media. When updated to account for the interactive dimension of the internet era, that is, with the addition of shared media, this has become the PESO model (Dietrich 2014; Robinson 2016). Paid media refers to conventional advertising, where an advertiser pays for space in a magazine or time on television, usually with the help of an advertising agency, which also prepares the creative content of the advertisement itself. As has been previously explained, this arrangement has come under serious challenge. Earned media is the realm of public relations, where, with the help of an agency, a client’s product or service is considered newsworthy enough to “earn” its place as media content. The advance publicity that we see for films and music releases in magazines, and usually also across all media, would be the most prevalent example: behind‐the‐scenes features, interviews with stars, the cultivation of controversies, and so on. Shared media refers to the ways in which the interactive qualities of the internet, and especially the affordances of social media, can be commercially exploited. In the former age of mass media, audiences had limited opportunities to respond to media content or to take part in the making of it. Readers’ letters in magazines or quiz show participation on television typically represented the limits of such involvement. From the point of view of the media organizations, the corollary was that their audiences were relatively anonymous to them. In the social media era of the twenty‐first century, not only do media and advertisers connect interactively with internet users, but – and this is the really defining characteristic of “social” media – users are connected with each other. Real‐world interconnected social hierarchies, subcultures, and friendship networks, along with virtual communities, are made accessible to advertisers via Facebook and Twitter, to name only the dominant platforms, and an immense virtual playground is created for the participatory elaboration of popular culture. The attraction for advertisers is not only that users readily provide demographic and all kinds of other exploitable information about themselves, thus ­identifying themselves as sales prospects, but also that the advertisers can tap into otherwise inaccessible social networks, tuning in to the “buzz” of “trending topics” and memes in the virtual, global sphere of popular culture. The holy grail for the big global advertisers is that their



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advertising message will “go viral”: that is, that users will actively pass it on, relaying it from one social network to another, ultimately to be seen by millions. The initial planting of the message might be via an “influencer,” such as a popular blogger on Facebook or a celebrity with thousands of followers on Twitter. Note that while influencers are inherent in social media marketing practice, they are not exclusive to it: magazines also use influencers in their own ways, both in print and cross‐platform content. Magazines such as Marie Claire combine their authority with  the online popularity of influencers to promote fashion and even automotive brands (Hemphill 2018). Owned media provides an interesting case, particularly as far as magazines are concerned. In owned media, the advertiser is also the publisher. For example, it is major retailers who own some of the largest‐circulating magazines in the USA (Costco); UK (Tesco); Australia (both Coles and Woolworths); and everywhere, Ikea. These are all freely available online and enable readers to shop directly. They also serve as catalogs of the whole product range these stores carry, and as such, can be seen as digital avatars of the mail‐order catalogs, which absorbed so much advertising expenditure in the pre‐mass media era (see Chapter 10 by Koch, Denner, and Gutheil). The fact that these magazines are free, and owned by the advertisers themselves, sets them apart from the conventional kind of commercial magazine under consideration here, but a comparable trend should be noted: “the creation of storytelling material that attracts readers, viewers and listeners to a brand” (O’Brien 2012, n.p.). Rather than retailers, it is brands that are heading into content marketing, Red Bull being a distinctive example, with its own lifestyle magazine, The Red Bulletin, featuring articles consistent with its brand identity on extreme sports, games, and movies (Red Bull 2018). Similarly, Coca‐Cola launched Journey in 2012, a “digital magazine” now published in over 30 countries, which draws on user‐generated as well as corporate content, and declares: “we capitalize on pop culture moments and real‐time opportunities” (Journey Staff 2017, n.p.). Magazine publishers are increasingly setting up content marketing divisions to provide this kind of service to brands. For example, the German‐based Bauer Media curates content from its range of titles and puts it online to capture the interest of particular demographics for specific advertiser clients (Mitchell 2016). Thus, owned media are not necessarily published in‐house by the brand but contracted out to magazine publishers who provide them with content, even at the risk of cannibalizing their own titles.

Ad Tech’s Ecosystem “IBM never undermined the Mad Men of the world. But Google and Facebook did” (Wired Staff 2014). From the advertising agencies’ point of view, the digital duopoly’s activities on the internet are certainly blurring the traditional boundaries between advertising medium and advertising agency, and in doing so, usurping the agencies’ time‐honored “media‐buying” functions: advising advertisers on ad placement and buying space or time on their behalf, for commission. The major agencies have been notably proactive rather than reactive in meeting the challenge of their “disintermediation” by establishing a stake in the new specialized technical areas, which the internet had opened up for the generation, placement, distribution, measurement, and general management of online advertisements, as well as research, analysis, and trading in ad inventory. These activities now populate a new digital space, between the agencies and the internet, and effectively form a third area of commercial service provided by the agencies, the first two being the placement and then the creation of advertisements. Buying advertising space, selling it on to advertiser clients, and placing advertisements for them was the original business model of the advertising agency, dating from the late nineteenth century. Only in later decades did agencies begin to offer the creative services for which we now know them. The global advertising industry’s vigorous response to disintermediation began when Publicis Groupe, a global marketing communications holding group based in Paris, initiated a rush of

112 Sinclair acquisitions of technical companies specializing in digital advertising with its takeover of an online marketing specialist company, Digitas, in December 2006 (Pfanner 2006). Publicis Groupe includes the major media‐buying agency networks Starcom Mediavest and ZenithOptimedia, and such creative networks as Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi. A more significant move was to follow in May 2007, when the WPP Group bought 24/7 Real Media, a search optimization and online ad delivery network. WPP is the world’s largest global advertising holding group, based in the UK, with international media‐buying agencies like Mindshare and distinguished creative networks like J. Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam under its umbrella. WPP serves global clients of the stature of Ford, Unilever, and HSBC. WPP’s then‐ CEO, Sir Martin Sorrell, declared that based on the new acquisition, WPP was entering “a third major line of business” beyond the traditional media‐buying and creative functions, that is, in what he called the “online technology space” (quoted in Story 2007). Publicis and WPP were actually pre‐empting Google with these acquisitions, but in 2008, Google bought DoubleClick. This is an ad‐serving company, the basic business of which is to deliver ads to web sites and ­measure the clicks they receive. Google went on to strengthen its capacity in display advertising (as distinct from search) with the acquisition of Teracent in 2009, thus extending the base of its digital dominance (Hof 2012). One magazine executive describes himself as being “a little whiplashed” at the speed, scale, and complexity of all this digital disruption (Smith 2015, p. 11). Just like advertising agencies, magazines are now also disintermediated, in the sense that ­advertisers can now go directly online to target individual potential consumers, rather than place an advertisement in a magazine, even one with a specialized readership. Advertising or “marketing communications” holding companies, such as Publicis and WPP, were formed over the latter decades of the twentieth century as they each acquired a series of existing international media‐buying and creative agency networks, operating them relatively independently under the one coordinating umbrella. Along with the US‐based holding groups Omnicom and Interpublic, they constitute the “Big Four” of global advertising in the West. Over time, faced with more stringent client budgets, and competition in digital marketing from the global consultancy firms as well as from the internet duopoly (Google and Facebook), the holding groups have been obliged to shift the balance increasingly toward ad tech as the combat zone. By 2018, the holding groups were restructuring their businesses in moves “aimed at reducing complexity, cutting costs and a greater focus on technology” (Bond 2018). Thus, as Wired magazine has observed, As advertising has shifted to the internet, more and more of it is being managed … by techies  – ­engineers, programmers, and others who understand the world of social media sites, real‐time ad exchanges, online analytics, and ad targeting systems. (Wired Staff 2014)

This ascendancy of technology in the advertising and media industries has been brought about largely by the advent of “programmatic advertising,” which began as software for finding and utilizing “inventory,” or publishers’ available advertising space on the internet. By the second decade of this century, programmatic advertising was becoming the norm, and extending into mobile and television advertising. Effectively, programmatic advertising is the automation of the advertising industry’s traditional core business of media‐buying and ad placement, which also happens to be the more profitable side of the industry. Therefore, the agencies have had no choice but to launch themselves into digital technology and build their capacity in ad tech, in competition with Google and Facebook. Disintermediation and the rise of programmatic advertising have meant that, internationally, magazines’ share of all advertising expenditure has diminished, as advertisers now can bypass the advertising agencies – and the media properties they have traditionally serviced – in direct p ­ ursuit of targeted online individuals (Roderick 2017). Programmatic works like this: the “publisher” (any website owner) goes to a supply‐side platform (SSP), that is, an ad server which interfaces



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with an online advertising network or exchange. This network, in turn, interfaces with a demand‐ side platform (DSP) on the advertiser’s side. This system allows advertisers to put online advertising before a selected, individualized target audience. It can also work for magazines targeting new readers: notably, in 2015 The Economist ran one such successful programmatic campaign and won a marketing award in the process (Davis 2016). More characteristically, magazines pride themselves on providing attractive visual content environments for brand advertisers ­seeking select audiences (Roderick 2017). The agencies’ principal competitor in programmatic advertising is Google, which presents itself as a complete ad network, covering display as well as search, with DoubleClick as its ad server. On the supply side, for publishers such as online magazines, there is AdSense; on the demand side of programmatic trading, that is, for advertisers, is AdWords. As for the agencies, ad tech companies brought under the respective umbrellas of the advertising holding groups include Publicis’ SapientRazorfish (Hickman 2016) and WPP’s AKQA, a creative digital agency (WPP 2018). Interpublic has acquired a number of digital agencies, including its own trading desk (Cadreon), while Omnicom prefers to work with a separate “data and marketing sciences” company, Annalect, which is “embedded” with its media and creative networks (Weissbrot 2016). Both within the structures of the major players and beyond, there is, in reality, an extremely complex ecology of ad tech businesses. This complexity is rendered in an intricate “LUMAscape” infographic (Figure  8.1) by LUMA Partners, a digital marketing investment bank (LUMA 2017). As a Hearst magazine executive commented on first seeing this graphic in 2010, “in new business markets sometimes you can have too much biodiversity” (Smith 2015, p. 8).

Figure 8.1  LUMA graphic. Source: LUMA Partners LLC.

114 Sinclair A practitioner of programmatic advertising defines it in the following way: “Programmatic is buying digital advertising space automatically, with computers using data to decide which ads to buy and how much to pay for them” (quoted in Rogers 2017). This definition makes it clear that programmatic is not just about technology, but also about user data. Programmatic advertising is thus identified with “real‐time bidding” (RTB), which refers to display advertising delivered via ad infotech specialist companies. In the time a page request is loading in a user’s browser, the ad exchange’s software advises its advertiser clients which page it is and supplies demographic and behavioral data about the user. Each advertiser’s software then puts in its bid, and the entire automated, algorithm‐driven transaction is completed by the time the user’s page has finished loading, complete with the ad of the winning bidder (Marshall 2014; Smith 2015). What is crucial, however, is not so much the speed of the transaction, but the user data that makes RTB possible. Remembering that Google knows our search histories, and Facebook our “Likes,” and much more, these and other social media platforms have amassed commercially valuable marketing data on each and all of us: “…data‐harvesting is the beating heart of platform‐ driven consumer technology businesses” (Adhikari 2018, p. 19). There are three categories of commercial data. First‐party data is the data collected by social media platforms, publishers, or advertisers, from their own resources. Data about readers collected by magazines is first‐party data, for example. Second‐party data is data shared by an advertiser and some other business, such as a magazine publisher, in collaboration; while third‐party data is collected and made ­available for sale by a company that specializes in the business of data collection (Mornat 2016). Oracle’s Datalogix is an example, or the previously‐mentioned Salesforce (Auletta 2018, p. 157). Magazines, even print‐only ones, generate their own first‐party data, and they can use this in striking marketing deals with second parties. Magazines that cannot commercialize their data are vulnerable: as noted earlier, small, special‐interest magazines with small advertisers have been losing their advertisers to Google. Just as in the mass media age, when media organizations attracted audiences that could be sold to advertisers, so now do social media sell access to their users’ data, which is much more precisely targeted than, say, television ratings or even magazine reader surveys ever could be. Advertisers can target ads in accordance with such information, which users – able to generate their own content – have willingly provided. In the course of our everyday internet use, we offer up, both knowingly and unknowingly, information about ourselves. Whereas television ratings yield only a broad demographic breakdown of the anonymous mass audience, social media have unobtrusive electronic means of following users’ online tracks as the basis for personalizing commercial messages to individuals. Thus, with their information on users’ browsing history, “publishers”  –  such as portals, platforms, and other website owners  –  can offer advertisers “interest‐based” or “behaviorally targeted” advertising. Especially for social media sites, advertisers can target ads in accordance with information users have included in their profiles. The social media sites are unprecedented vehicles for expressive individualism, personal opinion, and peer interaction, encouraging users to “share” the details of their lives with their “friends,” which means that users are not only surrendering information about themselves, but also providing access to their social networks. This is what has been called the “empowerment–exploitation paradox” of social media (Sinclair 2012, p. 81). In the same way we pay the true price of “free” television by watching commercials, and accept the hidden costs of advertising passed on to us when we pay to consume goods and services, the true price of using the common internet platforms is the monetizable information we give over about ourselves and others. In both cases, the illusion of something for nothing overshadows the implicit transaction. What is new about the internet age is that individual users can be targeted directly by marketers, though not necessarily as individuals. This is where algorithms come in: “predictive ­audience models” able to discern “the particular pattern in user profiles and user transactions that are most indicative of a positive response to the ads. The model‐building process is a



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­ athematically sophisticated deduction process based on large quantities of data” (Shao 2011). m Algorithms are the techno‐mathematical means by which accumulated “big data” on users’ browsing histories can be analyzed in terms of demographic or lifestyle variables, location, or other relevant factors, resulting in “personalized” ads. The trend toward electronic personalization and behavioral targeting of advertising has its limits, however, and this is to the advantage of magazines. The much‐publicized breach of Facebook data to Cambridge Analytica in 2016 (Adhikari 2018), with its strong international backlash, has been just one of several data security scandals over recent decades (Amerding 2018). Cumulatively, these breaches have cooled the enthusiasm with which advertisers had formerly embraced digital advertising (Rogers 2017). This concern has been compounded by the ongoing problem with click fraud, as noted earlier, and other issues around the transparency and accuracy of the metrics of programmatic advertising – accurate measurement and calculation of ROI supposedly being one of its advantages for advertisers. Some of the biggest advertisers have also been pulling back because of the apparent lack of control over the appearance of their brand advertising on disreputable sites associated with race hate and pornographic content (Bond 2018). On the consumer side, and particularly since the Facebook scandal of 2016, many have become aware of how they are being targeted by internet advertising, resulting in the “#Delete Facebook” movement. Yet even before this, the emergence of ad‐blocking technologies allowed growing numbers of consumers to actively evade online advertising, not only on desktops and tablets, but particularly via mobile apps (Elder 2017). This is a cause for concern for Google and  Facebook, as it is yet another reason for advertisers to become disillusioned with digital advertising (Scott 2017). To the extent that programmatic advertising is focused on users rather than the sites they visit, it is all about data, rather than content (Green 2014). Even if it is targeted according to users’ known online behaviors, programmatic advertising historically has tended to commoditize publishers’ sites, that is, ad tech software has approached sites as fungible, or mutually interchangeable, with no reason to prioritize some sites over others. This is Turow’s (2012) argument, cited at the outset, that because advertisers can cheaply reach huge and ostensibly measurable numbers of known prospects with programmatic advertising, they are less likely to pay a premium for a magazine that claims to add value. Nevertheless, online magazines have an investment and an advantage in native advertising, which is the placement of paid advertising in a way that is integrated with the look and feel of the website on which it appears, and which the user can choose to view in the normal course of browsing. Print magazines can provide, for example, feature articles on travel and cuisine as a lush environment for ads for cruises and high‐end kitchen appliances; similarly, ads placed in online magazines harmonize with content, inviting a click‐through, even when labeled “sponsored.” Importantly, native advertising can also be automated: “advertisers are able to create content that can intuitively adapt and reformat itself to the appearance of the site, app and device that it will be displayed [on].” (DBS Interactive 2016)

Ad Tech and Critical Theory A critical theoretical perspective on the commercial exploitation of audiences emerged in the age of mass media. Dallas Smythe’s influential view was that audiences did “work” for advertisers by giving their attention to advertising media – magazines as much as broadcasting. In this sense the audience was a “commodity” that media assembled to be “sold” to advertisers (Smythe 1977). Ever since the internet was opened up to advertising in the mid‐1990s, various commercial interests have sought to form and exploit some relation to users, the new kind of audience that the internet had brought into being. The “work” metaphor still survives in the contemporary critical literature. Theorists argue that because our freely chosen online behaviors are being

116 Sinclair f­ ollowed so as to collect information that can then be used to sell us goods and services that this is “immaterial labor,” a form of work in which we produce ourselves as economically valuable resources for advertisers. Robert Bodle, for example, refers to “the commodification of social labor (playbor), where personal information is turned into product, and the consumer becomes the (unpaid) producer” (Bodle 2017, p. 140). Other theorists go further, arguing that the innovation of automated ad placement, as with programmatic advertising, and the application of techno‐mathematical computation in the form of algorithms mark a new era in the history of communication media and consumer culture: the “algorithmic turn” toward an “algorithmic culture” (Brodmerkel and Carah 2016, pp. 16–17). This culture needs to be understood not just in human terms, but rather in the context of the complex relationship between humans and the “material agency” (Brodmerkel and Carah 2016, p. 17) of non‐human entities, notably computer technologies. Actor–network theory (ANT) has been tentatively proposed as a guide to such an understanding (Hardy 2017, p. 23). Current maneuvers and experimentation in the ad tech industry suggest that even more intricate relations between persons and technologies can be expected in the future. In the advertising industry trade press, the distributed ledger of blockchain technology is being discussed as a means of bringing users into a more direct relationship with publishers and advertisers, bypassing Google and Facebook (Bush 2017). On the other hand, Google and Microsoft are working to consolidate their dominance in search advertising with the application of artificial intelligence (AI) – specifically, machine learning that enables them to refine the accuracy of personalized ad targeting (Simonite 2017). Similarly, Google has been trialing the insertion of “immersive” 360° ads into virtual reality (VR) content, such as games (Stinson 2017), while Facebook has been developing a mass‐market VR headset (Bloomberg News 2017). These instances can be seen as “each part of a larger effort to engineer the entanglements between bodies and media platforms” (Brodmerkel and Carah 2016, p. 117). How much, and how soon, these nascent innovations might have an impact on the readers and publishers of online magazines remains to be seen. More immediately, there has been a significant development in subscriber access to premium cross‐platform magazines, using existing online streaming technology. In 2009, leading magazine publishers in the USA, notably Conde Nast, Meredith, NewsCorp, and Hearst formed a company, Next Issue, and launched Texture, a monthly online subscription service on the Netflix streaming model. For $US10 a month, subscribers gain access to a bundle of 200 magazines, with titles ranging from Vanity Fair to Sports Illustrated. In 2018, Texture was acquired by Apple, giving publishers wider subscriber reach, while Apple achieved command over quality content and gained a vehicle for its own subscription services (Mickle 2018; Vanian 2018). This business model may allow certain online magazines in the USA to protect and expand their subscriber base, but it does not p ­ rovide a comprehensive and international solution for distribution and monetization in the magazine industry as a whole, which has been left to survive by its wits in the electronic jungle of the ad tech ecosystem.

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118 Sinclair Mitchell, J. (2016). Bauer Media aggregates magazine content. The Australian (14 November). Mornat, L. (2016). Understanding customers better through first, second and third party data. Commanders Act (13 October). https://www.commandersact.com/en/understanding‐customers‐better‐through‐ first‐second‐and‐third‐party‐data. Nicholas, D. (2017). 5 Pubs who abandoned print for digital‐only magazines. Mequoda (1 August). https://www.mequoda.com/articles/digital‐magazine‐publishing/digital‐only‐magazines. O’Brien, J. (2012). How Red Bull takes content marketing to the extreme. Mashable (20 December). https://mashable.com/2012/12/19/red‐bull‐content‐marketing/. Peters, J. (2010). Web focus helps revitalize The Atlantic. New York Times (12 December). https://www. nytimes.com/2010/12/13/business/media/13atlantic.html. Peterson, T. (2014). Amazon tops list of Google’s 25 biggest search advertisers. AdAge (15 September). http://adage.com/article/digital/amazon‐tops‐list‐google‐s‐25‐biggest‐search‐advertisers/ 294922. Pfanner, E. (2006). Publicis buys Digitas, an online marketer, for $1.3 billion. New York Times (20 December). https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/business/worldbusiness/20iht‐publicis. 3966509.html. Quinn, T. (2018). Digital magazines: news and a history timeline. Magforum (January). http://www.magforum. com/digital_history.htm#top. Red Bull (2018). The Red Bulletin. https://www.redbull.com/int‐en/theredbulletin/about (accessed 8 April 2018). Robinson, S. (2016). What is the PESO model for marketing? Iterative Marketing (2 November). http:// iterativemarketing.net/peso‐model‐marketing. Robischon, N. (2016). How BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti is building a 100‐year media company. Fast Company (16February).https://www.fastcompany.com/3056057/how‐buzzfeeds‐jonah‐peretti‐is‐building‐a‐100‐year‐ media‐company. Roderick, L. (2017). How brands are switching up their approach to magazine advertising. Marketing Week (23 August). https://www.marketingweek.com/2017/08/23/brands‐magazine‐advertising‐ change. Rogers, C. (2017). What is programmatic advertising? A beginner’s guide. Marketing Week (27 March). https://www.marketingweek.com/2017/03/27/programmatic‐advertising. Sar, S. and Rodriguez, L. (2015). The business of magazines: advertising, circulation and content issues. In: The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research (eds. D. Abrahamson and M. Prior‐Miller), 179–196. London and New York: Routledge. Scott, M. (2017). Use of ad‐blocking software rises by 30% worldwide. New York Times (31 January). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/technology/ad‐blocking‐internet.html. Shao, X. (2011). It’s the algorithm, stupid., ClickZ (14 March). http://www.clickz.com/clickz/ column/2031519/algorithm‐stupid. Simonite, T. (2017). Google and Microsoft can use AI to extract many more ad dollars from our clicks. Wired(31August).https://www.wired.com/story/big‐tech‐can‐use‐ai‐to‐extract‐many‐more‐ad‐dollars‐ from‐our‐clicks. Sinclair, J. (2012). Advertising, the Media and Globalisation. London and New York: Routledge. Smith, B. (2016). Clickbait copycat. Adespresso (4 July). https://adespresso.com/blog/clickbait‐facebook‐ advertising‐examples. Smith, G. (2018). Time magazine, Fortune put up for sale by new owner Meredith. Bloomberg (22 March). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018‐03‐21/time‐magazine‐fortune‐are‐put‐on‐block‐by‐ new‐owner‐meredith. Smith, M. (2015). Targeted: How Technology Is Revolutionizing Advertising and the Way Companies Reach Consumers. New York: Amacom. Smythe, D. (1977). Communications: blindspot of western marxism. Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 1 (3): 1–27. Stinson, E. (2017). VR ads are almost here. Don’t act surprised. Wired (21 July). https://www.wired.com/ story/vr‐ads‐are‐almost‐here. Story, L. (2007). WPP Group to buy 24/7 Real Media, an online ad company. New York Times (18 May). https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/business/media/18online‐web.html.



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The Onion (2018). Report: We don’t make any money if you don’t click the fucking link. https://www. theonion.com/report‐we‐don‐t‐make‐any‐money‐if‐you‐don‐t‐click‐the‐1823460398 (accessed 6 April 2018). Trachtenberg, J. (2017). Koch‐backed Meredith picks up Time for $2.4bn. The Australian (28 November). Turner, F. (2014). When is native advertising not just glorified advertorial? The Drum (28 February 28). http:// www.thedrum.com/opinion/2014/02/28/when‐native‐advertising‐not‐just‐glorified‐advertorial. Turow, J. (2012). The Daily you: How the New Advertising Industry Is Defining your Identity and your Worth. Newhaven CT: Yale University Press. Vanian, J. (2018). Apple just bought Texture, a Netflix‐like service for magazines. Fortune (12 March). http://fortune.com/2018/03/12/apple‐texture‐netflix‐magazines. WARC Data (2018). WARC says global ad spend growth to accelerate. Campaign Brief (24 January). http://www.campaignbrief.com/2018/01/warc‐says‐global‐ad‐spend‐grow.html. Weissbrot, A. (2016). How Annalect contributed to Omnicom’s big year. AdExchanger (19 September). https://adexchanger.com/agencies/annalect‐contributed‐omnicoms‐big‐year. Wired Staff 2014. For today’s ‘Mad Men’, it’s nerds who rule, not drapers. Wired (23 May). https://www. wired.com/2014/05/mad‐men‐on‐the‐net WPP 2018. AKQA. http://www.wpp.com/wpp/press (accessed 6 April 2018). Xi, C. (2017). What is the adtech industry doing to combat ad fraud? Digital Marketing Magazine (7 August). http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/digital‐marketing‐advertising/what‐is‐the‐adtech‐ industry‐doing‐to‐combat‐ad‐fraud/4534.

9

An Extraordinary Duckling B2B Magazines as Information and Networking Tools for Professionals Dan Zhang and Paul Dwyer

Introduction Business‐to‐business (B2B) journals have been seen as the homeliest and least important sibling in the family of magazine publishing. The B2B sector is, however, an extraordinary duckling because of its monetary focus, professional information and networking utilities, and richness of product offerings. B2B magazines have always had a focused and powerful mission, which is to help readers make money (Abrams and Meyers 2010; Fosdick 2003; Fosdick and Cho 2005; Rutenbeck 1994). Even the seemingly non‐pecuniary subset of professional knowledge publications aims to help their readers build marketable skills so they can achieve more rewarding careers (Zhang 2016a). Researchers should not be shy of acknowledging this pragmatism. B2B magazines offer two utilities that help their readers make money. First, they empower professionals by meeting their information needs (Peck 2015). Second, and this is not widely recognized, they allow businesspeople and professionals to connect with each other. Therefore, B2B publishing has functioned as a professional social medium long before the emergence of today’s digital social media. To deliver these utilities, B2B magazines have relied on controlled‐ circulation, advertising support, subscription, retail, and on‐demand customization business models – a variety that is unrivaled within the magazine media family and rarely seen in any other single media sector. This chapter reviews studies of B2B magazines published over more than four decades to demonstrate the uniqueness of these periodicals and to identify research directions for the digital era. It is common to see most studies about B2B magazines start with laments of some kind, including that the sector is understudied, little understood, or consistently neglected (Edwards and Pieczka 2013; Endres 1994; Sweeney and Hollifield 2000; Wilkinson and Merle 2013) or that it has been labeled inconsistently as B2B media, trade press, trade magazines, or specialized business press (Endres 1994; Peck 2015). Even more problematic are the dwindling opportunities to study B2B magazines as they fold up or metamorphose into other media forms. This chapter examines the increasingly data‐driven and event‐based nature of B2B magazines and proposes future research perspectives.

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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Overview of Existing Research Two methods enabled a comprehensive search for English‐language academic studies on B2B magazines. The first source of such articles was the Bibliography of Published Research on Magazine and Journal Periodicals, 8th Ed. (Prior‐Miller and Associates 2012), a census and analysis of abstracts of academic research on magazines published in Communication Abstracts, American Periodicals, the online Journal of Magazine and New Media Research (recently renamed Journal of Magazine Media), and other sources over a 25‐year period up to August 2012 (more up‐to‐date information is listed in Table 9.1). More than 1500 studies are listed in searchable form, with keywords provided in most entries. The second approach to finding published articles was searching online in Google Scholar and the online database EBSCOhost  –  including its subsections Mass Media and Communication Complete, Business Source Complete, and the Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) for additional and more updated journal articles. The search terms included combinations by pairing keywords from two groups. The first group included the following words used as adjectives/ modifiers: business‐to‐business, trade, B2B, industrial, industry, professional, specialized, business, and specialized‐business. The second group included the following nouns: media, press, magazine, journal, publication, publisher, publishing, information, and journalism. To search, one of the first‐group keywords was paired with one of the second‐group keywords. The searches resulted in 170 articles. Further screening excluded studies that were not about B2B publishing and publications or mentioned them only as a minor example in a discussion about consumer magazine publishing. Also excluded were chapters of magazine publishing practice books or textbooks, papers published before 1970 and therefore with limited relevance to contemporary publishing, and articles whose full text was not accessible through online databases. The remaining 65 studies were published on the subject of B2B magazine between 1970 and 2018. Of these, 36 (55%) were included in the Prior‐Miller and Associates (2012) bibliography. The sampled articles are marked with * in the reference list of this chapter. The next steps involved quantitative and qualitative overviews. The quantitative analysis outlines the landscape of B2B magazine research in the English‐language academic world to illustrate the distribution of interest, expertise, research approaches, and impacts. The qualitative analysis identifies the major themes and theoretical constructs in the literature.

Quantitative Overview The identified 65 articles on B2B magazines published in English‐language journals over 48 years (1970–2018) average less than 1.4 articles per year. Figure 9.1 illustrates their distribution by decade. It is unclear whether the low number in the 1970s illustrates a paucity of research or a sparsity of full‐text articles from that decade in digital databases. Table 9.1, which displays the locales of each article’s author(s), reveals the dominance of American scholars in this research domain. However, this dominance has declined after 2000 as studies authored Table 9.1  Locales of authors of published studies on B2B magazines by decade. 2000+

1990s

1980s

1970s

Asia‐Pacific

3

11%

0

0%

1

7%

0

0%

Europe

8

29%

1

5%

1

7%

0

0%

International

1

4%

1

5%

0

0%

0

0%

USA

16

57%

17

90%

13

87%

3

100%

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Zhang and Dwyer 25 20

19

20

15

15 10

8

5 0

3

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

Figure 9.1  Distributions of sampled papers by decades.

by European and Asia‐Pacific authors have accounted for a greater proportion (40%). Only two articles reflected international collaborations – one between Swedish and Sri Lankan scholars (Tomson and Weerasuriya 1990) and the other between American and African scholars (Pratt et al. 2002). The 65 articles were published in 39 journals. Journalism Quarterly (1928–1995) and its continuation title, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (1995 onward), published nine of the articles (14%). Industrial Marketing Management published four (6%). Agricultural History, Agriculture and Human Values, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Media Economics, Journal of Advertising, and Journal of Applied Communications published three articles each. The rest of the journals published one or two articles about B2B magazines. The journals represented eight academic disciplines. Journals in media and communications published 52% of the articles, followed by advertising and marketing (12%), agricultural sociology (11%), business management (9%), and public relations (6%). The authors’ academic specialties also varied widely into eight categories (Table 9.2). If an article’s two or more authors were in the same academic area, their common specialty was counted collectively. If they did not share an academic area, each author’s specialty was recorded. Two groups of public relations theorists were grouped in the Journalism, Media, and Communication specialty, which was home to most authors of B2B magazine studies (44%). The next most common specialty was Business Studies which includes advertising and marketing scholarship (17%), followed by Agricultural and Industrial Communication (16%).

Table 9.2  Academic specialties of the authors of studies about B2B magazines. Specialty of authors

Frequency

Percentage (%)

Journalism, media and communications

31

44

Business studies (including advertising and marketing)

12

17

Agricultural and industrial communication

11

16

Humanity and sociology

5

7

Medical and pharmaceutical studies

5

7

Publishing industry practice

4

6

Media management and economics

1

1

Geography

1

1

Total

70

100



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Table 9.3  Subject/trade areas covered by articles on B2B magazines. Subject or trade area

Frequency

Percentage (%)

Agriculture and farming

19

29

General

16

25

Media and journalism

9

14

Medical, healthcare and pharmaceutical

6

9

Advertising and marketing

4

6

Entertainment

3

5

Public relations

2

3

Building and construction

1

2

Chemical

1

2

Communication

1

2

Food service and retail

1

2

Furniture

1

2

Travel

1

2

Total

65

100

Table 9.3 illustrates the subjects or trade areas covered by the sampled B2B magazine research papers. Articles studying Agriculture and Farming magazines accounted for most of the studies (29%), followed by General (25%), which discussed B2B magazines and B2B publishing as a whole without specified industrial focus, Media and Journalism (14%) and Medical (9%). Most of the studies (41) used quantitative methods, followed by qualitative approaches (23 articles). Only one article (Gluch and Stenberg 2006) used mixed methods. The study also recorded 76 uses of eight research methods in the 65 articles. The most frequently used research method was content analysis (in 22 articles), followed by survey (in 17 articles), textual analysis (in 14), case study (in 10), historical/archival research (in four), interviews (in three), focus groups (in two) and market data analysis (in four articles). Twenty‐one theories were used 31 times in the selected articles, with uses and gratifications and agenda settings (each 12%) being the most popular. Some papers used more than one theoretical framework, while 48% of them did not use any. This supports Endres’s (1994) observation that research in the specialized business press in the United States lacks a solid theoretical foundation. None of the articles attempted theory building. More problematic than the small number of studies on B2B publishing is their limited impact, as illustrated by their citation numbers, which are often (23 of the 65) in the single digits. An overview of the sampled articles’ citations as recorded by Google Scholar as of October 2018 is presented in Table 9.4. The 65 sampled articles have been cited a total of 1269 times, including in non‐English‐­ language publications. About 80% of the citations appear in research not focused on B2B ­publishing. The article with the highest impact (121 citations) employs a uses and gratifications analysis across all types of magazines, including trade publications (Payne et al. 1988). In sum, the articles included in this overview illustrate the paucity of published research on B2B publishing as well as a lack of academic interest and the low impact of what has been published. The increase of publications on this subject outside the USA is, however, a positive development. No studies have attempted to explain the prevalence of scholarship on agricultural publications, which are indeed an important (but not the only) type of B2B publishing media. The primary foci of such studies were journalism practice and ethics. For example, Reisner and Hays (1989), Hays and Reisner (1990, 1991), Reisner (1992), and Reisner and Walter (1994) examined commercial influences on agricultural journalism. Abrams and Meyers (2010) used gatekeeping theory to

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Table 9.4  Citations of articles about B2B magazines, according to Google Scholar as of October 2018. Descriptive statistics (n = 65)

Cited

Cited in studies on B2B publishing

Cited in non‐ B2B‐related studies

Mean

20

4

16

Median

14

3

9

Minimum

0

0

0

Maximum

121

20

116

Sum

1269

249

1020

illustrate how agricultural journalists conceptualized agriculture risks differently from the national press and emphasized actionable information intended as a resources for their audiences to cope with the risks. Another focus was using agriculture media to analyze national media market structures (e.g. Stuhlfaut 2005; Van der Wurff 2003). Sweeney and Hollifield (2000), who analyzed the agenda‐setting capabilities of agricultural trade publications in the USA, found that despite their stronger topic expertise, they were less successful than national media. Agricultural journals were also used to study aspects of rural societies, often in historical perspectives (e.g. Casey 2004; Stoker and Arrington 2010; Walter 1995, 1996; Wood and Pawson 2008) because these publications often meet the information needs of the farming community on a range of topics, such as education, domestic economy, social life, and even childrearing (McMurry 1989). Another popular area of B2B media studies focused on medical, health, and pharmaceutical journals and magazines, which have been considered a stand‐alone publishing genre (e.g. Gussow 1984). Hybrids of peer‐reviewed science journals and medical professional magazines, these publications were studied primarily in terms of their commercial side, on aspects related to advertising quality, effects, and ethics (e.g. Hawkins and Aber 1993; Othman et  al. 2009; Tomson and Weerasuriya 1990; Walton 1980). The limited scope of the papers that could be included in this overview raises a concern that B2B magazines have not received the scholarly attention necessary to fully understand where these publications fit within the context of magazine studies. The purpose of the following section is to attempt to fill in the gaps by employing a methodological approach that complements and enriches the initial enumerative analysis.

Qualitative Analysis This study of 65 sampled articles identified four themes, and within those themes, eight topics under which B2B magazines have been studied (Table 9.5). The following sections will review each of the themes and the topics it comprises. Table 9.5  Themes and topics evident in the studies included in the overview. Themes

Topics

B2B journalism

Commercialization of B2B journalism Editorial ethics and practices

B2B publications as advertising media

Advertising ethics and practices Advertising effects

Relationships with occupational fields

Audience value and effects Stakeholder relations in B2B publishing

Market dynamics and management issues

Market and management issues Digital publishing



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Journalism in B2B Magazines Media scholars have studied trade journalism as a feature of commercialization intended to suit audience needs. Trade journalists have to consider not only their own critical economic interests, but also those of audiences (Abrams and Meyers 2010; Fosdick 2003; Fosdick and Cho 2005; Rutenbeck 1994; Walter 1995, 1996). Although helping audiences improve their ability to make money is one of the greatest values that B2B publishing has to provide, it has often been accompanied by concerns about editorial ethics and practices. The literature identifies three factors behind potential bias in B2B magazines’ editorial content: (i) structural constraints imposed by powerful industry stakeholders (Wilkinson and Merle 2013), particularly advertiser pressure (Hays and Reisner 1990, 1991; Reisner and Hays 1989; Reisner and Walter 1994); (ii) the tendency of B2B journalists to make editorial decisions with a pro‐industry bias (Abrams and Meyers 2010; Reisner 1992) and position‐taking (Walter 1995, 1996); and (iii) internal resource limitations, including limited journalistic competence (Gluch and Stenberg 2006) and limited access to information sources (Sweeney and Hollifield 2000). Corrigan (2018) summarized the above by arguing that “trade publications employ daunting industry jargon, and they can be cozy with the industries they cover” (p. 2751). Communications and media researchers, such as Hollifield (1997), Reisner and Hays (1989), and Wilkinson and Merle (2013), have assuaged these concerns by indicating that B2B journalists usually receive journalism training, work to accepted professional standards, and prioritize quality information as a service to their readers. Historical studies present several examples of B2B magazines’ meeting readers’ needs for commercial information (e.g. Sullivan 1974; Zhang 2008) or professional knowledge in a specific field, such as farming (Casey 2004; Marti 1980; Stoker and Arrington 2010). Similar findings have been reported by Kaur and Mathur (1981), who found that the production criteria for farm magazines met readers’ knowledge and cultural needs, and by Clark et al. (1990), who found a positive association between the readability of articles and the degree to which they influenced readers. Non‐communication scholars, such as Gluch and Stenberg (2006), who have contrasted journalistic reporting with their own academic expertise, have been more critical of the quality and practices of B2B journalism. Milavsky (1993) has also critiqued B2B journalists’ infrequent use of primary data, professing of often superficial opinions, and under‐representation of non‐ European countries.

Advertising Media The second approach to studying B2B magazines explored their functions as an advertising medium. The studies dealt with two main aspects: (i) advertising ethics and practices; and (ii) effects of advertising on audiences. Business management scholars contributed most of the literature on B2B advertising. Studies of medical and pharmaceutical journal advertisements suggest these messages are of low quality due to misleading and ambiguous messages (Othman et al. 2009) and a failure to provide scientific data (Tomson and Weerasuriya 1990). Sommer and Pilisuk (1982) have further argued that the presence of pesticide manufacturers on the pages of farm journals is unethical because it could mislead readers. On the positive side, Baack et al. (2016) challenged traditional perceptions of B2B advertising as a void of creativity and discovered that creative B2B ads positively affect the attitudes and behaviors of audiences. On advertising effectiveness, Bearden et  al. (1979) found that consumer magazines were more efficient than trade magazines in reaching a large number of organizational buyers. This finding is potentially alarming for B2B publishers because they face the prospect of having more specialized niche advertisers than general retailers. Most other researchers in this area have used B2B magazines to study issues of concern to the advertising industry, without necessarily contributing any insights about the B2B publishing industry. Easton and Toner (1983) showed industrial advertising largely provides information

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instead creating images or changing attitudes. Lohtia et  al. (1994) also argued that meeting audiences’ information needs is the primary factor for trade journal advertising to be considered effective. Researchers have also studied the effects of advertising on audience actions. In the B2B area, this has included not only brand impression or brand awareness, but also purchasing decisions, such as doctors’ prescriptions (Othman et al. 2009; Walton 1980) and the purchase of resins by the plastic industry (Donovan 1979). Other issues that have been studied in the context of B2B advertising include trustworthiness, treatment of gender and racial profiles (e.g. Easton and Toner 1983; Hawkins and Aber 1993; Stevenson and Swayne 2011), response order (e.g. Sekely and Blakney 1994), and text and image layout (e.g. Clark et al. 1990; Soley and Reid 1983). However, little attention has been given to studying how B2B advertising functions to provide connectivity between the sellers and buyers.

Relationships with Occupational and Professional Fields The analyzed papers studied the links between B2B magazines and the related occupational fields from two perspectives: the first focusing on the values and effects that B2B magazines create for their audiences and the second on how the stakeholders in the fields affect B2B magazines and their practices. All studies pointed out the function of B2B publishing to keep professionals and decision makers informed of their trades. For example, Sullivan (1974) noted that Advertising Age met “a real information need” (p. 94). Professionals rely on B2B publications for work‐related information, whether they are farmers (e.g. Hays and Reisner 1990; Stuhlfaut 2005; Walter 1996), doctors (e.g. Othman et al. 2009), engineers (e.g. Gluch and Stenberg 2006), policy makers (e.g. Hollifield 1997), academics (e.g. Wilkinson and Merle 2013), or medical students (e.g. Shoemaker and Inskip 1985). B2B magazines provide information about both professional values and practical work skills. For  example, agricultural journals have historically shaped rural social values as well as farmers’ professional identities in the USA (Casey 2004; Stoker and Arrington 2010; Stuhlfaut 2005), although some scholars argue they did so less efficiently than they should have (Walter 1995, 1996). In another example, Cronin (1993) found that American journalists a century ago preferred to read a media trade journal that took a leadership role in professionalism debates than another one with a vague stance. Maier (2000) argued that journalism trade publications have shaped and reinforced high ethical standards for journalists, often seeing themselves as a corrective and moral compass for the profession. Similarly, Edwards and Pieczka (2013) suggested that PR Weekly magazine helped construct project archetypes that led to the occupational legitimacy of the public relations profession. Overall, researchers with roots in a specific professional or occupational field (e.g. Gluch and Stenberg 2006) tended to be more critical of  B2B journalism’s professional knowledge building role than did scholars specializing in ­journalism, media, and communications. Van der Wurff (2002b, 2003, 2005) has consistently defined B2B and professional information as both “need to know” and task‐related. What emerges from the literature is a potential hierarchy of needs or uses and gratifications for the audiences of B2B publications. Often, being informed is the readers’ most immediate need, while discussions of professional knowledge and values can wait. But when B2B publication readers face time‐bound tasks and decisions, information enabling these actions becomes more valuable. For example, Shoemaker and Inskip (1985) found that senior dentist students and new dentists’ are highly motivated to read medical journals about how to run clinical practices. Othman et  al. (2009) found that pharmaceutical advertisements in medical journals affected doctors’ prescription decisions. Studies of agricultural magazines noted how farmers have used actionable information from B2B periodicals to make complex marketing decisions (Hays and Reisner 1990) or protect themselves from financial risks (Abrams and Meyers 2010). In late‐nineteenth‐century New Zealand, the country’s first agricultural periodical circulated information that helped to shape



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farming practices (Wood and Pawson 2008) and task completion are typical parts of the readers’ efforts when doing their jobs. Scholars have also paid attention to key constituencies in the B2B publishing business, such as sources, associations, and the government. Edwards and Pieczka (2013) and Napoli (1997) describe B2B publishing as a self‐contained subsystem within the larger system of occupational fields. Edwards and Pieczka further note that “the close links between such media and the occupational field” (p. 9) result in a conflation of sources and audiences, “where readers and their professional lives also comprise the main news sources for reporters” (p. 10). These news sources, in turn, provide information subsidies to B2B media (Sweeney and Hollifield 2000; Wilkinson and Merle 2013). As in mainstream journalism (Shoemaker and Reese 1996), sources’ selectivity in providing information to preferred media and journalists affects the strength and objectivity of B2B publishing (Ruth‐McSwain 2008). Some scholars have expressed concerns that B2B media often rely on a limited number of elite sources, resulting in content dominated by a few people’s opinions (Abrams and Meyers 2010; Edwards and Pieczka 2013; Gluch and Stenberg 2006; Wilkinson and Merle 2013). Professional and trade associations also hold stakes in B2B publishing, even though many professional magazines that started as association newspapers are now published independently, usually to the benefit of their readers. For example, Marti (1980) notes that as American agricultural journals walked away from professional societies to become independent publications in the first half of the nineteenth century, they were able to improve their use of various farming knowledge sources, resulting in improved diffusion of knowledge. Little research exists on the relationship between associations and B2B media, possibly because professional societies’ influence is negligible, except when they are considered the “voice” or information source for their industries (Edwards and Pieczka 2013). Nor have government regulations been a significant topic for B2B publishing research. Only Mitchell (1989) studied one historical case of political pressure that affected the B2B publishing industry in the USA in the 1950s in fear of communism, to discover that American media succumbed to the hysteria of McCarthyism.

Market Dynamics and Management Issues Although academic interest in B2B publishing remains low, research foci have diversified to include concerns about the digital distribution and the market structure of B2B media. Most recently, scholars have viewed digital technology in B2B publishing as a force of change that has challenged, displaced, or dismantled the entrenched business models (Carroll 2002; Mazza and Pedersen 2004; Van der Wurff 2002a,b, 2003) while simultaneously creating new audience values, such as timely access to information (Carroll 2002; Ingham and Weedon 2008), and meeting the task‐oriented content of audiences consumption needs (Randle 2003; Van der Wurff 2002a,b). In the USA, early patterns of B2B media ownership and employment were studied by Endres (1988) and later by Stuhlfaut (2005), who identified a moderately concentrated market structure of B2B media from 1993 to 2002 as well as constraints placed by new technology and alternative advertising channels on the publishers’ ability to set prices in concentrated markets. Mazza and Pedersen (2004), who studied B2B media in Denmark and Italy from 1960 to 2000, found that the trade press gained greater social relevance, reach, and influence over that period. They discovered that business journalism shifted from being news‐oriented to becoming more analytical and problem‐oriented, and the central mission was to produce strategic information for decision‐makers. Van der Wurff (2002a,b, 2003, 2005), who examined the professional and trade publishing market in the Netherlands, systematically advanced the organizational theory framework to study B2B publications in three ways. First, employing Picard’s (1989) concepts of the information market and attention market enabled the author to provide a sophisticated description and categorization of content and advertising service providers. Van der Wurff (2003) also illustrated the competitive strategies employed (i) by publishers offering low‐price products in

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greater diversity in advertising‐supported models for the attention market; and (ii) by those offering high‐differentiation products in lesser diversity in subscription models for the high‐end information market. Second, low‐cost electronic reproduction and distribution technologies disrupted the traditional publishers’ control of the information market. The result was disintermediation, meaning that B2B publishers were increasingly competing against original content producers and advertisers who can bypass publishers and distribute information directly to professionals (Van der Wurff 2002a,b). Third, re‐integration occurred as traditional publishers transitioned to electronic publishing strategies to counter these threats. Van der Wurff (2005) studied the publishers’ product diversification and differentiation strategies against the basic market conditions of competition and ownership concentration, arguing that the success of the publishers’ product and content differentiation strategies depended on the audiences’ willingness to pay high subscription prices. Among scholars using social and historical perspectives, Brake (1998) examined the British publishing industry periodicals in the last decade of the nineteenth century as the publishing industry was flourishing toward the end of the Industrial Revolution. The author pointed out that the publishing industry had undergone a professionalizing process to represent the interests of authors, newsagents, readers, journalists, editors, and literary agents, after the advertising‐supported business model of B2B publishing was already established, and that specialized content offerings were key for publishers seeking to provide commercial functions to specific reading communities. To sum up the qualitative review, the utility of B2B magazines to provide professional information was the primary focus of the analyzed literature. However, researchers mainly identified professional knowledge content as the information product. In the twenty‐first century, scholars such as Mazza and Pedersen (2004) started to notice that B2B magazine content had increasingly shifted from news to analytical and problem‐oriented strategic information for decision‐makers. The commercialization and perceived industrial bias of the trade press led researchers to consider B2B journalism as a second‐class citizen in the town hall of journalism. Studies on B2B magazines’ advertising functions focused mostly on display ads or generic forms and failed to notice advertising genres such as the classified, recruitment, and product catalogs, which have traditionally constituted the main revenue streams of B2B publishing (Whittaker 2008). Caudill et al. (1987) were the only authors to study job and classified advertisements in a newspaper trade journal, but the aim was only to identify which professional criteria (i.e. education, writing skills) were most sought after in American newsrooms. Studies of B2B media in the twenty‐first century supplemented the journalistic and advertising approaches with insights into the media business, which is driven by its commercial interests to provide useful and quality information that satisfies the needs of the audiences. Sparks (2002), from industrial point of view, predicted the polarization of B2B information content into free and low‐cost general news versus high‐end must‐have business intelligences. The literature suggests that B2B magazines provided knowledge as an information utility to keep professionals informed so that they could make decisions and maintain professional and ethical standards. But the audience value of B2B publishing has not been fully identified. This is the subject of the next section.

Examining B2B Media in the Context of Magazine Studies Not only are existing academic studies on B2B magazines relatively few, but they have also had a minimal impact, being judged by their low citation counts. B2B media are not a popular research topic, which may reflect a lack of funding and the fact that many libraries did not keep extensive archives of trade magazines (Endres 1994). She has also argued that journalism highereducation programs often overlook the subject because the journalism faculty may lack relevant training. As digital and data technologies are transforming B2B magazines into information and service brands, they may no longer fall within the realm of magazine studies and traditional magazine study approaches may no longer apply to them, and perhaps they never should have.



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It may be at odds with this volume to say that B2B magazines should not be studied as magazines. However, studying B2B publishing as a sub‐branch of magazines has limited the scope and the knowledge contributions of the resulting research. Most of the analyzed academic studies were conducted within a broader tradition of magazine publishing research. All the journal articles mentioned “magazine” as an interchangeable alias of the B2B publication, trade publication, and journal (specialized) business press, etc. Studying B2B journals as a sub‐genre of magazines means they have been treated as a minority subject within a minority subject in media research. Among all media, magazines receive the least amount of scholarly attention (Edwards and Pieczka 2013; Fosdick and Cho 2005; Gerlach 1987; Johnson 2007). Gerlach (1987) showed that magazine‐related research accounted for 6% of all the research published in Journalism Quarterly over a 20‐year period, and “special periodicals” were under‐represented as a minority of this minority. Magazine‐study approaches in their traditional fashion have resulted in several limitations of B2B media research. First, the magazine‐focused approach limited the presentation of the multitude of B2B publishing product types. The concept of a specialized business press (Endres 1994; Hollifield 1997; Sweeney and Hollifield 2000) and the notion of B2B advertising were oversimplified. The specialized business press was largely understood to be the collective nomenclature for trade journals, magazines, and sometimes newsletters; therefore, trade journalism was not studied differently from magazine journalism except that its audiences are businesspeople and decision‐makers. The overarching terms of “information” and “news” were used to describe trade journalism genres, without differentiating the many forms of B2B content, such as data, journalism, and professional knowledge that serve the needs of different types of audiences. The existing literature merely identified the information needs of the B2B audiences (e.g. Hollifield 1997; Lohtia et al. 1994; Peck 2015; Sparks 2002; Sullivan 1974), thereby simplifying the utilities that B2B publishing can provide. Some also specified that such information needs are task‐oriented (Abrams and Meyers 2010; Randle 2003; Van der Wurff 2002a,b, 2005). B2B audiences have usually been identified as business decision makers and professionals, but no study has examined whether the information needs of decision makers and professionals are the same or different. Second, information is only one of the utilities that B2B media provide; the other utility is connectivity (Zhang 2016b), which is similar to the concept of the “virtual community” discussed by increasing numbers of general‐interest or consumer magazine studies (e.g. Aitamurto 2013; Rauwers et al. 2016). None of the sampled studies in this overview has discussed the connectivity needs of B2B audiences. Connectivity delivery methods, such as events, conferences, and exhibitions, have had limited presence as a subject of magazine research. B2B media service products, such as advertising and events, generate awareness, cause responses, enable transactions (Chamblee and Sandler 1992; Fang et al. 2015), and establish B2B connections and interactions (Mair 2013; Mair and Thompson 2009; Medjahed et  al. 2003). All these reflect the connectivity utility: professionals meet with professionals, advertisers connect with their audiences, and companies interact with their clients and stakeholders. Third, the magazine focus has limited examinations of the diversity of business models supporting the B2B media. Consumer magazines and newspapers mostly use the hybrid of advertising and subscription business models, which is in line with the dual‐product market model (Picard 1989). No literature discussed this because it appeared to be an overly obvious matter that deserved no special attention. But, in reality, the B2B publishing media include companies such as Reuters, which rely completely on corporate subscription revenues. There are also free controlled‐circulation publications, such as Centaur’s Marketing Week in the UK, which rely only advertising revenues. A few studies did mention this business model (e.g. Sweeney and Hollifield 2000), which is specific to B2B media, but without depth. None attempted to differentiate the controlled‐circulation B2B publications using people‐based distribution lists from free consumer newspapers and magazines whose distributions are “location‐based” (Bakker 2002, p. 182).

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Table 9.6  Overview of common B2B media products, business models, and utilities. Product

Business Models

Utility

Examples

Data and intelligence

Subscription

Information

Reuters, Bloomberg

Subscription periodicals

Advertising‐supported subscription

Information

Farmers Weekly

Controlled circulation periodicals

Advertising

Connectivity/ information

Marketing Weekly

Events

Advertising/sponsorship/ paid‐for by exhibitors/ paid‐for by attendees

Connectivity/ information

UBM (United Business Media) events and exhibitions

The considerations of product variety, utility provision, and sustaining business models of B2B media have been synthesized in Table 9.6. As this chapter has revealed, academic studies over the past five decades have examined only a small proportion of the B2B media sector represented by magazines and journals. To achieve a comprehensive understanding, researchers should examine all aspects of the products, business models, and utilities listed in the Table 9.6.

B2B Media in the Digital Age Digitalization and technology have transformed B2B magazine publishing, resulting in the disappearance of print magazines and migration to digital publishing, along with a diversification of digital product offerings: e‐magazines, websites, databases, webinars, and social media. B2B media are taking new forms. It is safe to predict that the traditional form of the magazine will become an increasingly insignificant academic concern, and there will be even fewer studies dedicated to B2B magazines in the years to come. All new digital forms of B2B media products still provide the two basic utilities, information and connectivity, which B2B publishing has provided through advertising and event products since its conception. These utilities illustrate not only the sector’s uniqueness in comparison to other media, but also its role as the earliest form of social networking to serve professional communities. To sustain this argument, it is necessary to compare B2B media with the contemporary digital social media. Zhang (2016b) identified a two‐step establishment of the digital social media concept, with each step emphasizing one of the utilities. In the first step, Boyd and Ellison (2007) define “social network site(s)” by emphasizing the factor of “connection” (p. 211). Successive communications studies have used the terms “social network services” (SNS) and “social media” interchangeably; however, only by emphasizing the information utility of SNS in the second step has the concept of social media been fully developed. The concept of user‐generated content (UGC) enabled by Web 2.0 technology was also critical in all attempts to define social media (e.g. Kaplan and Haenlein 2010; Kietzmann et al. 2011; Obar and Wildman 2015). And although studies of SNS and social media have examined facets of the same phenomena, SNS and social media are, in fact, different. SNS provides the digital connectivity and consequently networked relationships, whereas social media supply the connected infrastructure with the currency of information and content. The key to understanding the future of B2B media is to examine how digital technology has affected the ways in which the sector provides its two basic utilities. On the connectivity front, the uses of social media and the Internet have provided unprecedented levels of connectedness. However, businesspeople and professionals need face‐to‐face, real‐person connectivity. The



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literature on conferences and conventions shows that networking opportunities, which mean establishing personal connectivity, have been an important factor for potential participants in deciding to attend such events (Mair and Thompson 2009; Oppermann and Chon 1997; Witt et al. 1995). Rogers (2013) and Shone (1998) have argued that conference organizers have to build networking functions as an integral part of the conference design in order to create value for the participants. Historically, B2B publishing has been active in organizing networking events, such as exhibitions or expos, trade shows, industrial awards, and other forms of community services (Whittaker 2008). In recent years, the market demands for connectivity have motivated major B2B publishers such as United Business Media to divest journalism assets and knowledge publishing business units and focus exclusively on events. On the information front, the B2B media sector still strives to provide timely and high‐quality information. Publishers have pooled their available resources to develop and distribute business data and intelligence products, often provided on a real‐time basis to assist business decision‐ making (Zhang 2016b). Reuters, Bloomberg, and their desktop financial and business data systems are typical examples. In the pursuit of developing data‐driven products, contemporary B2B media have acted as both contributors to and users of Big Data, but their competence in controlling this holy grail of the data business is yet to be proven. Future research should consider examining the creation, owning, mining, and uses of Big Data by the B2B media. As the time this chapter is written, research in this topic is still a void.

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*Shoemaker, P. J. and Inskip, E. (1985). Targeting audience subcategories for specialty magazines: A uses and gratifications perspective. ERIC. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED255946.pdf. Shoemaker, P.J. and Reese, S.D. (1996). Mediating the Message. White Plains, NY: Longman. Shone, A. (1998). The Business of Conferences: A Hospitality Sector Overview for the UK and Ireland. Oxford: Butterworth‐Heinemann. *Soley, L.C. and Reid, L.N. (1983). Industrial ad readership as a function of headline type. Journal of Advertising 12 (1): 34–38. *Sommer, R. and Pilisuk, T. (1982). Pesticide advertising in farm journals. Journal of Communication 32 (1): 37–42. *Sparks, S. (2002). From brand extension to migration: the business publishing industry today. Business Information Review 19 (4): 16–21. *Stevenson, T.H. and Swayne, L.E. (2011). Is the changing status of African Americans in the B2B buying center reflected in trade journal advertising? Journal of Advertising 40 (4): 101–122. *Stoker, K. and Arrington, J. (2010). Weekly Sabbath school: the farm press as a pulpit for ‘uncle Henry’ Wallace’s progressive moral reform and instruction. Journal of Media and Religion 9 (1): 30–46. *Stuhlfaut, M.W. (2005). Economic concentration in agricultural magazine publishing: 1993‐2002. Journal of Media Economics 18 (1): 21–33. *Sullivan, P. (1974). G.D. Crain Jr. and the founding of ‘advertising age’. Journalism History 1 (3): 94–95. *Sweeney, S. and Hollifield, C.A. (2000). Influence of agricultural trade publications on the news agendas of national newspapers and news magazines. Journal of Applied Communications 84 (1): 23–45. *Tomson, G. and Weerasuriya, K. (1990). Codes and practice: information in drug advertisements – an example from Sri Lanka. Social Science and Medicine 31 (7): 737–741. *Van der Wurff, R. (2002a). Competition, innovation and performance of professional information providers. In: Media Firms: Structure, Operations and Performance (ed. R.G. Picard), 37–52. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. *Van der Wurff, R.J.W. (2002b). The impact of electronic publishing on the performance of professional information markets in the Netherlands. New Media & Society 4: 307–328. *Van der Wurff, R.J.W. (2003). Structure, conduct, and performance of the agricultural trade journal market in the Netherlands. The Journal of Media Economics 16 (2): 121–138. *Van der Wurff, R.J.W. (2005). Business magazine market performance: magazines for the agricultural, business services, and transportation sectors in the Netherlands. Journal of Media Economics 18 (2): 143–159. *Walter, G. (1995). A ‘curious blend’: the successful farmer in American farm magazines, 1984–1991. Agriculture and Human Values 12 (3): 55–68. *Walter, G. (1996). The ideology of success in major American farm magazines, 1934‐1991. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 73 (3): 594–608. *Walton, H. (1980). Ad recognition and prescribing by physicians. Journal of Advertising Research 20 (3): 39–48. Whittaker, J. (2008). Magazine Production. London: Routledge. *Wilkinson, K.T. and Merle, P.F. (2013). The merits and challenges of using business press and trade journal reports in academic research on media industries. Communication, Culture and Critique 6 (3): 415–431. Witt, S.F., Sykes, A.M., and Dartus, M. (1995). Forecasting international conference attendance. Tourism Management 16 (8): 559–570. *Wood, A.E. and Pawson, E. (2008). Information exchange and the making of the colonial farm: agricultural periodicals in late nineteenth‐century New Zealand. Agricultural History 82 (3): 337–365. *Zhang, B. (2008). The development of business‐to‐business magazines in China. Publishing Research Quarterly 24 (1): 54–58. Zhang, D. (2016a). Business‐to‐Business (B2B) media in UK: a mixed methods study using product variables to assess the impacts of social media on product strategies. Doctoral thesis. University of Westminster. http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/id/eprint/19134. Zhang, D. (2016b). Using product variables of business‐to‐business (B2B) media to assess the impacts of social media. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. 11 (1): 31–48.



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Further Reading The following uncited references were used in the quantitative analysis of the literature. *Broom, G.M., Cox, M.S., Krueger, E.A., and Liebler, C.M. (1989). The gap between professional and research agendas in public relations journals. In: Public Relations Research, vol. 1 (eds. J.E. Grunig and L.A. Grunig), 141–154. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. *Jeffers, D.W. (1989). Using public relations theory to evaluate specialized magazines as communication ‘channels.’. In: Public Relations Research, vol. 1 (eds. J.E. Grunig and L.A. Grunig), 115–124. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. *McCullough, L.S. and Taylor, R.K. (1993). Humor in American, British, and German ads. Industrial Marketing Management 22 (1): 17–28.

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Customer Magazines as Hybrids of Journalism and PR Thomas Koch, Nora Denner, and Benedikt Gutheil

Introduction A notable global trend in recent decades has been the emergence of companies and other organizations such as political parties, NGOs, or associations as important content providers on the media market (e.g. Haeusermann 2013; Macnamara 2016; Rau 2011). They expand their communication activities by providing entertaining and informative content for their customers. Thus, they no longer depend on journalistic publications as a vehicle for their (promotional) messages. Instead, organizations own the platforms themselves and distribute content independently. A well‐known example for this communication strategy is Red Bull: The company operates its own TV channel (Red Bull TV) and different magazines (e.g. The Red Bulletin, a monthly magazine focusing on men’s sports), produces music (Red Bull Records), photography (Red Bull Photography), and other media products (Frühbrodt 2016). This illustrates the broad range of media activities companies can get involved in, leading Baetzgen and Tropp (2013) to claim the arrival of “a new historical phase of brand communications” (p. 2). Within this broad range of owned media, one medium stands out in particular: organizational magazines. While many segments of the journalistic magazine market are struggling to survive and stay profitable, the opposite trend is seen for organizational magazines, which have rapidly growing circulations. As organizations publish a broad variety of different magazines, it is important to distinguish them according to the stakeholders they intend to reach. Koch (2016) differentiates four groups of organizational magazines: the first group comprises magazines for internal stakeholders, i.e. employees of a company. The second cluster of magazines is aimed at business clients and market competitors. A third set of addressees are public administrations and authorities as relevant stakeholders. Finally, the fourth group of organizational magazines addresses consumers. Organizational magazines of the latter type, customer magazines, are located in‐between public relations and journalism (Koch 2016). On the one hand, they are a corporate communication instrument and pursue strategic objectives: building and strengthening relations with customers, presenting the company in a positive light, legitimizing the interests of a company, and, finally, functioning as a marketing tool to increase sales of promoted products. On the other hand, customer magazines resemble journalistic publications in many aspects: this does not only pertain to layout and style, but also to content. To create and maintain readers’ interest, editors report about topics thought to be relevant and entertaining for the customer audience, thereby expanding coverage beyond the company or its brands and products (Haeusermann 2013). The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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Definition of Customer Magazines Customer magazines are organizational publications that address existing and potential customers of a company; the magazines appear periodically, are edited in a journalistic manner, and are usually distributed free of charge (e.g. Denner et al. 2017). Well‐known magazines examples are the HOG Magazine for the motorcycle manufacturer Harley–Davidson, providing content about road trips or suggestions for customizing bikes, and the Four Seasons Magazine, an in‐ room magazine dedicated to the guests of Four Seasons hotels, presenting travel destinations all across the globe and travel tips. The most common example of customer magazines are inflight magazines, distributed via the seat pockets of airplanes: for instance, Lufthansa Magazine or high life for British Airways provide stories about destinations, their fleet, or the company. These examples already show these magazines are widespread in many industries: transportation, real estate, entertainment, food, construction, and the chemical industry (Diekmann and Mitronatsiou 2011). However, automotive, retailing, and financial services are the most popular sectors for customer magazines (Shijns 2008). They are not only created for individual brands or companies, but also for entire sectors (e.g. tourism regions, the security sector, etc.). The market of these magazines has been growing fast in recent decades (e.g. Rau 2011; Weichler and Endrös 2010). This is particularly surprising because many sectors of the magazine market are facing a seemingly never‐ending crisis (Curran 2010). However, customer magazines have experienced the opposite trend and quite a boom in recent years (Mintel 2005; Schijns 2008; Weichler 2007, 2014). This applies not only to the total circulation rate, but also to the number of titles. Moreover, the budgets for the production and distribution of these publications have also risen sharply. This concerns in‐house production by companies as well as the agency sector: many of these magazines are produced by specialized agencies on behalf of companies and other organizations (Haeusermann 2013). This market for agencies specializing in custom publishing has also grown in recent years. A central point of our definition refers to the similarity of customer magazines with journalistic publications: the magazines are edited in a journalistic manner. This applies first to the layout: the design and the format of the magazines and articles are very similar to journalistic magazines. Rau (2011) claims that it is almost impossible to distinguish customer magazines from news or business magazines at first glance. Second, it applies to the content. While it is one of their main functions to present the company itself and its products in a positive light, they also aim at attracting attention, arousing customers’ interest, and entertaining the readership (Denner et al. 2017). These magazines do not talk about products, but around products. Therefore, they provide informative and entertaining stories, and offer valuable as well as useful content. The magazines focus on topics regarding the respective industry as well as the specific company for which they are published. Within this sector, customer magazines cover a wide range of different topics. However, in contrast to classic journalistic news media, they do not provide news in the “traditional sense”. Haeusermann (2013), who conducted interviews with publishers and editors of customer magazines, states that while “the form is modeled on that of journalistic products, the content is designed on behalf of an organization with an aim to engage their customers” (p. 104). The definition further addresses the periodical publishing of customer magazines. This criterion distinguishes customer magazines from other organizational publications that are printed only irregularly or even only once (Freese 2012). The periodicity plays a major role in creating a bond between recipients and the organization and thus creates a loyal relationship toward the company. The definition also states that customer magazines are usually distributed free of charge: They are either laid out at specific points (e.g. in the aircrafts’ seat pockets, in hotel rooms, or in shops) or sent by post to the customers; however, sometimes the magazines can also be purchased or subscribed to for a fee (Haeusermann 2013). Most of the magazines are distributed as hard copies, but also made available online or via smart‐phone applications.

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The term “customer magazines” already labels their target group: existing and potential customers; however, the magazines are primarily distributed to existing customers and are not a typical vehicle for the acquisition of new ones. Customer magazines address either individuals or other companies and can therefore be categorized into two groups: business‐to‐customer (B2C) and business‐to‐business (B2B) publications (Van Reijmersdal et  al. 2010; Weichler 2014). An example of a B2B magazines is think: act (Roland Berger consulting). In addition to companies, other organizations, such as non‐governmental organizations, political parties, universities, clubs, associations, or societies, also publish magazines to communicate with their stakeholders. The World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF), for instance, publishes the quarterly World Wildlife magazine for its members. However, it should be noted that these do not address customer per se, as their target groups include members and donors. Therefore, these magazines do not match our understanding of customer magazines and we will not discuss them in more detail.

History of Customer Magazines Customer magazines have a long tradition and their origins can be traced back several centuries (Allan 2010); however, it is difficult to determine a defined origin for the roots of customer magazines (Haeusermann 2013). Allan (2010) estimates that traditional journalism and custom publishing share a long common history that dates to the emergence of the printing press around the fifteenth century. Around this time, the roots of customer magazines lie in weekly newssheets published in Venice that commented on news from across Europe (Haeusermann 2013), and in Germany, the businessman Jacob Fugger I sent information about his trading company to sponsors and business associates in written form (Müller 1998; Weichler and Endrös 2010). These publications essentially showed all the characteristics of today’s customer magazines. So, the overall idea of customer magazines and their core concept – to inform and entertain customers – is not new. The first acknowledged custom magazine founded in the USA is John Deere’s The Furrow, first published in 1895. John Deere, the founder of the magazine, did not advertise its own products in the magazine, but rather gave customers tips on how to improve their agricultural businesses and therefore used the articles to introduce the latest agricultural technology (Frühbrodt 2016; Gardiner 2013). At its peak in 1912, the magazine reached more than 4 million farmers. Today, the agricultural engineering magazine has around 570 000 readers in the USA and Canada as well as 2 million readers worldwide (Gardiner 2013). The Furrow is still one of the most successful B2C magazine worldwide. One of the oldest B2B magazines is Transport, which was founded in 1962 by Mercedes Benz in Germany. In the editorial of the first issue, the editors assured that they would by no means have the intention to issue an advertising leaflet for the products of Mercedes Benz in magazine format. Instead, they explicitly stated to seek an exchange of experience with the transporters, owners, and drivers of commercial vehicles (Haußmann 2012). Many customer magazines in Germany have been around for several decades and have a long tradition: around 1925, they were one of the most used media with a large customer base (Schröder 2011). The 1990s has been the phase with the biggest growth so far, but today the industry registers an even bigger growth rate. About 400 different titles existed in 1995, 10 years later there were more than 3500 (Weichler and Endrös 2010). In 2012, there were around 15 000 customer magazines in German‐speaking countries (Austria, Germany, and Switzerland) with a circulation of 780 million copies (Haumer 2012; Weichler 2014). With the rise of customer magazines, there was also growth in agencies producing content or the entire magazines for companies and organizations. In Britain, the first custom publishing agency was established in 1983. From that point onwards, the field flourished and grew continuously and tripled its turnover between 1990 and 2002 (Haeusermann 2013). Through



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improving standards in the editorial and production field, circulations grew and made the custom publishing field one of the most successful sectors in the magazine industry in Britain, reaching a worth of £904 million in 2008 (Haeusermann 2013). Today custom publishing and customer magazines play a key role in the strategic communication of companies in all industries.

Strategic Functions of Customer Magazines Customer magazines are designed to fulfill functions from two different areas. On the one hand, they serve as a strategic instrument of organizational communication and help to manage the communication between a company and its customers (Grunig and Hunt 1984). On the other hand, they are intended to entertain and inform the reader, just like journalistic publications (e.g. Reineck 2011; Röttger 2002; Weichler 2014). In the next two parts, we will first look at the strategic functions of customer magazines and second at the journalistic functions, locating the magazines in‐between journalism and public relations. The most important function of customer magazines is to build and strengthen enduring relations with the customers of a company (e.g. Shijns 2008). Building these relationships strengthens customer loyalty toward the brand, product, or company, which in turn increases profits as loyal customers spread positive word‐of‐mouth and buy more products (e.g. Buttle 1996; Fournier 1998). This indicates that these magazines also serve as marketing tools by providing (positive and persuasive) articles about new products, brands, or services. Another central function of these magazines is closely linked to this, namely to present the image of the brand and the company in a positive light and thus to increase brand awareness and to establish a desired brand image. The ultimate objective here is to increase sales – leading to the question whether customer magazines are just another form of advertising. This perspective, however, would be inappropriate. Advertising is characterized by the fact that the advertiser pays a medium to deliver his message. Customer magazines also aim at legitimizing a company’s practices and actions (Suchman 1995). For this purpose, they are better suited than other communication instruments such as advertising or media relations. In contrast to advertising, customer magazines benefit from being able to also convey complex messages because they offer different possibilities for storytelling, background stories, or framing certain issues. Advertising is usually only looked at briefly and recipients do not deeply elaborate on the contents, making it difficult to present complex facts and arguments (Armstrong 2010). In contrast to media relations, customer magazines enable companies to communicate directly with their customers. A detour via journalistic reporting, as classical media relations do, is no longer necessary (Grunig and Hunt 1984). If companies succeed in reaching their customers regularly with their magazines, they no longer need to rely on traditional media to legitimize their interests. The information presented is consequently not shortened, edited, or questioned by journalists, but can be passed on to the readers as intended.

In‐Between Journalism and Public Relations As the previous section showed, customer magazines serve different strategic functions for companies. To attract potential readers, however, an additional value needs to be offered by providing information, entertainment, and service to (potential) customers. Accordingly, customer magazines resemble the layout and style of journalistic publications, and partly also their content (Rau 2011). Thus, they strive to find a balance between journalistic and commercial standards. This raises the question of how much journalism is in custom publishing.

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To answer this question, Koch (2016) conducted a survey among editors of customer magazines in Germany. The data shows that almost half of the editors have previously had a job in journalism before they started to work for a custom magazine. More than one‐third of the ­editors completed a journalistic traineeship. Thus, the professional socialization of customer magazines’ editors is quite journalistic. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the editors see themselves as journalists: the vast majority clearly consider themselves as public relations actors or as in‐between both professional roles. This becomes even more evident when we look at the editors’ self‐conception of their professional role: they consider the main purpose of their work to be representing and communicating the interests of the company to the stakeholders. Moreover, they see presenting the company they work for in a favorable light as a key function of their role; however, like journalists, explaining and disseminating complex issues is regarded as one of their main functions and they want to offer a service to the readers and entertain them. A vital part of journalism, namely the critique and control function, is not part of the editors’ self‐conception (Koch 2016). As this self‐conception affects the routines of the editors and, in turn, the content of the magazines, it is not surprising that few editors stated that they publish negative reports about the company. Denner et al. (2017) analyzed the relevance of journalistic news factors in the selection of topics in customer magazines. They conducted a quantitative survey among editors‐in‐chief of customer magazines and examined how their perceptions differed from those of journalists. Their finding, namely that the most relevant news factor is economic proximity, shows that the company itself or the industry in which it operates, respectively, defines the thematic framework of the magazine. Moreover, the positivity and successes of the respective companies are important selection criteria, while negative events are largely ignored. Denner et al. (2017) point out that controversial topics, such as strikes and protests, are avoided in customer magazines. This is therefore a key difference to journalistic reporting, in which news factors such as negativity, damage, and aggression are quite relevant; however, the survey also reveals that a link to the company alone does not make an event worth reporting on. Accordingly, it is not surprising that, despite the journalistic background of the editors, the coverage in customer magazines is not neutral. This means that there is both positive and negative reporting. There is little critique of politics, economics, and society (Macnamara 2016; Röttger 2002). In one of the few content analyses, customer magazines are compared with general‐interest magazines (Reineck 2011). It shows that customer magazines focus on a more positive presentation of topics and report fewer critical issues. In particular, the reports about their own company are quite favorable. Compared to journalistic publications, articles in customer magazines referred to fewer sources and there were fewer reports of controversial positions on a particular topic. Another content analysis conducted by Rau (2011) analyzed articles in customer magazines about different journalistic quality criteria. He shows that the magazines resemble journalistic publications in layout, style, and appearance (Rau 2011). His study, however, also reveals that customer magazines exhibit more quality criteria regarding layout and style than regarding content. The author thus recognizes a trend toward professionalization or “journalistification” of customer magazines, but also points out that the magazines cannot substitute the functions of journalistic publications. A key difference to journalistic reporting is that customer magazines rarely report controversial issues or negative events, but rather frame their articles in a positive light. These considerations inevitably lead to the question of the level of autonomy. Based on his study, Haeusermann (2013) suggests “that particular agents possess a certain autonomy, which enables them to produce publications that are read and enjoyed by their readers” and customer magazines can “can thus only exist because of the relative autonomy possessed by its agents” (p. 108). Whether this is a shift from traditional journalism to a new sphere, as Haeusermann suggests, is at least questionable. It is obvious, however, that these magazines further blur the boundaries between public relations and journalism (Macnamara 2016).



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Effects of Customer Magazines Recipients sometimes overlook the fact that customer magazines are corporate publications, which gives them the impression of reading a journalistic piece (Van Reijmersdal et al. 2010). Due to this camouflage, readers are not aware of the persuasive intent inherent these magazines and the publications benefit from the credibility of journalistic pieces (Röttger 2002). As the readers of customer magazines do not always notice that there is a (hidden) persuasive intent, this implies that the magazines have very specific effects. There are few studies, however, analyzing the effects of customer magazines: experimental research is scarce and the few surveys of customer magazines’ readers date back to the 1960s and 1970s. To deal with this lack of literature, we took specific concepts into account to explain the (potential) effects and subsequently discuss the few empirical studies. As recipients have the impression of reading a journalistic publication while in fact reading a strategic corporate publication, makes it less likely that they will identify the persuasive intent (Amazeen and Wojdynski 2018; Wojdynski 2016). To identify a persuasive intent, people need to activate persuasion knowledge (Friestad and Wright 1994), which refers to their knowledge of persuasive strategies as well as persuasive intentions (Koch and Zerback 2013). Friestad and Wright (1994) conceptualize the cognitive processing and consequences of persuasive attempts. According to their persuasion knowledge model (PKM), people develop the ability to recognize a persuasive intent throughout their lifespan. Individuals are constantly confronted with persuasive messages in their everyday life and by learning how to identify and cope with them, they build up persuasion knowledge. Most studies only consider negative consequences resulting from the activation of persuasion knowledge (e.g. Campbell and Kirmani 2008), although Friestad and Wright (1994) stress that the PKM does not specify the responses to persuasive attempts. Typically, researchers argue that recipients perceive persuasive attempts as a threat to their personal freedom. They are reluctant to be forced into certain options and opinions, and are motivated to restore their personal freedom. This psychological process is referred to as reactance (Brehm 1966; Brehm and Brehm 1981; Burgoon et al. 2002). Koch and Zerback (2013), for example, show that higher levels of persuasion knowledge due to message repetition lead to trigger reactance. Similar effects were found for persuasion knowledge that was triggered by narrative structures in television formats (Moyer‐Gusé et al. 2012), and frequent product placement exposure (Matthes et al. 2007). Reactance, in turn, negatively affects attitudes toward the promoted brand or product, when recipients recognize a persuasive attempt (Campbell and Kirmani 2008; Friestad and Wright 1994; Matthes et al. 2007). Moreover, recognizing an attempt at persuasion can also trigger counter arguing, meaning that recipients actively seek opposing arguments against the ones presented from a persuasive source. Transferring these considerations to customer magazines, there is a thin line between communicating the interests of the respective company and attracting the readers: being too promotional could trigger readers’ persuasion knowledge and, in turn, lead to reactance, lower the company’s credibility, or activate counter arguing. In line with this, a study of Van Reijmersdal et al. (2010) shows that commerciality of customer magazines negatively influence the credibility of the format and at the same time, trigger the perceived persuasive intent, which leads to negative attitudes toward the magazine. The study also shows that the readers use the content rather than the source to rate a magazine’s credibility. Other studies (Cameron and Curtin 1995; Kim et al. 2001; Reid et al. 1981; Van Reijmersdal et al. 2005) support these findings. Besides the negative effects of the (hidden) persuasive attempts by customer magazines, they also have positive effects on their readers. Schijns (2008) analyzed how accountable customer magazines are in reaching their goals by conducting a survey in the Netherlands. He investigated customers of nine companies from the automotive, financial services, and retailing sectors that offer a customer magazine. He found that readers of customer magazines felt (i) more committed to the publishing company than non‐readers and (ii) had a more positive view of the ­company’s image than non‐readers. A third result he drew from his study was that readers of

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customer magazines interacted more with the brand than non‐readers, for example using coupons or special offers attached to the magazine. Results from the study indicate that customer magazines can be a tool to strengthen the relationship between customers and the publishing company and therefore are an effective instrument in corporate communications.

Perspectives: a Shift from Print to Online? In the past few decades, digitalization has profoundly changed the media landscape (Franklin 2014; McNair 2009). On the one hand, for media production and reporting, the spread of the Internet fundamentally changed various aspects of journalism. It created economic difficulties for print media (as advertising customers were lost), with publishers still searching for alternative business models to finance their journalistic work. Moreover, digital transformation altered the way journalists researched stories, affected the professional culture and role of journalists, and their ethics, relations with sources, and even their identity (Franklin 2014). On the other hand, digitalization had wide‐ranging consequences for the way people use media: people do not wait for the next morning’s paper to read about current events – they are consuming their news at all times and on the move. This goes hand in hand with a shift away from printed newspapers and magazines toward the use of digital outlets on mobile phones and tablets. In addition, the expectations of recipients toward journalists and the media have also changed: they expect different content preparation, interactive services, or quick feedback. Although digitalization has radically changed media production and media use, it seems that customer magazines did not experience this change to the same extent. There is no decline in circulation, as is the case for newspapers. In fact, customer magazines experienced the opposite trend and there are no indications that this trend could be over soon (Weichler 2014). One of the main reasons for the further increase in circulation is that most customer magazines are distributed free of charge and do not depend on being sold at a newsstand. Another reason is that recipients do not per se prefer reading stories on mobile devices; in fact, even digital natives often prefer reading printed magazines. The art director of The Furrow, for example, emphasizes that their customers prefer print over online content (Gardiner 2013). Even companies that work exclusively online – for example WebMD, an online publisher of news – now publish an analog customer magazine (WebMD the Magazine). Another example is Net‐a‐Porter, a digital retail company, that has published its magazine Porter since 2014. These are only a few examples for a trend that can be seen across the market for customer magazines: companies still rely on printed magazines. However, these magazines are of course merely one possible vehicle for delivering information as well as entertainment and most customer magazines already combine print and digital content. Many companies not only print their magazines and distribute these hard copies for free, they also make the content available online (Weichler 2014). Online, the entire magazine or single articles can be spread via various channels, e.g. their website, social media accounts, newsletters, apps, or corporate blogs.

Conclusion This chapter defines customer magazines as organizational publications that appear periodically, address customers of a company, are edited in a journalistic manner, and are usually distributed free of charge. These magazines are part of a long‐lasting development in which ever more companies publish content for their customers that gives the impression of independent journalistic reporting. The companies build up their own media brands as part of their strategic communication. An important part of this media mix are customer magazines. In contrast to advertising, which requires a (journalistic) vehicle to spread its messages, customer magazines invite the



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recipients to read the articles by offering informative and entertaining content. Hence, the focus is on utility value, informative stories, and entertainment for the reader. Advertising for the company and its products is of secondary importance. This development, however, is by no means new: the origin of customer magazines dates back several centuries. Nevertheless, there has been a rapid growth in the number and circulation of these magazines in recent decades. This is particularly surprising when many newspapers and magazines are struggling with a decline in circulation and advertising revenues. The observation that on the one hand journalism is in an economic crisis and on the other hand corporate publications are becoming increasingly relevant, leads to the question of whether they are in competition with each another. Are customer magazines displacing journalistic newspapers and magazines? In fact, some customer magazines also fulfill the functions that journalistic publications are supposed to meet. However, even if customer magazines adopt a journalistic style, layout, and some content characteristics, they are not journalistic publications. Content analyses as well as surveys of the editors of customer magazines show that reporting in customer magazines is not independent and objective: there is hardly any critical reporting and the magazines focus instead on positive topics and a favorable framing of the owner company. Hence, critique and control functions are not part of the editors’ self‐conception. Instead, they are a strategic instrument of organizational communication  –  helping the company gain or keep a positive image, to legitimize their interests, and to promote sales. Hence, customer magazines are not and will never be a substitute for independent journalism. So, the questions remain of how critical this mixture of journalism and advertising is and whether recipients are being deceived. This development contributes to blurring the boundaries between journalism and strategic communication. Does blurring the lines damage the users’ trust in journalism? As described earlier, recipients activate persuasion knowledge when they are confronted with advertising. Yet, studies indicate that recipients do not always recognize these magazines as advertising. It is difficult to answer the question whether it is becoming increasingly difficult for recipients to distinguish between information and advertising. To our knowledge, there are no empirical long‐term studies available. Not all customer magazines are clearly recognizable as strategic corporate publications. Companies often refer to customer magazines and similar organizational media as “corporate journalism” or “brand journalism” and have “newsrooms,” where their corporate communication is set up. These terms, however, are misleading as these publications are pseudo‐ or quasi‐journalistic.

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Campbell, M.C. and Kirmani, A. (2008). I know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it: the use of the persuasion knowledge model in consumer research. In: Handbook of Consumer Psychology (eds. C. Haugvedt, P.M. Herr and F.R. Kardes), 549–571. New York, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Curran, J. (2010). Future of journalism. Journalism Studies 11 (4): 464–476. https://doi. org/10.1080/14616701003722444. Denner, N., Koch, T., and Himmelreich, S. (2017). News selection within customer magazines. Journalism Practice: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2017.1343092. Diekmann, L. and Mitronatsiou, A. (2011). Was ist Corporate publishing? [What is corporate publishing?]. In: Corporate Publishing: PR Als Journalismus [Corporate Publishing: PR as Journalism] (ed. D. Reineck), 7–12. Hamburg: Universität Hamburg (Germany). Fournier, S. (1998). Consumers and their brands: developing relationship theory in consumer research. Journal of Consumer Research 24: 343–373. https://doi.org/10.1086/209515. Franklin, B. (2014). The future of journalism. Digital Journalism 2: 254–272. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 21670811.2014.930253. Freese, W. (2012). You cannot manage, what you cannot measure. In: Corporate Magazines. Print – Online – Mobile (eds. W. Freese, M. Höflich and R. Scholz), 202–217. Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler. Friestad, M. and Wright, P. (1994). The persuasion knowledge model: how people cope with persuasion attempts. Journal of Consumer Research 21 (1): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/209380. Frühbrodt, L. (2016). Content Marketing: Wie “Unternehmensjournalisten” Die öffentliche Meinung Beeinflussen [Content Marketing: How "Corporate Journalists" Influence Public Opinion]. Frankfurt am Main: Otto‐Brenner‐Stiftung. Gardiner, K. (2013). The story behind the furrow, the world’s oldest content marketing. In Contently (3 October). https://contently.com/strategist/2013/10/03/the‐story‐behind‐the‐furrow‐2 (Accessed 4 May 2018). Grunig, J.E. and Hunt, T.T. (1984). Managing Public Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Haeusermann, T. (2013). Custom publishing in the UK: rise of a silent Giant. Publishihng Research Quarterly 29: 99–109. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109‐013‐9310‐y. Haumer, F. (2012). Der Wertschöpfungsbeitrag von Corproate Publishing: Effekte Formaler Und Inhaltlicher Gestaltungsmerkmale von Kundenmagazinen [The Added Value Contribution of Corporate Publishing: Effects of Formal and Content‐Related Design Features of Customer Magazines]. Dresden: Springer Gabler. Haußmann, T. (2012). Integriert, Markenkonform, Lebendig. 50 Jahre transport [integrated, compliant, alive. 50 years of transport]. In: Praxishandbuch Corporate Magazines. Print – Online – Mobile [Manual Corporate Magazines. Print – Online ‐ Mobile] (eds. W. Freese, M. Höflich and R. Scholz), 110–123. Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler. Kim, B.‐H., Pasadeos, Y., and Barban, A. (2001). On the deceptive effectiveness of labeled and unlabeled advertorial formats. Mass Communication and Society 4 (3): 265–281. https://doi.org/10.1207/ S15327825MCS0403_02. Koch, T. (2016). Journalism or public relations: a quantitative survey of custom publishing editors in Germany. Public Relations Review 42 (2): 345–352. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2016.01.003. Koch, T. and Zerback, T. (2013). Helpful or harmful? How frequent repetition affects perceived statement credibility. Journal of Communication 63 (6): 993–1010. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12063. Macnamara, J. (2016). The continuing convergence of journalism and PR: new insights for ethical practice from a three‐country study of senior practitioners. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 93 (1): 118–141. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699015605803. Matthes, J., Schemer, C., and Wirth, W. (2007). More than meets the eye: investigating the hidden impact of brand placements in television magazines. International Journal of Advertising 26 (4): 477–503. https://doi.org/10.1080/02650487.2007.11073029. McNair, B. (2009). Journalism in the 21st century  –  evolution, not extinction. Journalism 10 (3): 347–349. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884909104756. Mintel (2005). The customer publishing industry. Executive summary. Prepared on behalf of the APA by Mintel Consultancy. http://www.the‐cma.com/uploads/apa_documents/Mintel_exsum.pdf (accessed 4 May 2018). Moyer‐Gusé, E., Jain, P., and Chung, A.H. (2012). Reinforcement or reactance? Examining the effect of an explicit persuasive appeal following an entertainment‐education narrative. Journal of Communication 62 (6): 1010–1027. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460‐2466.2012.01680.x.



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Müller, F. (1998). Die Kundenzeitschrift: eine empirische Untersuchung über Funktionen, Wirkungen, Erfolg und Management eines Instruments der Unternehmungskommunikation. [The customer magazine: an empirical study on the functions, effects, success, and management of an enterprise communication tool.]. PhD dissertation. Universität St. Gallen (Switzerland). Rau, H. (2011). Corporate publishing: tomorrow’s journalism? From parajournalism to a post journalistic era? Paper presented at the International Communication Association 2011 Annual Meeting, Boston (MA), USA. Reid, L.N., Soley, L.C., and Vanden Bergh, B.G. (1981). Does source affect response to direct advocacy print advertisements? Journal of Business Research 9: 309–319. https://doi.org/10.1016/0148‐2963(81)90024‐2. Reineck, D. (2011). Corporate publishing: PR als Journalismus. Ein Überblick [Corporate publishing as journalism. An overview]. In: Corporate Publishing: PR als Journalismus [Corporate Publishing: PR as Journalism] (ed. D. Reineck), 4–7. Universität Hamburg (Germany): Hamburg. Röttger, U. (2002). Kundenzeitschriften: Camouflage, Kuckucksei oder kompetente information [Customer magazines: camouflage, cuckoo’s egg or competent information]. In: Zeitschriften und Zeitschriftenforschung (eds. A. Vogel and C. Holtz‐Bacha), 109–125. Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler. Schijns, J.M.C. (2008). Customer magazines: an effective weapon in the direct marketing armory. Journal of International Business and Economics 8 (3): 70–78. Schröder, J. (2011). Corporate publishing in Deutschland [Corporate publishing in Germany]. In: Corporate Publishing: PR als Journalismus [Corporate Publishing: PR as Journalism] (ed. D. Reineck), 13–15. Hamburg: Universität Hamburg (Germany). Suchman, M.C. (1995). Managing legitimacy: strategic and institutional approaches. Academy of Management Review 20 (3): 571–610. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1995.9508080331. Van Reijmersdal, E.A., Neijens, P.C., and Smit, E.G. (2005). Readers’ reactions to mixtures of advertising and editorial content in magazines. Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising 27: 39–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/10641734.2005.10505180. Van Reijmersdal, E.A., Neijens, P.C., and Smit, E.G. (2010). Customer magazines: effects of commerciality on readers’ reactions. Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising. 32 (1): 59–67. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10641734.2010.10505275. Weichler, K. (2007). Corporate publishing. Publikationen für Kunden und Multiplikatoren [Corporate publishing. Publications for clients and multipliers]. In: Handbuch Unternehmenskommunikation [Manual Corporate Communications] (eds. M. Piwinger and A. Zerfaß), 441–452. Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler. Weichler, K. (2014). Corporate publishing: Publikationen für Kunden und Multiplikatoren [Corporate publishing. Publications for clients and multipliers]. In: Handbuch Unternehmenskommunikation [Manual Corporate Communications] (eds. M. Piwinger and A. Zerfaß), 767–786. Wiesbaden: Springer Gabler. Weichler, K. and Endrös, S. (2010). Die Kundenzeitschrift [The customer magazine]. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft. Wojdynski, B.W. (2016). The deceptiveness of sponsored news articles: how readers recognize and perceive native advertising. American Behavioral Scientist 60 (12): 1475–1491. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0002764216660140.

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On Johnson’s Shoulders The Lessons and Legacy of Ebony Magazine Sharon Bloyd‐Peshkin and Charles Whitaker

Introduction In the early 1940s, John H. Johnson launched a media company that essentially created a parallel media universe for Black readers, who did not see themselves in the magazines of the day. Negro Digest and then Ebony and Jet – along with other shorter‐lived publications – covered the issues that mattered to Black readers but were ignored by mainstream publications. In doing so, they raised awareness about Black America and aided the recognition of the Black middle class. During the first two decades, Johnson demonstrated an adeptness at both anticipating and responding to readers’ desires, as well as a nimbleness in navigating and sometimes circumventing racism within the magazine and advertising industries. Ebony flourished, becoming essential reading for Black Americans. But after the Civil Rights era, Johnson no longer had his finger on the pulse of the times, and the magazine eventually lost its dominance in the industry and in the lives of its intended audience. This case study looks specifically at Ebony magazine (which was modeled on Life magazine) from its launch in 1945 through its decline in the early twenty‐first century, seeking to understand its rise, heyday, and decline in the context of the magazine industry and twentieth‐century African‐American history. Specifically, it explores the initial appeal and need for that “separate but equal” media space; the subsequent inability of Ebony to satisfy the burgeoning Black middle class it helped to promote; its failure to reflect the growing outrage of the Black Power Movement and the hip‐hop era; and the ultimate consequences of the atomization of both content and audiences faced by all contemporary magazines. It ends by noting some of the universal struggles this specific magazine illuminates, and Ebony’s lasting impact on magazines, advertising, fashion, photography, cosmetics, and culture.

The World into Which Ebony Was Born At the dawn of World War II, Black America was in the throes of dramatic change. The second wave of the Great Migration – the mass exodus that saw some six million African-Americans flee the South in search of better opportunities in the North – was in full effect (Wilkerson 2011). The result was a shift in economic fortunes that saw a significant rise in the Black middle class.1 For example, the number of Blacks working in clerical and technical fields, such as bank tellers, The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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bookkeepers, cashiers, mail carriers, and railway clerks, nearly quadrupled between 1940 and 1950, largely due to “political pressure and the Fair Employment Practices Laws enacted”2 in 11 Northern states and 25 cities (Frazier 1957, p. 50). These nouveau working‐class former Southerners would come to make up the bulk of the audience that a young publisher named John H. Johnson – himself a transplant from Arkansas City, Arkansas, to Chicago – would seek to engage. As a teenager in Chicago, Johnson had come under the patronage of Harry H. Pace, president and CEO of Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Co., the largest Black business in the country at the time. From Pace, Johnson got a glimpse into the tiny and rarefied world of the Black elite – the small cadre of entrepreneurs, teachers, preachers, doctors, and funeral home owners who were educated largely in the all‐Black colleges in the South that were started after the Civil War to train skilled laborers and teachers for the newly freed slaves (Frazier 1957, p. 63; Johnson 1989, p. 88). Many of the members of this elite world were the descendants of house servants who had enjoyed a measure of privilege during slavery. Their light skin, denoting their white ancestry, was worn as a badge of honor (Frazier 1957, p. 196). Though they were still confined to marginalized enclaves and restricted in their social and economic movement by Jim Crow laws (named after a popular nineteenth‐century song mocking a disabled African slave and performed by a white actor in blackface), which enforced segregation in the South, and restrictive covenants in the North, the Black elite constructed its own society, consisting of exclusive clubs with cotillions and debutante balls that mirrored the white social events forbidden to them (Frazier 1957, p. 202). World War II upset this status quo. The depletion of the white labor force due to conscription led the federal government to offer vocational training programs that prepared Black workers for jobs in defense plants (Franklin 1980, p. 439). A million African‐American enlistees volunteered or were drafted, serving in segregated units but believing that after fighting against racial supremacy abroad, they would return to a more equal society at home. “African Americans reasoned that through participation in the war effort they would be accepted as first‐class citizens after the war,” and sought occupational training and educational benefits through the GI Bill (Moore 2006, pp. 120–121). But when they returned, they were denied the low‐cost mortgages and educational benefits provided to white veterans (Rothstein 2017, p. vi). Those who were able to use their GI benefits to enroll in historically Black colleges did manage to enter the world of the Black elite (Frazier 1957, p. 445). Their elevated status and the substantial gains made by Black workers during the war intensified the call for racial equality by organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; Frazier 1957, p. 451). The only media devoted to covering the Black middle class at this time were the plethora of Black newspapers that had emerged between the two world wars, which championed civil rights and chronicled the lifestyles of the Black elite (Frazier 1957, p. 415). After World War I, the number of these Black newspapers had grown exponentially, with more than 350 publications employing more than 10 000 people (Frazier 1957, p. 415). As the aide‐de‐camp to Harry Pace, the young John Johnson’s chief role was to collect and read Black newspapers, as well as chronicle the rare instances in which news about Blacks appeared in White newspapers, in order to provide Pace with a digest of what was happening in the Black world. This provided the inspiration for his media empire (Johnson 1989). He came to realize that there was “no consistent coverage of the human dimensions of Black Americans in northern newspapers and magazines” (Johnson 1989, p. 114). He believed the time was right for a vehicle that allowed the Black elite to see itself and its triumphs, and to provide them with hope and inspiration. In 1942, Johnson launched Negro Digest, modeled on Reader’s Digest. A key difference, however, was in the tone of the publication. While Reader’s Digest was a generally feel‐good periodical, Negro Digest “spoke to an audience that was angry, disillusioned, and disappointed. You couldn’t digest that world without digesting the frustration and anger” (Johnson 1989,

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p. 23). But as World War II was winding down, Johnson recognized there was also an opportunity for a publication with the upbeat perspective of Reader’s Digest but less newsy content. “The war will soon be over and Black vets will soon be coming home, looking for more glamour and more pizzazz than we’re running in Negro Digest. They’ll need a period of relaxation and relief from the day‐to‐day combat with racism” (Johnson 1989, p. 153). That did not, however, turn out to be the case for those who were denied the GI benefits their white counterparts enjoyed. It is into this world of contradictions that Ebony was born.

The Emergence of Ebony Ebony provided a decidedly different perspective on the Black experience for an aspirational readership seeking evidence of Black achievements and a sense of pride (Burns 1966, p. 89). This was in contrast to the racial militancy of contemporaneous Black newspapers, such as the Chicago Whip and The Chicago Defender. “We wanted to create a windbreak that would let them get away from ‘the problem’ for a few moments and say, ‘Here are some Blacks who are making it. And if they can make it, I can make it, too’” (Johnson 1989, pp. 156–157). By 1950, African‐Americans in white‐collar jobs constituted more than 20% of the northern population (Stange 2001, p. 210). Ebony offered stories of successful Black entertainers, athletes, and businesspeople – a “substitute aristocracy” (Hall 2001, p. 194) that both reflected and defined the Black middle class with “articles on various aspects of black life, including politics and business” (Ingham and Feldman 1994, p. 373). Photography was an essential aspect of this portrayal.3 Early issues were dominated by depictions of successful African‐Americans who represented the middle‐class aspirations of the magazine’s readers, modeled after the images typically appearing in Life magazine’s “Speaking of Pictures” department (Stange 2001, p. 208). The photos “bordered on the sensational” in the early days, “featuring picture reports on conspicuous consumption by the black elite” (Ingham and Feldman 1994, p. 373). In his autobiography, Johnson recalls a letter from a reader: “We’ve never seen ourselves before in large photographs presented in a positive light unrelated to crime, and we love it” (Johnson 1989, p. 162). But to support this coverage, Johnson needed money to pay for editorial, printing, and distribution costs. He needed national advertisers, who were dubious of the purchasing power of Black readers, which was, in turn, dependent on progress in civil rights, employment, and education (Hall 2001, p. 191). He launched a misguided campaign in The New York Times to lure white readers, but quickly saw the folly of this attempt (Johnson 1989, p. 184). Instead, he realized that his success lay in defining the Black consumer market for white advertisers. In 1952, he wrote an article for Advertising Age touting the “dos and don’ts” of selling to Negro consumers. “The Negro market is a fifteen billion dollar market,” he wrote. “In the seventeen largest cities, the Negro population is virtually a city within a city … twice as big as the total population of Belgium, Greece or Australia – and it’s right here at home” (Johnson 1989, p. 230). Ultimately, Johnson succeeded in convincing white corporate executives that there was money to be made4 (Hall 2001, p. 194). When he was shunned by existing services, Johnson created his own. He launched the careers of Black magazine distributors, photographers, marketers, and circulation specialists (Johnson 1989, p. 127). To remedy the lack of Black models, he co‐created Fashion Fair, the largest traveling fashion show in the world (which also served as a circulation vehicle); when conventional cosmetics did not work for the Fashion Fair models’ skin tones, he launched Fashion Fair Cosmetics (Johnson 1989, pp. 248–249). He also created a mail‐order fashion business and wig company, and sold vitamins and hair‐care products (Johnson 1989, pp. 184–185). Throughout the 1950s, Johnson continued to model Ebony and his other magazines after existing publications. During the “true‐confessions period,” he launched Tan Confessions



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(November 1950) and Copper Romance. When Look came out with the pocket‐sized Quick, in the same decade, he copied the format when launching Hue and Jet (Johnson 1989, p. 206). As Ebony’s readership continued to grow, with 79% of the urban Black population reading at least one of every six issues by the early 1960s, advertisers followed Johnson’s lead by creating ads for Ebony that were near duplicates of the ones that appeared in Life, with one notable difference (Berkman 1963): Indeed, ads placed in Ebony by national advertisers who sell to the general or middle‐class market … were not merely “comparable,” but except for the substitution of Negroes in approximately two thirds of the ads which included pictures of models … they were identical to the ads these advertisers placed in Life and/or other general circulation periodicals. (Berkman 1963, p. 54, emphasis in original)

But Johnson had to strike a balance between his original vision and continued claim over the years of being “strictly nonpartisan” (Hall 2001, p. 192) and the growing frustration of the Black middle class in the face of continued discrimination. Blacks were using their consumer power to push for equality in employment, housing, education, society, and the economy (Chambers 2006, p. 55). Johnson was keenly aware of advertisers’ interest in a magazine highlighting consumerism rather than agitation, but as Hall (2001) notes, “an absence of any agitation would neither concretely improve the economic prospects of the black middle class nor acknowledge that class’s unique history and contemporary political situation” (p. 191). Johnson negotiated these conflicting pressures by combining “the articulation of black consumer desire” with “the aura of black success” (Hall 2001, p. 191). Ebony not only promoted Black participation in the existing consumer society, but also politicized consumption as advocacy for equality, as “buying a consumer statement could become more than a purchase alone … a statement in the larger fight for equality” (Chambers 2006, p. 56). The revolutionary nature of Johnson’s approach here is hard to over‐emphasize. A condescending 1963 article published in Journalism Quarterly, which continually highlighted “the hard reality that the American Negro as a race has a long way to go before achieving any sharp ascent in status” (Berkman 1963, p. 54) and that described Ebony ads as “reinforc[ing] the fantasy that in general the Negro has ‘made it’, by citing some of those very few who have” (emphasis in original, p. 59), offers a glimpse of the social and academic assumptions that Johnson was endeavoring to change. Paradoxically, Johnson’s very avoidance of the political and polemical may have helped catalyze his readers’ emerging activism (Hall 2001, p. 194). And by the mid‐1950s, that activism turned to rage. “We were a part of a story that cannot be recalled or told without referring to the pages of Ebony and Jet and the 2 million photographs in our archives,” Johnson later recalled (Johnson 1989, pp. 240–241). Ebony’s circulation had begun to slide just prior to the Civil Rights era, and internal divisions roiled the staff. Johnson directed the editors and writers to tackle the more serious issues of the times (Johnson 1989, p. 235). The days of trumpeting Black achievements were not over, but they were balanced by stories about racial injustice and the emerging civil rights movement.

Times of Upheaval: civil Rights, Black Power, and Hip‐Hop After an all‐white jury acquitted the murderers of Emmett Till, a 14‐year‐old boy lynched in 1955 in Mississippi, and his body – transported back to his home in Chicago for burial – was seen by thousands in Chicago and millions more worldwide in photographs, the brutality and unequal treatment of Black Americans became an international outrage. Then, following the 1955–1956 Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott and the 1956 bombing of Martin Luther

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King’s home in Montgomery, the Supreme Court’s 1956 ruling that segregation was unconstitutional became the beginning of the end of Jim Crow (Harris and Terborg‐Penn 2006, pp. 33–34). These events traumatized and activated Ebony’s readers. While Jet, the newsweekly, was Johnson Publishing Company’s primary vehicle for covering breaking events on the Civil Rights beat (Jet and the Chicago Defender were first to publish the gruesome images of Till’s body), Ebony also championed the movement, generally in features that chronicled major events, such as the trial of the men accused of Till’s murder, the 1963 March on Washington, and the 1965 March in Selma, Alabama (Bennett 2018). This was a major change for a magazine that had previously avoided the political, but its metamorphosis was unavoidable, given the times. Ebony simply could not ignore the largest story in contemporary American society  –  especially one disproportionately impacting the Black middle class (Harris and Terborg‐Penn 2006, pp. 34–35) and therefore of great interest to Ebony’s primary readership. Ebony’s coverage was hardly revolutionary. In fact, Hoyt Fuller, one of Ebony’s young firebrands, quit his job as an associate editor of the magazine in 1957 because he was “disillusioned at its politics“(Hall 2001, p. 197) and considered it “not relevant enough to the Black struggle for freedom and equality” (Harris 1984, p. 12). Fuller returned in 1970 to edit Negro Digest,5 which soon became Black World, but left the company for good in 1975 when Johnson folded the publication due to flagging sales (Standiford 2008, p. 178). Jet magazine played a greater role in covering the fight for civil rights and the explosive emergence of the Black Power Movement, in part because, as a weekly magazine, it was able to respond more nimbly to fast‐moving events. During these heady political times, when the Black Panthers worked to empower poor Blacks and oppose police brutality (Harris and Terborg‐Penn 2006, p. 64), and the Black Arts Movement connected Black liberation and self‐determination to dance, literature, drama, and fine art (Harris and Terborg‐Penn 2006, p. 65), Ebony was cautious in its coverage of these developments, staying true to its mission of chronicling more conventional Black achievements. These three movements were in direct response to the prevalent racism, despite the gains of the Civil Rights era, and the challenges to and dismantling of legislative achievements like affirmative action. The Black middle class – Johnson’s audience – still had a tenuous hold on its middle‐class status. Many lived from paycheck to paycheck and suffered from persistent racial discrimination (Kelley 2006, pp. 106–107). Another new cultural art form emerged in the 1990s, too, but made few appearances in Ebony’s pages: hip‐hop, which incorporated rap music and graffiti in a critique of “contemporary racism, poverty, police brutality, and drug use” and was “devoted to radical political themes … committed to black nationalist or Afrocentric messages” (Kelley 2006, p. 112). Hip‐hop was the natural successor to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts movements (Price 2006, p.  19). But its baggy‐pants‐wearing moguls, with their profane and sometimes misogynistic lyrics, were a sharp contrast to the assimilationist ideal of Black upward mobility that Ebony had long promoted. It is, in some ways, ironic that Johnson, who historically had his finger on the pulse of Black culture as it evolved, missed both the emergence of hip‐hop as an expression of impoverished and angry youth, and its evolution into a corporate windfall (Price 2006, p. xii and pp. 10–11). Ebony’s view remained assimilationist at heart; Johnson was still providing Black readers with a parallel universe, of sorts, to the white world. But the children of the Civil Rights generation, who espoused the 1990s’ new Black nationalism, were less interested in integrating into mainstream white society and more interested in ending police brutality, housing discrimination, wage disparities, and disenfranchisement from power (Kelley 2006, p. 112). They were drawn to Vibe (launched in 1993) and XXL (launched in 1997), where they saw their rage, their style, and their lives better reflected. To this younger generation, Ebony was no longer relevant; it was truly their grandparents’ magazine. It was no longer the magazine of the Black elite, either.



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Competition, Assimilation, and Atomization Even before the hip‐hop era, Ebony was facing competition from all sides. In the early 1970s, several new Black magazines were launched, including Essence, Black Collegian, and Black Enterprise in 1970, and Encore in 1972 (Click 1975, p. 716). These publications were followed by Emerge in 1989, which was similar to Ebony in its appeal to the Black middle class, in contrast to Vibe and XXL, which focused on the hip‐hop era and featured the icons and issues important to a new generation of Black readers. Not only did Black readers have more options, so did Black writers and editors. As Black journalists were hired by the mainstream media, Black issues were more frequently addressed in those publications, providing Black readers with more options, according to a New York Times’ interview with Melody Spann‐Cooper, chairwoman of Midway Broadcasting Corporation (Ember and Fandos 2016). This also forced Black publishers to compete against “more established and better‐funded rivals for qualified reporters and editors” (Strader 1992, para. 28). Ebony’s woes were compounded by the general state of magazine media in the early twenty‐ first century. With few exceptions, revenues plummeted as audiences and advertisers connected through other, less costly means. The reader loyalty and trust that magazines had long relied on to woo advertisers could not compete with the easy online access to target markets. Furthermore, Black readers no longer needed to turn to a Black magazine for coverage of issues affecting them. In fact, they did not need to turn to magazines at all. Ebony had not invested a lot in its presence online, where a robust conversation was developing among younger Black consumers, thinkers, and activists on platforms like Black Twitter. But even if Ebony had developed a significant web presence, that might not have mattered. With technology platforms, most notably Facebook and Google, earning 52% of all online advertising revenue in 2017 (Stocking 2018), and readers accessing stories through search engines and social media feeds, print magazines and their websites face a diminished relationship to their audiences. When their content is published online in atomized form, they resemble what Burnham (2017) has described as “commodity content suppliers in a sea of undifferentiated content” rather than carefully curated publications with a privileged relationship with their readers (para. 2). As Adam Moss, editor‐in‐chief of New York magazine, noted at the 2014 meeting of the American Society of Magazine Editors, readers “may not even know that what they’re reading was part of your magazine, and for them the magazine‐ness of it is completely irrelevant. It’s just a piece of content they’re interested in or not, and that’s that” (ASME 2014, n.p.). Today, two‐thirds of readers locate magazine stories through a “side door” – search results or social feeds – rather than by logging on to a magazine’s website, and they remember the platform better than the publication (Kadish 2018). This environment poses extraordinary pressure on Black media, which are smaller and lack the deep pockets of traditional media companies (Ember and Fandos 2016). Ebony was unable to recover from its loss of readers and revenue. In 2005, Johnson died and the magazine went through seven top editors over the course of 13 years, along with several rate‐ base cuts and give‐backs to advertisers for failing to make rate base. In 2010, the iconic Johnson Publishing Building, symbol of Johnson’s extraordinary success, was sold. In 2016, Ebony and Jet were sold to Clear View Group, a private equity firm, and the next year, the National Writers Union filed suit against Ebony for failure to pay writers (Springer 2017). Ebony is still being published, but it never successfully repositioned itself as a must‐read for Black Americans.

The Legacy Ebony’s decline6 serves as an object lesson about the dangers of falling out of touch with the times, particularly when the business model of the medium itself – magazines – must also change.

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Ebony’s failure to embrace first the waves of change after the Civil Rights Movement and then the shift to online publication and revenue generation rendered it increasingly less relevant to potential readers and financially untenable. A perfect storm of internal and external factors submerged the seemingly unsinkable Ebony. But not everything went down with the ship. John H. Johnson had an undeniable and indelible influence on African‐American culture and American media. The stories of successful Blacks validated what African‐American readers knew about their aspirations and achievements, and provided a corrective to other readers who were able to accept a new narrative (e.g. Gregory 2017). The photographs published in Ebony redefined and better reflected African‐Americans in popular culture, “from the familiar markers of degradation, spectacle, and victimization” to “naturalized and sanctioned symbols of class respectability, achievement, and American national identity” (Stange 2001, p. 208). Ebony also demonstrated that a Black publication could be successful editorially and financially (Gregory 2017), that it could entice prominent writers and celebrities to give it first options on their stories (Hall 2001), and that its quality could match that of any other magazine of its day. Advertisements in Ebony had to accommodate the demands of its readers by showing Black models and featuring products that Black readers were interested in, as illustrated by the decline in advertisements for hair straighteners and skin bleaches in Ebony following the Afrocentric movement of the 1960s (Leslie 1995). From haircare and skincare to fashion and cosmetics, the magazine contributed to the launching of whole new categories of consumer goods, proving the consumer power of African‐American readers and persuading advertisers that they had to be culturally relevant and speak in an authentic voice (Hall 2001). The careers of innumerable Black writers and editors were also launched at Ebony, and these journalists went on to work for other publications, diversifying mastheads across the country and enhancing coverage of issues, events, and people previously overlooked. One could argue that Black Twitter and other distinctly Black platforms – and even the many diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at colleges and corporations – stand on John H. Johnson’s shoulders.

Notes 1 Editor’s note: The authors of this chapter use the terms “Black” and “African‐American” interchangeably when referring to the Great Migration and descendants of enslaved Black Americans. 2 Editor’s note: These Fair Employment Practices laws preceded the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII of which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and established is the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. 3 In 1968, Ebony photographer Moneta Sleet became the first Black man to win a Pulitzer Prize for his picture of the widow of Martin Luther King, Coretta Scott King, and her daughter Bernice at Dr. King’s funeral. See http://www.newseum.org/2016/09/09/a‐prized‐photo‐fit‐for‐a‐king. 4 It is safe to say that more than 90% of Ebony’s advertising revenue came from major (i.e. white) corporations. There were very few Black companies that had national clienteles. 5 Negro Digest was published continuously alongside of Ebony and Jet. It became Black World, and then Johnson shuttered it in 1975. 6 Ebony’s circulation, according to Gregory (2017), stands at 1.27 million, down from its peak of 2 million copies at the magazine’s height.

References ASME (2014). What is a Magazine Now? ASME Annual Meeting, panel discussion. http://www.magazine. org/asme/magazine‐now (accessed 20 March 2019). Bennett, J. (2018). How Ebony chronicled the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. Ebony. https://www. ebony.com/news/the‐life‐of‐dr‐martin‐luther‐king‐jr (accessed 20 March 2019).



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Berkman, D. (1963). Advertising in ‘Ebony’ and ‘Life’: negro aspirations vs. reality. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 40 (1): 53–64. Burnham, B. (2017). Protocol Labs. Union Square Ventures. http://www.usv.com/blog/protocol‐labs (accessed 20 March 2019). Burns, B. (1966). Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Chambers, J. (2006). Presenting the black middle class: John H. Johnson and Ebony Magazine, 1945–1974. In: Historicizing Lifestyle: Mediating Taste, Consumption and Identity from the 1900s to 1970s (eds. D. Bell and J. Hollows), 54–69. London and New York: Routledge. Click, J.W. (1975). Comparison of editorial content of Ebony magazine, 1967 and 1974. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 52 (4): 716–720. Ember, S. and Fandos, N. (2016). Pillars of black media, once vibrant, now fighting for survival. The New York Times (2 July). https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/business/media/black‐owned‐media‐ companies‐struggle‐to‐adapt‐to‐a‐digital‐world.html (accessed 20 March 2019). Franklin, J.H. (1980). From Slavery to Freedom. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. Frazier, E.F. (1957). Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class. The Free Press. Gregory, D. (2017). John H. Johnson and the black magazine. The Paris Review (26 September). https://www. theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/26/john‐h‐johnson‐black‐magazine (accessed 20 March 2019). Hall, J.C. (2001). On sale at your favorite newsstand: Negro Digest/Black World and the 1960s. In: The  Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (ed. T. Vogel), 188–206. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Harris, R.L. (1984). Introduction – Hoyt W. Fuller: the man in historical perspective. In: Homage to Hoyt Fuller (ed. D. Randall), 11–18. Detroit, MI: Broadside Press. Harris, R.L. Jr. and Terborg‐Penn, R. (eds.) (2006). The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Ingham, J.N. and Feldman, L.B. (1994). African‐American Business Leaders: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. Johnson, J.H. (1989). Succeeding Against the Odds: The Inspiring Autobiography of One of America’s Wealthiest Entrepreneurs with Lerone Bennett, Jr. New York, NY: Warner Books. Kadish, S. (2018). How the phone changes the news. WIRED magazine (3 March), p. 26. https://issuu. com/totsapornamatayakul/docs/wired__us__2018.03_march (accessed 20 March 2019). Kelley, R. (2006). Looking backward: African Americans in the postindustrial era. In: The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939 (eds. H. Jr, L. Robert and R. Terborg‐Penn), 101–119. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Leslie, M. (1995). Slow fade to? Advertising in Ebony Magazine, 1957–1989. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 72 (2): 426–435. Moore, B. (2006). African Americans in the military. In: The Columbia Guide to African American History Since 1939 (eds. R.L. Harris Jr. and R. Terborg‐Penn), 120–135. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Price, E.G. (2006). Hip Hop Culture. Westport, CT: ABC‐CLIO. Rothstein, R. (2017). The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing. Springer, A.J. (2017). NWU sues on behalf of Ebony freelancers. National Writers Union. https://nwu. org/author/ajspringer/ (accessed 20 March 2019). Standiford, K.A.P. (2008). A Black Studies Primer: Heroes and Heroines of the African Diaspora. Hertford, UK: Hansib Publications. Stange, M. (2001). Photographs taken in everyday life: Ebony’s photojournalistic discourse. In: The Black Press: New Literary and HIstorical Essays (ed. T. Vogel), 207–227. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Stocking, G. (2018). Digital News Fact Sheet. Pew Research Center. http://www.journalism.org/fact‐ sheet/digital‐news (accessed 19 March 2019). Strader, J. (1992). Black on Black. American Journalism Review. http://ajrarchive.org/Article.asp?id=1679 (accessed 19 March 2019). Wilkerson, I. (2011). The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

12

Case Study: Porter Magazine A Case Study in Hybridity Tim Holmes

Introduction By 2014, the glory days of big launches for print magazines in Britain were long gone. The last really significant industry event in the UK had been the launch of the fashion‐cum‐celeb weekly Look in February 2007, when magazine publisher IPC pumped a reported £18 million (Plunkett 2008) into promotional activities, such as sending staff to spend time with target readers, television advertisements, and free pre‐launch promotional copies, which newsagents such as British retailer WHSmith gave away in the week before the official launch date. The strategy worked, as the new title sold over 300 000 copies a week from the off. However, the accelerating decline in print’s fortunes began not long after that successful debut, resulting in Look being reduced to a weekly sale of less than 58 000 copies before its closure in May 2018 (Tobitt 2018). The Audit Bureau of Circulation figures for 2014 illustrate the steepness of the industry’s slump. In the first half of the year, women’s magazines such as Elle and Grazia posted “double digit percentage falls in circulation” (Johnson 2014). The second half was no better; with magazine circulations overall down by an average of 6.5%, the women’s sector saw some particularly large declines – Look down by 17.1%, Marie Claire by 12.9%, and Cosmopolitan by 9.9%; even the mighty Vogue lost 0.5% of its circulation (Turvill 2015). Given the situation in which these well‐established titles found themselves, 2014 must have seemed a perverse time to launch a brand new, glossy fashion magazine, but on 11 February 2014, that is exactly what happened when the first issue of Porter appeared on the newsstands. With supermodel Gisele on the cover and 282 shiny pages of high‐fashion content, Porter looked like a familiar item from the get‐go. It was, however, a magazine with a difference. Porter was not a product of one of the major fashion‐oriented publishing houses, such as Hearst or Condé Nast, nor was it the result of a bold move by a cheeky small publisher looking to break into a high‐value sector; Porter was not the product of a publishing house at all, because it was developed, created, and published by Net‐A‐Porter, the online retail site that specializes in high‐end women’s clothing. Customer publishing, as this form of promotional media is usually known, was nothing new, as Lynda Dyson explained in Customer Magazines: The rise of “glossies” as brand extensions (2008), but as Dyson noted, such work was usually undertaken by contract publishers, who

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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promise to deliver their clients a publication that acts as an ideal vehicle for brand management in the media. These magazines use the authority of editorial to shore up brand values whilst enabling the client to exert complete control over the production of the publication. (Dyson 2008, p. 114)

That idea of complete control, without even the mild intermediation of a contract publisher, was becoming increasingly important to fashion brands around this time. Burberry, the London‐ based luxury brand, had taken the revolutionary step of launching its Autumn/Winter 2012 collection across 10 different digital platforms – its own website, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and four from China (Sina Weibo, Douban, Youku, and Kaixin001) (Gartner L2 2012). In addition to taking control of its promotional media, Burberry monetized the website by making it shoppable; as Blue Carreon explained in Forbes, “viewers of the campaigns can buy the clothes and accessories worn by the actors while watching the short films” (Carreon 2012). Burberry did not, however, have a print magazine, but that was probably because Burberry did not have Natalie Massanet in charge. Before launching Net‐A‐Porter in 2000, Massanet had been a model and a stylist, then worked as an assistant at the Italian fashion magazine Moda. She became a fashion journalist at Women’s Wear Daily and, perhaps crucially, an assistant to legendary fashion journalist Isabella Blow at Tatler, the London socialite magazine, where one of her colleagues was a journalist named Lucy Yeomans. This journalistic background, coupled with what fashion brands like Burberry were doing in communicating directly with their customers, inspired a revolutionary idea. As Viv Groskop wrote in her profile of Massanet for The Observer, Her vision was simple: she imagined being able to “click” on an outfit in a magazine and buy it. “People always say to me, ‘You’ve really strived to redefine retail.’ But the reality is, I wanted to redefine magazines.” (Groskop 2013)

Massanet insisted that Net‐A‐Porter was a media company, a principle echoed by the company’s chief executive Mark Sebba. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he stated, “‘As of today, retailing activity pays the rent … But we are a media company’. The profit margin on advertising revenue is higher than on retail sales, he says, making it an attractive income stream” (Binkley 2014). Nevertheless, it is one thing to call your business a media company and quite another to actually be a media company, especially one that intends to operate effectively across multiple platforms. To realize her dream of redefining magazines, Massanet needed the help of people with the right kind of experience and contacts, who were also open‐minded enough to embrace new ways of doing things and would not be deterred by sniffy traditionalists who thought there should be a clear demarcation between commerce and content. The conjunction of these two words was evidently another of Massanet’s favorite mottos – or was it more of an equation? It is mentioned in her 2013 Observer interview with Groskop, and again in a video interview she did, along with Lucy Yeomans and Tess McLeod Smith, for Business of Fashion. Interviewer Imran Amed mentions a previous meeting with Massanet in which she had explained her vision of “content meeting commerce” (Amed 2014, @18.55). To be honest, Massanet rather fudges her answer, but she does characterize the print manifestation of the brand as “an omnimedia play” (Amed 2014, @19.33). The “content” side of the omnimedia equation would be taken care of by Lucy Yeomans, the journalist Massanet had worked with at Tatler. Since their time together on the Condé Nast title, Yeomans had moved onward and upward, being appointed editor of the UK edition of Hearst’s Harpers & Queen in 2001 and relaunching it as Harper’s Bazaar shortly thereafter. In traditional terms, this pretty much made her magazine royalty, and her decision to move from an established, prestigious title within a traditionally hierarchical company to an unknown and untested editorial venture displayed a strong belief in the Net‐A‐Porter vision. Not that Yeomans

156 Holmes did not already have some form when it came to jumping ships. As she explained in an interview with Fashionista (Klein 2015), immediately before the Harper’s editorship she had started a job at Vogue UK but spent literally one day there before accepting the offer from Hearst. Despite the freedom that she had to reinvent the title, one thing that Yeomans claimed to have found irksome at Harper’s Bazaar was the fact that the international editions were so different from one another, and that they “all focused on such a different type of woman. I had my version of the brand, but I always wanted the aspect of being global” (Klein 2015). This was exactly the vision Net‐a‐Porter’s founder had too, which is perhaps not surprising, given that an online retail site is intrinsically global and this one in particular had set its sights on supplying women with fashion‐forward clothing anywhere in the world. The commerce side of the equation, in media terms at least, came under the purview of Tess McLeod Smith. She was another high profile émigré from Hearst, where she had been, surely not coincidentally, the publishing director of Esquire, the men’s magazine that was obsessed with socks for a while,1 and of Harper’s Bazaar. McLeod Smith’s task was to plan and establish the infrastructure, systems, and teams needed to enable Net‐a‐Porter to become a media company in the fullest sense. As anyone who has worked in publishing will know, this is a very substantial task, but by the time Lucy Yeomans came on board, Mr. Porter, the menswear side of the company, had already been already publishing The Journal since February 2011 as a weekly online magazine that mixed shoppable fashion recommendations with fully fledged lifestyle features. In the context of this case study, it is revealing to see the explanation The Journal’s editor Jodie Harrison gave for leaving her previous berth as style editor of men’s monthly GQ: “I felt I was no longer learning anything relevant to the world of new media – monthly magazines just don’t move fast enough for me” (Siddall 2014; see also footnote 1). Mr. Porter also publishes a bi‐monthly magazine in tabloid newspaper form, the Mr Porter Post, as well as The Daily online, which does exactly what the title suggests. Put all this together, and it is fair to say that Net‐a‐ Porter certainly had strong claims to be a media company even before the launch of Porter. If it seems slightly odd that the menswear side of the business got into publishing before the womenswear side, Yeomans and McLeod Smith wasted no time once the former had come on board in March 20122 (Lidbury 2012). The first project was a 30‐page weekly digital newsletter, The Edit, which combined shoppability with legitimate editorial content, such as interviews with designers, news, and features. To emphasize that legitimacy and make a claim for editorial independence, The Edit did not just feature brands or fashion lines stocked by Net‐a‐Porter, but looked beyond what was available on the retail site. Most importantly for the team’s global aspirations, it was, from the outset, published in English, French, German, and simplified Mandarin. Yeomans seems to have found the process quite easy – she told Fashionista that it was “quick” to do, and left her plenty of time to think about the next stage in the overall editorial strategy: While getting The Edit up and running, I really had the time to really drink in the brand and the Net‐a‐Porter women, but also to really look at magazines and think, “What would you do if you were starting one now?” (Klein 2015)

One thing you might not have thought of doing, in 2014, was starting a magazine in print. As noted earlier, print titles in general, and women’s magazines in particular, were suffering from the inroads made by digital publishing. But this was not just an atavistic preference; it was, of course, based on data. As Dyson notes, customer publishing frequently relies on data to tailor, or “mass customise,” its editorial offering: The publishers of contract magazines work closely with brand management personnel within the client company and, as a result, have access to sophisticated details about their potential readers. In the case of Sainsbury’s, information about lifestyles and consumption patterns is gathered through a



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complex and expensive process whereby statistics, gleaned from point of sale information together with details provided by applicants for loyalty card and focus groups, are used to profile and categorise “bundles” of consumers. (Dyson 2008, p. 116)

In this case, the client company and the publisher were one and the same (“content and commerce”). Not only was there a mass of data available from the millions of customers3 showing who bought what, but there was also a research panel comprising 10 000 clients (Klein 2015) that Yeomans had drawn on to tailor her approach. Two important points became clear to her – the need for a curated point of view and the fact that print offered a kind of sanctuary to women who spent a lot of time online: Honestly, when we ask these questions of these women, we were really expecting them to say that they didn’t possibly want print anymore. But print was important to them, and one of the reasons why was because – aside from having a larger chunk of information curated to a very specific point of view – it was time away from technology.” (Klein 2015)

McLeod Smith had reached similar conclusions after researching the media preferences of those customers: When I first arrived here, I really wanted to see how our customers were consuming fashion content, and I found they are heavy consumers of print magazines,” she said. “These are women in their mid‐ to late 30s, who are buying four to five magazines per month. They love print and they love a global edit. They’re buying titles like Japanese Harper’s Bazaar along with French Vogue. And it was clear they want us to communicate with them through all platforms. (Conti 2013)

The team tested this hypothesis with a one‐off pilot, The Collections Special, a 104‐page magazine that was printed in the four languages of The Edit, before being sent to multiple thousands4 of “top customers who have been identified as particular lovers of print” (Conti 2013). The feedback must have been encouraging because the next step was the launch proper of Porter, with an initial print run of 400 000 copies and distribution in 60 countries (Response Source 2014). In Australia, the Mumbrella site got quite excited by the fact that Porter was actually being launched simultaneously around the world; the first person to leave a comment also appreciated the quality of the new magazine: “Benchmark. Bar just got that bit higher.” The second commenter was not so enthused, though: “FFS its [sic] a glorified custom magazine” (Reynolds 2014). Before looking again at whether Porter really is just a “glorified custom magazine,” there are two traits that the founding team come back to time and time again. One is the insistence on the globally unified nature of the enterprise and the other is the characterization of the reader/audience/consumer. As is evident from reading the various articles and interviews cited here, Massanet, Yeomans, and McLeod Smith were united in their global vision. When asked about whether the multiple languages used for the magazine, and especially Mandarin, would change the way the business works, Massanet replied: “It introduces the question of local editors versus a centrally run business. Right now it’s one voice, one edit, one buy, translated and delivered all over the world” (Zhukova 2018). McLeod Smith was specifically tasked with launching Porter as a single global product (Benady 2015), and we have already seen that Yeomans chafed at the idea that Harper’s regional editions somehow diluted the editorial vision. Having just one edition for a worldwide readership did surface some cultural issues that would have been second nature to local editors, as Emine Saner noted: Now Yeomans is editing an international title, she points out, “there are issues of nudity and covering up” she has to think about, as well as language differences. “In our interview with [Fifty Shades of Grey director] Sam Taylor‐Johnson in this issue, she talks about having this ‘barney’ with [the book’s author] EL James”, which left the US magazine team puzzled.5 (Saner 2015)

158 Holmes The other unifying motif is the persistent focus on “the woman” whom Porter is targeting, rather than the “reader,” as might be more common usage. Given the number of times it is repeated across interviews and articles, it appears to be a deliberate form of discourse, perhaps intended to reinforce the global focus (women of the world, united by content and commerce), but it also seems clear that it is intended to denote a specific kind of woman, to profile a particular category of consumer into the kind of “bundle” to which Dyson refers – only in a more elegant phrase. Saner noted this in her interview with Yeomans: At Porter, she says, “it’s all about the woman, listening to her, asking her what she wants.” Yeomans talks about “the woman” (never “the reader”) a lot – they know she travels regularly (about 11 times a year), and spends more than £22,000 on fashion from a household income of more than £150,000 … Yeomans wanted the magazine to be “very woman‐friendly, celebratory of women in all different fields. It’s like ‘we’re on your side, we’re not on the side of the fashion industry.’” (Saner 2015)

Tess McLeod‐Smith added to this idea of “the woman” and what the magazine could do for her when she spoke to the British advertising trade title Campaign: The thinking behind Porter was to continue the fusion of fashion and content that had begun on Net‐a‐Porter and, as Macleod Smith says, to “put the woman at the heart of everything.” She calls magazines such as Vogue “not very customer‐friendly … Fashion magazines have become so industry‐ focused, they have lost sight of their consumer,” she points out. “We went right back to the magazines of the 50s and 60s – they helped women get dressed. We felt a lot of fashion magazines had stopped doing that, so this was about helping women get their own sense of style.” (Benady 2015)

Not everyone agreed with this self‐assessment, of course. Stephen Quinn, the long‐serving publishing director of Vogue UK, was suitably dismissive of this upstart rival. In an interview with InPublishing, he commented: Net‐a‐Porter treads a curious line between claims to be objective and detached in its reportage and its business model based around selling off the page … I’ve seen interviews with people there called ‘editors’ talking about their love of the immediacy of their sales. But all that is is a great big money‐ making machine. And there is no sense that these “editors” are on their readers’ side. (Carter 2013)

The following year Campaign’s somewhat hagiographic profile of him noted: He has a fresh fight on his hands in the guise of Porter, the new magazine from the online fashion retailer Net‐a‐Porter. It has a ballsy cover price of £5, markedly higher than Vogue’s £3.99, and Quinn expects it to show a circulation of around 150,000 in the next ABCs. But, for now, he is cheered that Vogue’s March edition carried 262 ad pages, while Porter’s first issue had 73 – “so, in one way, we weren’t impacted at all.” (Ridley 2014)

If you have time for only one of the surprisingly numerous items of media exposure that Net‐A‐ Porter and its dynamic trio inspired over a number of years, set aside 37 minutes to watch Imran Amed’s video interview with Massanet, Yeomans, and McLeod‐Smith, which encapsulate many of the points raised above. Moreover, as Amed, in his understated way, poses a mix of anodyne and penetrating questions, he manages to bring out a lot of insightful information. The idea of “the woman” is present throughout, as is the power of the “global edit,” but the slightly mystical myth‐making is tempered by down‐to‐earth commercial considerations and, as noted above, there are moments when the participants are clearly improvising – and not always entirely convincingly. Massanet sets the scene, Yeomans analyzes the editorial strategy of the first issue, and McLeod–Smith explains the realities of modern publishing business.



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One of the points Amed makes is that he expected the magazine to feel overtly shoppable, but that, in fact, this aspect is very subtle. True, there are clear pointers toward where merchandize is available, but much of the ramping up of product desirability is done through traditional aspects of magazine craft. In Chapter 7 of Subediting and Production for journalists (Holmes 2015), I analyze the way in which captions work with and enhance the photography in the first issue of Porter to create an alluring atmosphere. Someone who had a ground‐level view of this process is Laura Davies, who was a production journalist on the editorial team: “It was a really inspiring title to work on”, she recalls. “We felt that we were doing something new and innovative, and there was such a clear mission to fulfil. The editorial elements of the magazine were so beautiful that we wanted to make the finished pages as perfect as they could be. It was really hard and demanding work but the whole team pulled together and I think we achieved a fantastic result.” (L. Davies, personal communication)

But, as McLeod‐Smith acknowledges in that video and elsewhere, the magazine’s shoppability is a key point of distinction. During an interview with Campaign, she demonstrates how seamlessly the Net‐A‐Porter app works with the pages, and explains, “when a Net‐a‐Porter customer becomes a Porter subscriber, their rate of frequency on the site increases by 25 per cent and their spend by 125 per cent … the core audience makes 60 per cent of purchases online” (Benady 2015). This leads the journalist to ask, “Was it just another customer magazine or a real attempt to rival the likes of Vogue, Tatler and Vanity Fair?” (Benady 2015). I think we have an answer to that: it is a hybrid that was and is both. The editorial is outstandingly good – good enough to win honors from the British Media Awards and the Periodical Publishers Association (PR Newswire 2017), but the magazine operates within the equation of “content and commerce.” Three years after the launch, Porter’s strategy seemed to be paying off. In 2017, PR Newswire reported growth in click‐through rates, as well as circulation (up 6% to 180 646), subscriptions (30%), and digital editions (45%). Lucy Yeomans attributed this to the consistent focus of the operation: At PORTER, we have always aimed to be 100 percent on the side of our “woman.” This informs the way we tackle every single story, be it a feature or fashion shoot, to the type of events and brand extensions we offer, such as the recent launch of PORTER’s Incredible Women Talks, and it is wonderful to see this approach yielding such a positive result. (PR Newswire 2017)

In 2018, Porter launched a fully fledged digital edition, in response to a reported demand for more content, as “customer research (conducted in 2017) had revealed that 75% wanted more editorial, more frequently” (InPublishing 2018). Weekly newsletter The Edit was merged into the brand as PORTEREdit, with all digital content being published in four languages. Less than a year later, though, the band had broken up. First to go, years earlier, had been Massanet, who sold Net‐A‐Porter to the Swiss luxury goods group Richemont in 2010 but stayed on as executive chair. In this role, she steered through a merger with the Italian fashion e‐commerce company Yoox Group in 2015, and then made her exit. This was clearly not a perfect marriage because Richemont, still the largest shareholder in Net‐A‐Porter, set out to acquire a majority of shares and by May 2018 had taken control of the Yoox Group (Jahshan 2018). Changes, it seemed, were afoot. In January 2019, Tess McLeod Smith announced her imminent departure, the celebration of the fifth anniversary of the magazine providing “an opportune moment for me to embark on my next adventure” (Gwynn 2019). A couple of weeks later, Lucy Yeomans used a very similar phrase to announce her own departure: “As Porter hits its 5‐year anniversary milestone, it feels like the perfect time to take on an exciting new challenge” (Singh 2019).

160 Holmes When all is said and done, Porter was indeed a glorified custom magazine (as that commenter on Mumbrella huffed), but it was also at the forefront of a new trend in magazine publishing, which has seen many fashion titles form strategic partnerships with manufacturers and retailers to drive “affiliate revenue from e‐commerce sales” (Fernandez 2019). The marriage of content and commerce was not, is not, and never will be without potential ethical problems, but in one sense Porter was extremely honest. The cover of the first issue declared it to be “Powered by Net‐A‐Porter,” and the shoppability, although subtle, was never concealed. As a hybrid of the kind that Natalie Massanet envisioned, Porter (whatever its future in print) must be judged a significant success. Linda Dyson has argued that customer magazines provide excellent vehicles for a marketing strategy that controls the boundaries of consumer identity “because they mimic the provenance of the glossies, which already exist in the media landscape as artefacts providing a combination of pleasure, entertainment and information” (Dyson 2008, p. 119). With its persistent focus on “the woman” and its hybridization of commerce and content, Porter took the next step and became a glossy.

Notes 1 When Jeremy Langmead took over as editor in 2007, there were several articles instructing readers as to the correct length and color of socks to wear on formal occasions. As if to prove that Net‐a‐Porter exerts an irresistible gravitational pull on British fashion journalists, Langmead was appointed editor‐in‐ chief of Mr. Porter, the menswear side of Porter, in 2010 (Conti 2010). 2 It may not be representative of post‐split relations between Yeomans and Harpers, but the magazine’s web page that once celebrated her birthday and anniversary as editor retains the following text (without the video): “HAPPY BAZAAR ANNIVERSARY LUCY: Lucy Yeomans’ famous friends and fans congratulate her on her 10 year anniversary as Editor‐in‐Chief of Harper’s Bazaar, as well as very special birthday!” https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/fashion/fashion‐news/news/a4653/lucy‐yeomans‐ 10th‐anniversary‐video 3 There are discrepancies in the claimed numbers of Net‐a‐Porter customers. Yeomans says 3.5 million (Lidbury 2012), while McLeod Smith claims 8.3 million (Mortimer 2014). 4 Conti (2013) and Mau (2013) report 100 000; Royce‐Greensill (2013) reports 10 000. 5 A “barney” (etymology uncertain) means “argument” in demotic English.

References Amed, I. (2014). Full Video: Inside Net‐a‐Porter’s strategy for ‘Porter’ magazine. Business of Fashion. https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/video/full‐video‐inside‐net‐porters‐strategy‐porter‐ magazine (accessed 3 April 2019). Benady, D. (2015). Macleod Smith spearheads print revolution at Net‐a‐Porter. Campaign. www. campaignlive.co.uk/article/macleod‐smith‐spearheads‐print‐revolution‐net‐a‐porter/1332201 (accessed 4 May 2019). Binkley, C. (2014). Net‐A‐Porter launches magazine; for a pioneering online retailer, a venture into print. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/netaporter‐launches‐magazine‐1391559663 (accessed 3 April 2019). Carreon, B. (2012). Burberry lets you shop while you watch its campaigns. Forbes. https://www.forbes. com/sites/bluecarreon/2012/06/04/burberry‐lets‐you‐shop‐while‐you‐watch‐its‐campaigns (accessed 3 April 2019). Carter, M. (2013). Stephen Quinn  –  interview. InPublishing. www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/stephen‐ quinn‐interview‐1097 (accessed 4 April 2019).



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Conti, S. (2010). Mr Porter hires Jeremy Langmead as Editor. WWD. https://wwd.com/business‐news/ media/mr‐porter‐hires‐jeremy‐langmead‐as‐editor‐3240050 (accessed 4 April 2019). Conti, S. (2013). Net-a-Porter to Launch Magazine. WWD. https://wwd.com/business-news/media/ net-a-porter-to-launch-magazine-6705359/ (Accessed 4 April 2019). Dyson, L. (2008). Customer magazines: the rise of ‘glossies’ as brand extensions. In: Mapping the Magazine: Comparative Studies in Magazine Journalism (ed. T. Holmes), 113–120. Abingdon: Routledge. Fernandez, C. (2019). Lucy Yeomans exits Porter. Business of Fashion. https://www.businessoffashion. com/articles/news‐analysis/lucy‐yeomans‐exits‐porter (accessed 5 April 2019). Gartner L2. 2012. Burberry launches AW12 campaign on 10 social media platforms. L2. https://www. l2inc.com/daily‐insights/burberry‐launches‐aw12‐campaign‐on‐10‐social‐media‐platforms (accessed 3 April 2019). Groskop, V. (2013). Natalie Massenet: style leader who means business. The Observer. https://www. theguardian.com/theobserver/2013/sep/22/observer‐profile‐natalie‐massenet (accessed 3 April 2019). Gwynn, S. (2019). Tess McLeod Smith to leave Net‐a‐Porter. Campaign. www.campaignlive.co.uk/ article/tess‐macleod‐smith‐leave‐net‐a‐porter/1523252 (accessed 5 April 2019). Holmes, T. (2015). Subediting and Production for Journalists: Print, Digital, Social. New York: Routledge. InPublishing. (2018). Net‐A‐Porter launches Porter Digital. InPublishing (9 March). www.inpublishing. co.uk/articles/netaporter‐launches‐porter‐digital‐2653 (accessed April 6, 2019). Jahshan, E. (2018). Richemont’s takeover of Yoox Net‐a‐Porter completed. Retail Gazette. www.retailgazette. co.uk/blog/2018/05/richemont‐completes‐acquisition‐yoox‐net‐porter (accessed 5 April 2019). Johnson, T. (2014). Magazine ABCs show net circulation increase in first half of 2014. PrintWeek. https:// www.printweek.com/print‐week/news/1146110/magazine‐abcs‐net‐circulation‐increase‐half‐2014 (accessed 3 April 2019). Klein, A.V. (2015). How Lucy Yeomans, Editor‐In‐Chief of Porter, climbed the editorial ranks. Fashionista. https://fashionista.com/2015/10/lucy‐yeomans‐how‐im‐making‐it‐interview (accessed 3 April 2019). Lidbury, O. (2012). Lucy Yeomans quits Harper’s Bazaar for Net‐a‐Porter. Telegraph. http://fashion. telegraph.co.uk/news‐features/TMG9145753/Lucy‐Yeomans‐quits‐Harpers‐Bazaar‐for‐Net‐A‐ Porter.html (accessed 4 April 2019). Mau, D. (2013). Here’s Net‐A‐Porter’s new magazine The Edit. Fashionista. https://fashionista. com/2013/02/first‐look‐at‐net‐a‐porters‐new‐magazine‐the‐edit (). Mortimer, N. (2014). Net‐A‐Porter launches consumer magazine Porter, ‘powered’ by Net‐A‐Porter.com. The Drum. https://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/02/05/net‐porter‐launches‐consumer‐magazine‐ porter‐powered‐net‐portercom (accessed 3 April 2019). Plunkett, J. (2008). The rise and rise of Evelyn Webster, IPC’s new Chief Executive. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/dec/16/ipc‐evelyn‐webster (accessed 2 April 2019). PR Newswire.(2017). Porter magazine goes from strength to strength with third year of impressive growth. PR Newswire. https://www.prnewswire.com/news‐releases/porter‐magazine‐goes‐from‐strength‐ to‐strength‐with‐third‐year‐of‐impressive‐growth‐614843373.html (accessed 5 April 2019). Response Source. (2014). Porter launches. Response Source. https://www.responsesource.com/bulletin/ news/porter‐launches (accessed 4 April 2019). Reynolds, M. (2014). Net‐a‐Porter launches international print and digital magazine. Mumbrella. https:// mumbrella.com.au/net‐porter‐launches‐print‐digital‐magazine‐204732 (accessed 3 April 2019). Ridley, L. (2014). Vogue’s Quinn digs in his spurs for the next battle. Campaign. www.campaignlive.co.uk/ article/vogues‐quinn‐digs‐spurs‐next‐battle/1284550 (accessed 4 April 2019). Royce‐Greensill, S. (2013). Net‐A‐Porter names new print venture Porter. Telegraph. http://fashion. telegraph.co.uk/news‐features/TMG10291331/Net‐A‐Porters‐The‐Edit‐magazine‐rechristened‐as‐ PORTER.html (accessed 3 April 2019). Saner, E. (2015). Porter’s Lucy Yeomans: ‘It’s all about the woman, listening to her, asking her what she wants’. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/feb/08/porter‐magazine‐ editor‐lucy‐yeomans (accessed 4 April 2019). Siddall, L. (2014). The Editor of Mr Porter talks online content and commissioning artists. It’s Nice That. https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/mr‐porter (accessed 4 April 2019).

162 Holmes Singh, P. (2019). Lucy Yeomans announces her exit from Net‐a‐Porter. Fashion United. https:// fashionunited.uk/news/people/lucy‐yeomans‐announces‐her‐exit‐from‐net‐a‐porter/ 2019013041302 (accessed 5 April 2019). Tobitt, C. (2018). Time Inc UK closes Look magazine after 11 years blaming ‘continuing pressure’ on sales. Press Gazette. https://pressgazette.co.uk/time‐inc‐uk‐closes‐look‐magazine‐after‐11‐years‐blaming‐ continuing‐pressure‐on‐sales (accessed 2 April 2019). Turvill, W. (2015). Women’s magazine ABCs, second half of 2014: Good Housekeeping is top seller with growing circulation. Press Gazette. www.pressgazette.co.uk/womens‐magazine‐abcs‐second‐ half‐2014‐good‐housekeeping‐top‐seller‐growing‐circulation (accessed 3 April 2019). Zhukova, D. (2018). #TBT: how Natalie Massanet launched the world of luxury online shopping. Garage. https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/594mpx/natalie‐massenet‐interview (accessed 3 April 2019).

Part III

Magazines, Identities, and Lifestyles

13

Magazines and the Construction of Consumer Lifestyles David Weiss

Introduction While the forms and formats of magazines have changed over time, in many ways their purposes, functions, pleasures, and effects, both intended and unintended, have remained the same. This is certainly true when we consider the roles of magazines in the construction of readers’ ­lifestyles, and in particular their lifestyles as consumers. While all commercial media, it has been argued, contribute to audience members’ daily practices, values, identities, and (self) perceptions, magazines are particularly important in doing so. In the present chapter, then, I will explore and attempt to answer the following questions: ●● ●● ●●

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What are (consumer) lifestyles? Why do they matter? How might magazines’ roles in constructing consumer lifestyles be understood? How and why do magazines – even those not ostensibly focused on consumer products – contribute to such lifestyles? How can magazines published outside the global West, in nations that are new to consumerism, contribute to our understanding of the construction of consumer lifestyles?

Consumption, Consumerism, (Consumer) Lifestyles, and the Media The literature on the sociology and psychology of consumption and consumerism is vast, deep, and continually growing, with a scope well beyond what can be covered in this chapter. However, if we are to understand how magazines contribute to the construction of consumer lifestyles, it will be important to briefly discuss the components of those lifestyles, particularly those that are shaped and influenced by media generally and magazines in particular.

Consumption and Consumerism On its face, consumption is not necessarily a controversial notion, although its close relation, ­consumerism, almost always is. Consumption can be defined simply as “people’s acquisition and use of things” (Trentmann 2016, p. 23) or, similarly, as “the ways in which consumer goods are created, The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

166 Weiss bought, and used” (Miles 1998, p. 4). However, most scholars readily acknowledge that consumption, at least in contemporary industrial societies, is rarely so simple. Indeed, Miles argues that “consumption is more than a mere economic phenomenon” (1998, p. 4), while Bocock (1993) is less vague, defining consumption as “a set of social, cultural, and economic practices” (p. 90). While consumption is typically understood as an act, or as a “trait and occupation of individual human beings” (Bauman 2007, p. 28), consumerism is the ideology with which it is associated (Bocock 1993), and is therefore both an “attribute of society” (Bauman 2007, p. 28) and a “way of life, [serving as] the cultural expression and manifestation of the apparently ubiquitous act of consumption” (Miles 1998, pp. 4–5). Further, Miles argues, consumerism is a “bridge that links the individual and society,” meaning that it is at once both a sociological and a “psycho‐social” phenomenon (1998, p. 5). Consumerism, then, is not a necessary or universal condition; rather, it is contingent, an attribute of only those societies that are “oriented toward and organized around consumption and the cultures of market economies” (Iqani 2012, p. 2). More succinctly put, consumerism is “the capitalist version of consumption” (Storey 2017, p. 104) and its ideological function is to “legitimate capitalism in the eyes of millions of ordinary people” (Bocock 1993, p. 1). Key to this legitimation is the fact that, for better or worse, consumerism “offers consumers a framework within which they can construct a sense of identity” (Miles 1998, p. 114). Storey takes this line of critique further, arguing that consumerism produces “the (common) sense that who we are is defined and expressed through the commodities we consume” (2017, p. 104). Storey fears that if we view ourselves as consumers rather than citizens, and if “consuming commodities is what identifies us as human beings,” we come to believe that “every problem and every desire has a commodity solution” (Storey 2017, p. 108).

(Consumer) Lifestyles, and the Media The term lifestyle was coined in the 1920s by Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler, who defined it as “a unified and crystallized pattern of behavior … a distinct style of approaching problems and tasks” (quoted in Ansbacher and Ansbacher 1956, p. 22). Its meaning expanded considerably in the mid‐twentieth century, taking on the social components that remain central to its contemporary use in everyday speech and in marketing and media contexts, thanks largely to marketing scholar William Lazer, who defined the term as “a distinctive mode of living, in its aggregative or broadest sense … embodying the patterns that develop and emerge from the dynamics of living in a society” (Lazer 1963, p. 140). To contemporary practitioners and scholars of marketing and consumer research, lifestyle is “generally linked with the constructs of psychographics and values” (Lawson and Todd 2002, p. 296). Consumer lifestyles, specifically, are now understood as patterns exhibited by “groups within society that spend their lives, as consumers, in distinctive ways” (Ganglmair‐Wooliscroft and Lawson 2011, p. 172). How do people become aware of the various (consumer) lifestyle options available to them? How do they learn about the components, expectations, and objects embodied by those lifestyles? For at least the past hundred years, such “education” has largely if not entirely been provided by the media. Indeed, consumer culture since the turn of the twentieth century can be understood as “fundamentally mediated – that is, shaped, defined, and constructed by a variety of media technologies and tools of communication, and as taking shape in a range of media texts and images” (Iqani 2012, p. 4), since it is through media communications that the values and priorities of consumerism have been displayed, explained, magnified, promoted, glorified, and broadly disseminated.

Magazines, Consumerism, and Consumption While many scholars have considered the intertwining of (consumer) lifestyles and the media generally, only a few have focused on the roles of magazines in this imbrication. Yet a compelling argument can be made that magazines, even more than electronic media, focus on and valorize



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explicitly consumerist content and therefore contribute substantively to the construction of consumer lifestyles – even if that is not their stated purpose. As Iqani argues, magazines serve as “iconic examples of consumer media [due to] their central position in the history of both media and consumer culture” (2012, p. 5). Although the readers that magazines first targeted were female, by the second half of the twentieth century “the magazine industry … evolved to cater to all kinds of consumers, including teenagers, men, and special‐interest hobbyists” (Iqani 2012, p. 8). Abrahamson (1996) identifies the late 1950s and early 1960s as the turning point in this regard. During that time, mass‐circulation titles such as Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post began to be overshadowed by magazines targeting narrowly defined audiences with specific demographic characteristics and, especially, niche leisure interests. Not incidentally, such interests typically required the purchase of consumer products, which could be not only advertised in magazines but also made the focus of magazines’ editorial content. Magazines therefore became central to the processes of consumption; as Mort observes, a magazine, if “successfully established … could serve as the anchor point for a huge variety of goods and services” (Mort 1996, p. 18). As attested by the glut of publications launched in the early ‘60s such as Car and Driver, Boating, Popular Photography, and Stereo Review, and the revived popularity of established titles including Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping, glossy, interest‐specific, consumer‐ purchase‐focused magazines served as America’s windows into the postwar “good life” – and those that reflected and promoted the broader societal shift toward “affluence‐enabled consumption” became quite profitable (Abrahamson 1996, p. 43). Indeed, launching magazines in order to “open up new kinds of markets … for the benefit of advertisers and marketers” (Mort 1996, p. 20) became a common industry practice. Before the end of the 1960s, publishers learned that if they could convincingly offer “special claims to authority on matters of consumption, together with the forms of knowledge that made such claims possible” (Mort 1996, p. 22), they could build and maintain loyal readerships. In addition to magazines serving as bridges to, windows onto, and cheerleaders for consumption‐focused lifestyles, “addressing their readers as consuming individuals” (Iqani 2012, p. 9), magazines are themselves products. Specifically, they are “double commodities,” selling content to readers while simultaneously selling those readers to advertisers, “constructing through their content an ideal audience that (i) actual consumers will want to see themselves as part of, and (ii) advertisers will see as likely to purchase the kinds of goods advertised” (Peterson 2005, p. 182). In magazines, as in all sponsored media, addressing readers as consumers takes place in part – but only in part – via advertising: advertisers place ads in magazines because they want readers to know about, become interested in, and buy their products. However, as this process is neither mysterious nor subtle, it will not be especially useful to devote time here to exploring advertising’s contribution to constructing consumer lifestyles. I find it far more valuable to interrogate the usually overlooked part played by magazines’ editorial content – their articles, features, and photographs – in doing much the same things that advertising does: persuading readers to think, feel, and/or behave in certain ways regarding products and services and, as a result, creating and/or contributing to the construction of consumer lifestyles. How, in other words, are consumption, consumerism, and consumer lifestyles presented and promoted on those pages in magazines that are not advertiser‐ sponsored? The remainder of the chapter focuses on answers to this question.

Explicit Consumer/Lifestyle Categories Addressed and Constructed in Magazines Even the most cursory glance at a newsstand quickly reveals that magazines’ editorial foci can be described primarily (if not entirely) in terms of specific types of consumer products. This categorization‐by‐product‐focus approach can be seen directly by looking at the websites of magazine subscription sellers. Take, for example, MagazineLine, which offers discounted subscriptions to

168 Weiss Table 13.1  Main categories of magazines sold by MagazineLine (July 2017). Adult Magazines Animals and Pets

Fashion and Style Gay and Lesbian

Men’s Magazines Music

Art and Photography

General Interest

News and Politics

Automotive

Gifts

Parenting

Best Selling

Health and Fitness

Professional and Trade

Business and Finance

History

Religion and Inspirational

Computer and Electronics

Hobbies

Science and Nature

Cooking and Food

Home and Garden

Sports

Craft and Sewing

Kids’ Magazines

Teen Magazines

Digital Magazines

Lifestyle and Culture

Travel

Education

Medical

Women’s Magazines

Entertainment Key: boldface: categories defined by consumer‐product focus. underlined: categories defined by content not consumer‐product‐focused. italicized: categories defined by target readers’ identity markers.

students and educators. On its retail website, www.magazineline.com, MagazineLine divides its offerings into 34 categories, as shown in Table 13.1. While not an exhaustive taxonomy, MagazineLine’s categories are typical of those used by most subscription sites and thus conveniently serve to illustrate the consumerist focus of many magazines currently available.1 Of the 34 categories on the site’s home page, it can be argued that the editorial focus of at least 18  –  rendered in boldface in Table  13.1  –  is explicitly on consumer products or services. Magazines in these categories, such as Fashion and Style, Automotive, and Computer and Electronics, consist almost entirely of consumerist messages, as their editorial content as well as their advertising pages are devoted to information about ­products and services. Magazines’ exhortations to make such purchases appear not only on their inside pages; as Iqani (2012) documents, the consumerist focus of magazines’ editorial content begins on their covers. To illustrate this point, Table  13.2 provides a selection of sample magazine cover call‐outs of some of the titles featured on MagazineLine at the time of this writing (July 2017). While even these covers also include less‐expressly consumerist call‐outs  –  for example, in addition to “Want It! The Best Toys for Your Cat,” and “The Coolest Finds for Cat Lovers,” the Fall/Winter 2016–2017 Modern Cat issue also has a feature titled “Shhhh! How to Stop Pesky Night‐Time Meowing” – their emphasis is clearly on products and purchases. Not all magazines, of course, focus on, or are categorized, in terms of consumption. Indeed, as discussed in more detail below, many magazines are defined not by product type at all but rather by audience identity marker – that is, by the gender, sexuality, parental role, or age group of the intended reader. Still, as I discuss later, most of these reader‐identity‐based magazines devote significant editorial space to consumer purchases. Similarly, a few magazines classified by MagazineLine under presumably non‐consumption‐focused headings, such as News and Politics, Medical, and Science and Nature, also regularly feature articles about objects or services to buy. Only MagazineLine’s Education, History, and Religion and Inspirational categories feature titles with little or no focus on consumption.



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Table 13.2  Examples of magazine covers’ consumerist content. Category

Sample title

Cover date

Consumerist content featured on cover

Animals and pets

Modern Cat

Fall–Winter 2016/17

“Want It! The Best Toys for Your Cat”; “The Coolest Finds for Cat Lovers”; “Cat Tattoos”

Art and photography

Digital Photo

Summer 2017

“Ultimate Guide to Best Lenses for Every Subject”; “Most Popular Technique and Product Guides”

Automotive

Motor Trend

June 2017

“$399/Month Luxury Lease Deals”; “Which Sedan Gives You the Most Bang for Your Buck?”

Business and finance

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance

July 2017

“Where to Invest Now”; “Stocks to Buy”

Computer and electronics

MIT Tech. Review

May–June 2017

“A 3D Printer that Really Matters”

Cooking and food

Food Network Magazine

July–August 2017

“Make Your Own Lobster Rolls”; “Weeknight Dinners on the Grill”; “Potato Salad 4 Ways”

Craft and sewing

Flower

December 2016

“23 Elegant Gift Ideas”; “Collectible Silver”; “Festive Floral Wreaths”

Entertainment

Entertainment Weekly

June 30, 2017

“Scoop on Star Trek: Discovery”; “First Look: American Crime Story”

Fashion and style

Harper’s Bazaar

June–July 2017

“Best Beauty Buys that Really Work”; “Hot Shoes and Bags to Buy Now”

Health and fitness

Men’s Health

May 2016

“MH Fitness Gear Awards”; “4 Best Protein Drinks”; “7 Power Supplements for Men”

Hobbies

Family Handyman

March 2017

“Our Electric Chain Saw Buyer’s Guide”; “Insider Tips for Choosing the Best Mower”

Home and garden

Better Homes and Gardens

June 2017

“New Tools for the Grill Master”; “Perk Up Your Patio”; “Fresh Fruit Desserts”

Lifestyle and culture

Town and Country

May 2017

“A Sex Tutor for the 1%”; “Are You Rich Enough to Live Forever?”; “The Beauty Guru Power List: 40 Modern Miracle Workers”

Music

Drum!

July 2017

“2017 Cymbal Gear Guide”; “10 Things to Do with Your First E‐Kit”

Professional and trade

Plane and Pilot

June 2017

“Sorting 60 Years of Skyplanes: Which 182 is Right for You?”; “The New Economics of Flying: Why Used Planes are So Hot”

Sports

Field and Stream

May 2017

“Tackle: 2017 Best Rods Ranked and Rated”; “Shotguns: Dream Guns You Can Afford”

Travel

Nat’l Geo Traveler

June–July 2017

“25 Dream Trips to Italy and Beyond”; “Best Barbecue Joints”; “National Park Adventure”

Magazines Featuring Alternative Modes of Consumption Even in a capitalist economy, not all lifestyles are pro‐consumerist. The past two decades have witnessed the growth of social movements devoted to what is alternatively called “ethical consumption” (or, alternatively, “green consumption,” “affirmative purchasing,” and even ­ “heroic consumption”). Not surprisingly, magazines devoted to different varieties of ethical consumption, including explicit anti‐consumption, are readily available. Each serves to promote

170 Weiss and c­ontribute to particular ways of living, including several that can, paradoxically, still be described as consumer lifestyles.2 Environmental Magazines. Several ethical‐consumption magazines focus primarily on environmental issues. These titles – most available only online, thus avoiding paper waste – tend to be published by not‐for‐profit organizations, foundations, charities, or scholarly societies. Leaders in this subcategory include Environment Magazine (based in the USA), The Ecologist (UK), E: The Environmental Magazine (USA), and A/J: Alternatives Journal (Canada). While these magazines cover environmental news, science updates, and policy developments, each also has a section devoted to ethical consumption. The Ecologist, for example, boasts a “Green Living” section with articles such as “A Green Alternative to Styrofoam,” “Solar Irrigation Pump is Winner of the 2017 Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy and Water,” and “Tried and Tested Eco‐Cosmetics.” E also sports a “Green Living” section, featuring articles like “Wines from Healthy Vines,” “Cone Worthy: Taste‐Testing Non‐Dairy Frozen Treats,” “Sustainable Apparel and the Greening of the Closet,” “Copenhagen by Bike: Green Spaces, Eco‐Friendly Hotels, and Organic Restaurants,” and “Green Gifts for Guys.” With their emphases on foods, household accessories, clothing, and travel, such features undeniably ­promote, and help readers to construct, a certain type of consumer lifestyle. “Simplicity” Magazines. Another variety of ethical consumption is known as “voluntary simplicity” or sometimes merely “simplicity.” Marked by a drive to minimize, donate, or otherwise do away with one’s material possessions and, in more extreme cases, to adopt “a utopian vision of a self‐sustaining life on the land” (Blumenthal and Mosteller 2008, para. 2), the simplicity movement has spawned several of its own consumer magazines. One of these, Simple Living, features explicitly consumption‐related content, albeit content that provides advice for living a “simple” life; that is, one not prioritizing the acquisition of consumer products marketed by for‐profit corporations. Articles in Simple Living include features on easy, healthy recipes; decluttering one’s house; streamlining one’s finances, and mindful meditation practices. Still, the type of lifestyle promoted by Simple Living, while not pro‐consumerist, is still largely built around the items in one’s life. DIY/Handyman Magazines. Several magazines focus on the “DIY” (do‐it‐yourself) or handyman lifestyle  –  and, inevitably, the products that must be purchased to live it. Titles in this ­category include Do It Yourself, HGTV Magazine, Extreme How‐To, This Old House, Make, Handyman, The Family Handyman, and Popular Mechanics. The Do It Yourself website (n.d.) provides a description of the magazine that captures the ethos of the category as a whole: “Packed with step‐by‐step projects, Do It Yourself is your go‐to guide to personalizing your home. Find inspiration and instructions for simple room renovations, home decor projects, budget‐savvy style, flea market makeovers, [and] outdoor living.” The ostensible target for such magazines is the person who prefers to do his or her own home design, improvement, repair, renovation, and/or construction work rather than hiring contractors to perform such labor. However, just because DIY‐ers do such projects on their own, it does not mean that consumption is uninvolved. Indeed, to undertake any of the tasks promoted by these titles – e.g., “Build This Easy Barn Door!” (The Family Handyman), “45 Ways to Maximize Your Patio, Porch, and Garden” (Do It Yourself), “Paint Projects Anyone Can Do” (HGTV Magazine) – purchasing raw materials is required, a fact that becomes obvious in the magazines’ features, which instruct readers on where and how to buy them. Thus, while DIY magazines show readers how to do/build/design things by themselves, their editorial content is still devoted to promoting lifestyles inescapably dependent upon the purchase and consumption of things. Ethical Consumer. The magazine that perhaps best represents the ethical consumption lifestyle/movement is UK‐based Ethical Consumer, published by the activist Ethical Consumer Research Association. According to the organization’s mission statement, ECRA’s goal is “­making global businesses more sustainable through consumer pressure.” Not surprisingly, its contents and editorial focus are rather different from those of the other titles discussed in this



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section; as stated on the Ethical Consumer website, “each issue features detailed product guides, news of ethical products and campaigns, in‐depth features, opinion, comment, boycott updates, readers’ letters, and much more.” To this point, the cover of the July/August 2017 issue proclaims “You’ve got the power! Fighting climate change begins at home,” followed by the subhead “Product guides to: Electricity and Gas, Light bulbs, Gas boilers, Solar PV panels.” Inside the issue, in addition to the promised product guides, the reader will find sections including “climate,” “boycotts,” “beyond consumerism,” and “tax justice,” along with traditional‐magazine staples such as “food and home,” “money,” and “clothes.” However, in Ethical Consumer, the “food and home” s­ection focuses not on recipes but on grocery chains’ and produce wholesalers’ unethical trade and employment practices; the “money” feature discusses “carbon‐divested funds”; and the “clothes” section includes an article on “sustainable cotton.” The information, advice, and critique offered by Ethical Consumer – along with endorsement of and participation in political actions taken by the ECRA – contribute proactively to a distinctive variety of (ethical) consumer lifestyle. Adbusters. Perhaps the most aggressively anti‐consumerist magazine available is Adbusters, a Canada‐based title published by the nonprofit Adbusters Foundation. As stated on the publication’s web site (https://adbusters.org), Adbusters is “a not‐for‐profit magazine fighting back against the hostile takeover of our psychological, physical, and cultural environments by commercial forces.” Issues feature news stories, essays (often humorous or satirical), art, poetry, and, most famously, parodies of advertisements, which serve to critique specific manufacturers, product categories (e.g. tobacco, alcohol, fast food), and corporatist consumption as a whole. Ironically, even this well‐known anti‐consumerist magazine contributes to a certain type of consumer lifestyle  –  by selling products on its web site. In addition to original publications (books) and back issues of the magazine, the Adbusters “Culture Shop” offers the “Corporate America Flag” on which companies’ logos replace the stars ($US35); T‐shirts with anti‐­corporate imagery ($US45); and “Unswoosher” athletic shoes ($US135). It may be unsurprising, then, that the Adbusters organization (and, by extension, Adbusters Magazine) has been denounced by some scholars and activists for its “smug… politics of gestural resistance” (Haiven 2007, p. 86), its complicity with neoliberalist practices, and its blindness to issues of race, gender, and especially class; clearly, $45 T‐shirts and $135 athletic shoes are not purchases that just anyone can make. While Adbusters advocates for a certain type of (anti‐consumerist) lifestyle, it simultaneously promotes and reifies a key component of traditional consumerism: purchasing and ­publicly displaying products as a means of creating and communicating one’s identity.

Magazines Not Ostensibly About Consumption – And How They’re Consumerist Anyway Several categories of magazines are ostensibly neither traditionally pro‐consumerist, alternatively consumerist, nor anti‐consumerist. Such titles are, instead, classified in terms of their readers’ core identity markers: gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, age, relationship status, and/or parental status. Yet despite the stated purposes of these publications  –  typically, to provide news, information, and advice of interest to members of their audiences – they, too, devote substantial space to consumer purchases and thus contribute not only to “the active man’s lifestyle” or “today’s Latino lifestyle,” but also to consumer lifestyles more broadly. Moreover, almost always, the consumerist messages featured in these magazines are neither incidental nor secondary. Rather, they are crucial components of the magazines’ metacommunication about what it means to be a man (or a straight man, gay man, young single man, etc.), a woman (or a straight woman, gay woman, mother, wife, Black woman, Latina, etc.), a teenage girl, and so on. The role of magazines in constructing models of gender identity, in particular, has been studied extensively and is well beyond the scope of this chapter. (See Groeneveld (Chapter 16)

172 Weiss and Jenkins (Chapter 18) in this volume.) However, some of the research in this area looks specifically at magazines’ imbrications of consumption and the male role (e.g. Benwell 2003; Mort 1996), of consumption and the female role (e.g. Covert 2003; Sandlin and Maudlin 2012; Törrönen and Rolando 2017), and, to a lesser extent, of consumption and various other identity categories. While the meta‐message conveyed by these magazines is essentially the same  –  in order to be a functioning/fulfilled/desirable/successful/authentic member of Identity Category X, you need to buy/use the products featured in our publication – their specific messages vary ­somewhat across target audiences and time periods.

“Women’s Magazines” As attested by scholars of consumerism, “gender is significant to the perpetuation of consumer capitalism because of the culturally and socially constructed gender roles we play as women and as men in the context of consumer culture” (Sandlin and Maudlin 2012, p. 176). Specifically, “consumer” (stereo) typically equates to “female” – and, crucially, “female” (stereo) typically equates to “consumer.” Media portrayals of women as shoppers date to the earliest days of the American consumer economy (Bowlby 2001; Sandlin and Maudlin 2012), and are still commonplace in the twenty‐first century. The MagazineLine web site again provides a convenient window onto the current “Women’s Magazines” category and the ways its member publications center consumption in their ­depictions of women’s lives. MagazineLine divides its 86 Women’s Magazines into seven subcategories: Bridal and Wedding, Fashion, Health and Fitness, Home and Garden, Popular Hobbies, Celebrity News, and General. As the consumption emphasis of at least the first five of these subcategories is rather obvious, I will focus here on the “General” subcategory, and specifically on the “General” titles that are not also listed under explicitly consumerist categories such as beauty and fashion, home décor, and health and fitness. These truly “general” magazines include Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day, Cosmopolitan, O: The Oprah Magazine, Woman’s World, Family Circle, and Redbook. With the exception of Cosmopolitan, each of these publications is classified as a “women’s service magazine,” defined by the online Farlex Financial Dictionary (2012) as “a magazine most likely to appeal to homemakers, especially but not necessarily female homemakers. These magazines may include articles about children, cleaning, cooking, and so forth.” Such magazines date to the early 1900s; in their current incarnations, readers are not assumed to be exclusively “homemakers,” but they are still exhorted to consume. The July 2017 issue of Good Housekeeping, for example, describes itself on its cover as the “Steals and Deals Issue,” and includes the following call‐outs: “$ave Big This Summer!,” “Juicy Bargains under $100,” and “Ultimate Outdoor Living Guide: Sunset Suppers, Porch Décor, and More.” This focus on products is not surprising given that the magazine is a publication of the Good Housekeeping Institute, described on its parent company’s website (Hearst.com, n.d.) as a “consumer product evaluation laboratory which opened in 1900 and continues today with the same mission: to improve the lives of consumers and their families through education and product evaluation.”3 Other women’s service magazines do not have such an excuse. Family Circle’s July 2017 cover includes features and call‐outs nearly indistinguishable from those of GH, including “Best of Summer: Great Burgers, Grilled Fruit, Ice Cream Floats, and More,” “30 Road Trips,” “Top Self‐Tanners,” and “Hot Tropical Prints,” along with the non‐ consumption‐focused “Life of a Stay‐at‐Home Dad.” The cover of the July/August 2017 issue of Redbook is practically giddy about purchases, especially those not requiring large capital outlays; its features include “It’s All Under $100! 185 Stylish Finds for You,” “42 Best Beauty Buys Ever, Starting at $3!” and “Home Makeovers on a Budget!” as well as less overtly consumption‐ centered call‐outs, such as “Feel Unstoppable: Natural Ways to Boost Your Energy” and “Your Summer Fun List: Reasons to Kick Back and Enjoy Every Hot Minute.” Such editorial content



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suggests that being a “homemaker” primarily involves buying things for the house as much as, or more than, the non‐material responsibilities required of a spouse or parent. Cosmopolitan, a magazine targeting young(er), usually single women, seems to strike a balance between articles focusing on consumption and those promoting other aspects of its readers’ ­lifestyles. The cover of the July 2017 issue features a photo of movie star Scarlett Johansson, surrounded by a mix of purchase‐encouraging call‐outs (“Sexy Dresses,” “Glowy Skin,” and “Beach Reads: So Hot and Steamy Your Bikini will Burst into Flames”) and others unrelated to consumerism (“More Sex … Less Stress!” and “Sun’s Out, Buns Out: Easy Moves to Shape a High, Tight Tush”). The ideal(ized) Cosmopolitan lifestyle, then, seems to value aspects of consumerism to a noticeable degree, albeit largely in the guise of helping to enhance its readers’ beauty and sexual attractiveness.

“Men’s Magazines” While the prototypical consumer is still more likely to be female than male, magazines targeting men  –  and thereby positioning consumer behavior as central to the construction of masculinity – also have a centuries‐long history. As Rutherford (2003, p. 4) documents, as early as 1711 the British publication The Spectator served as “the embodiment of a new form of middle‐ and upper‐class polite society,” recommending to its male readers the “polite books, polite arts, [and] polite songs” they needed to master to function smoothly in that society. While not all of the male‐targeted magazines published in the ensuing 300 years have spoken to, or attempted to create, a “polite” reader, the centrality of consuming products in their representations of manhood has continued unabated, even as what it means to be a man has evolved (Mort 1996). To this point, in her study of the variety of “new masculinities” that emerged (and were promoted by marketers, advertisers, and publishers) in the 1980s in the UK and elsewhere, Benwell (2003) shows that, regardless of how one might be subcategorized as a man – traditional or “new lad,” rugged or sensitive, heterosexual or homosexual – magazines were, and continue to be, on hand to show how consuming was necessarily at its core. As Edwards puts it, forms of masculinity in men’s magazines “have very little to do with sexual politics and a lot more to do with markets for the constant reconstruction of masculinity through consumption” (Edwards 1997, p. 82). As discussed above, magazines that target men and whose content focuses explicitly on ­product‐centered hobbies or activities (Car and Driver, Stereo Review, Yachting, Guns, Golf Digest, Runner’s World, Cycling, etc.) communicate unsubtly about particular consumer lifestyles; presumably, readers purchase such titles precisely because they want to live the lifestyles represented in their pages and to buy the products necessary to do so. But, as with “women’s magazines,” more‐general “men’s magazines” do much the same. This can be seen readily by looking at three titles in the “General” subcategory of MagazineLine’s “Men’s Magazines” ­section: GQ, Esquire, and Men’s Journal. The first, GQ, sports the slogan “Look Sharp, Live Smart” and provides advice on precisely which clothes, fashion accessories, cars, trips, food, books, movies, music, beverages, home ­electronics, and appliances must be purchased by the reader should he wish to obey the slogan’s exhortation. Features in the July 2017 issue include “The 17 Best New Menswear Items to Buy Right Now,” “The Most Luxurious, Romantic Resort Is Not On a Beach,” and “Five Budget‐ Friendly Tools to Level Up Your Grilling Game.” While the magazine does include a non‐­ product‐focus section called Culture (stories on political and social issues, sports, and entertainment) and one called Women (a mix of relationship advice and Instagram feeds of scantily clad models), the titles of the other sections in GQ – titled Gentleman’s Quarterly, when it was launched, in 1957 – speak to what its vision of being a “gentleman” in the twenty‐first century entails: Style, Grooming, Entertainment, TandE (“travel and eats”), and Video. Esquire, another “General” men’s magazine, has been described as “the first thoroughgoing, conscious attempt to organize a consuming male audience” (Breazeale 1994, p. 1). Launched

174 Weiss in 1933 by two menswear marketers who sought to produce a men’s counterpart to the offerings in the burgeoning women’s‐service category (Breazeale 1994), Esquire, whose current slogan is “Man at His Best,” has for nearly a century communicated that being at one’s “best” is largely a matter of consumption. Like GQ, Esquire divides its content into sections titled Entertainment, Style, Food, Drinks, Sports, Lifestyle, Women, and News and Politics, although a glance at the Esquire web site makes clear that its emphasis is consumption‐related content as much as, if not more than, political, cultural, or social commentary. Stories appearing atop its home page in July 2017 include “14 Grooming Products to Get You Through Summer,” “These Are the 11 Coolest Sneakers of the Week,” and “10 Stylish Backpacks for Grown‐Ups.” Men’s Journal, launched in 1992, is ostensibly more focused on sports, exercise, and outdoor activities than GQ or Esquire, but like them it, too, promotes the consumption of food, beverages, fashion, accessories, and travel. The main sections of Men’s Journal are Gear, Health and Fitness, Adventure, and Food and Drink; secondary sections include Beer, Grooming, Gift Ideas, Whiskey, Watches, Cars, Workouts, Entertainment, Sports, and Fatherhood. The home page of Men’s Journal’s website as of July 2017 features consumption‐related and other features vying for the reader’s attention, such as “10 Great Beef Jerky Recipes,” “25 Great American Motorcycle Roads,” “The Best Tool for Bigger Arms and a Stronger Grip,” “Sunglasses that Will Get You Noticed This Summer,” and “How to Become a Member of the Explorers Club.” Thus, the Men’s Journal lifestyle appears to be one characterized by outdoor adventure, gym time, cooking, and shopping.

Other Identity Categories The contents of magazines categorized in terms of other reader demographic/identity ­segments – race, sexuality, life stage, parental status, relationship status – are also largely ­amalgams of news, opinion pieces, essays of social or political relevance to their particular targets, and ­features on consumer purchases. Essence, for example, describes itself as: the premiere lifestyle, fashion, and beauty magazine for African‐American women. With its motivating message, intimate girlfriend‐to‐girlfriend tone, compelling and engaging editorial lineup, and vibrant and modern design, Essence is the definitive voice of today’s dynamic African‐American woman. Essence speaks directly to a Black woman’s spirit, her heart, and her unique concerns. Every month African‐American women rely on Essence for editorial content designed to help them move their lives forward personally, professionally, intellectually, and spiritually. (Essence.com, n.d.)

Despite these stated goals, Essence’s personal, professional, intellectual, and spiritual messages are often overshadowed by its consumerist content. The cover of the July 2017 issue (“The Vacation Issue”) features a photograph of the Black stars of the movie Girls Trip and call‐outs including “Our 2017 Getaway Guide: Hot Beaches, Cool Travel Ideas, Top Sunscreens for Our Skin,” “21 Ways to Embrace Your Sexy,” and “So Cheeky! Best Blushes for Every Shade.” The targeted reader, then, is not merely “today’s dynamic African American woman” but, more specifically, today’s dynamic African American woman consumer. Magazines published by and for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community offer similar mixes of political, social, cultural, and consumerist content, implying that today’s lesbian, gay, bi, or trans reader is always, simultaneously, a shopper. The media kit for Out, for example, describes the magazine as “the world’s leading gay fashion and lifestyle brand,” and claims to offer “a gay and lesbian perspective on style, entertainment, fashion, the arts, politics, culture, and the world at large.” As of July 2017, the magazine’s website lists its sections as Fashion, Popnography (popular culture), Entertainment, News and Opinion, and Pride; f­ eatures include articles about music, movies, and TV shows targeting and/or produced by members of the LGBT community; photo essays about different aspects of LGBT life in the US; news about anti‐gay persecution in Russia and Chechnya; and pieces about shoes and tank tops for summer.



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The content of Curve, which calls itself “the best‐selling lesbian magazine,” is more focused on news, celebrity features, and relationship advice, although the publication does include sections on travel (in the July 2017 issue: “Provincetown Escapes”) and food (“Pride Cookies are Here!”), suggesting that the Curve vision of the lesbian lifestyle includes at least a modicum of consumption. Magazines targeting members of another demographic group – teen/tween girls – are notoriously consumption‐focused and, as such, have been the subjects of critical inquiry for decades. Indeed, Cook and Kaiser argue that the notion of the “tween” girl (age 9–14) “cannot be understood apart from its inception in, and articulation with, the market exigencies of childhood – specifically girlhood – as they have emerged since the Second World War” (Cook and Kaiser 2004, p. 203). Brookes and Kelly, among others, show how magazines targeting young female readers “position the tweenie self as an artefact of consumption” (Brookes and Kelly 2009, p. 599; see also McRobbie 1991; Minton 2017). Similarly, in their study of beauty coverage in magazines targeting female teens (as opposed to tweens), Labre and Walsh‐Childers (2003) identify three major themes in the content of CosmoGirl, Teen People, Seventeen, and Teen: “Beauty is a requirement, beauty can be achieved only through the purchase of products, and we can help you find the right products” (p. 379). However, such magazines provide ­messages not only about the supposed necessity of beauty products; rather, such titles are characterized by “an excess of consumerism” overall (Smith and Bortree 2012, p. 526). Recent issues of magazines targeting tween and teen girls bear out these findings. The July/ August 2017 Seventeen cover calls out “Summer Style! Tops, Shorts, Sandals, and other Must‐ Haves to Slay Your Vacay,” “Hair Inspo: Waves, Braids, and More,” and “10 Super‐Fun Ways to Get Glowy Skin,” alongside non‐consumption features such as “Your Friendship Drama – Solved!” “Perfect Date Ideas (Bye, Awkwardness),” and “Power Girls: How to Use Your Voice to Change the World.” Thus, presumably, the Seventeen lifestyle is characterized by self‐actualization, relationships with friends and boyfriends, hair styling, and shopping for clothing and accessories, if not necessarily in that order. With only minor modifications, similar messages from magazines about the centrality of consumption regardless of one’s age, marital status, parental status, or age, follow female readers – and, increasingly, male readers – throughout their lives.

Magazines Beyond the Global West While most scholarship about magazines and the construction of consumer lifestyles has focused on the global West, as nations in the East and South increasingly adopt or capitulate to the forces of global capitalism, their magazines serve increasingly consumerist missions. Correspondingly, in recent years, there has emerged a small but growing literature about non‐Western magazines and their standpoints relative to consumerism. Much of this new scholarship focuses on the textual components of advertisements, particularly in East Asian countries (e.g. Frith 2009; Yu et al. 2015). However, several studies explore consumerist aspects of non‐Western magazines’ editorial content – and, in some cases, the anti‐consumerist, anti‐Western messages offered by magazines whose publishers are actively attempting to resist the encroachment of capitalist values in their nations. Chen and Machin (2013), for example, explore the influx into China of international women’s magazine titles – for example, Cosmopolitan and Vogue, published by US‐based multinational conglomerates and “localized” for sale in individual markets around the world – and the impact of those global publications on China’s own local titles. As exemplified by Rayli Fashion and Beauty, launched in China in 1995, the world presented in women’s lifestyle magazines in China is increasingly one that is abstracted from contemporary social issues. It is a world that is highly stylized and individualized, in which empowerment is signified not through concrete actions but through simplistic “hot tips” presented in a confident and fashionable language. (Chen and Machin 2013, p. 74)

176 Weiss At the same time, however, the consumer lifestyle on offer in magazines such as Rayli (discussed in Chapter 19 by Chen and Machin) is, for the moment, distinct from those found in Western publications. Even as Chinese readers are exhorted to build lifestyles around fashion and beauty products, “there is still a sense of collective action and a connection to both immediate social groups and wider Chinese society, along with elements of visual localization that target the magazine’s market as specifically Chinese” (Chen and Machin 2013, p. 74). Still, Chen and Machin fear that traditional Chinese cultural and political values are being overtaken by those dominant in the West, thanks in part to magazines like Rayli, which “offer young women a glamorous world where they act strategically and fashionably as individuals [under] a surface gloss that lies over the symbolic architecture of consumer capitalism” (2013, p. 83). While China’s transition to a capitalist/consumerist economy is relatively new, other formerly communist nations have been grappling with such changes for quite some time – and their magazines reflect the tensions they engender. Zalewska (2017), for example, explores the decidedly mixed messages about consumer goods, and consumption‐focused lifestyles more generally, that Poland’s publications offered their readers from 1945 to 1980. As she demonstrates, even in this then‐communist nation, magazines reflected the contradictions faced when reporting on, and showing photographs of, the new Western‐produced consumer electronics increasingly available beyond the Iron Curtain: Did the adoption of modern refrigerators and TV sets in socialist Poland signal ideological capitulation to the West – or could their growing presence be used to support the government’s propagandistic messages about the country’s “progress”? Two studies by Peterson (2005, 2010) about children’s magazines in Egypt offer a fascinating look at a twenty‐first‐century intra‐national conflict between pro‐ and anti‐consumerist sentiments. In his 2005 analysis of magazine articles about computers and the Internet, Peterson finds a consistently pro‐consumption, pro‐technology, and arguably pro‐Western position being promulgated: Arabic children’s magazines offer Egyptian children and their families models of the modern Arab child as someone who is familiar with the history of Islamic heroes, is computer‐literate and ­knowledgeable about technology, and is familiar with worldwide popular children’s fads. Above all, these magazines construct children as consumers. Buying the magazine offers, through both ­advertising and articles, a world of other things to imagine buying, from technological gadgets to trips to theme parks. (p. 177)

Further, Peterson (2005) argues, the consumerist lifestyle promoted to Egyptian children in contemporary magazines is a component not only of a capitalist ideology but a globalist, albeit childhood‐centered, ethos: The use of English in brand‐name goods, the articles profiling IBM, Nintendo, and other international manufacturers of electronic goods, the description of international best‐selling Harry Potter books, all emphasize another crucial element in the construction of a social world expressed through consumer goods: the globalization of valuable goods. These magazines serve to allow children to imagine themselves, through consumption, to be linked to the larger international world of children. (2005, p. 191)

In his 2010 study, by contrast, Peterson interrogates Egyptian magazines that publish expressly negative reactions against consumerist media messages and, more broadly, against the Westernization of Egypt and the Arab world. Taking the globally successful Pokémon brand of cards, toys, and games as his focus, Peterson analyzes popular magazine articles that accuse the franchise of “being a threat to the morality and cultural purity of Egyptian children” as it is believed to be either satanic, “part of a Zionist conspiracy,” or some combination of the two (2010, pp. 242, 246). Some Egyptian publications, Peterson shows, “describe the fatwa against Pokémon issued by the Grand Mufti of Mecca on the grounds that the game [teaches] children



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behaviors incompatible with Islam, specifically gambling and evolution” (p. 246). Further, according to such magazines, “every pound spent on Pokémon [is] ultimately used to buy guns to kill Palestinians” (p. 246). Peterson argues that it is not only the specific attributes of the game’s characters or rules that catalyze such objections from certain segments of Egyptian society (including magazines). Rather, it is Pokémon’s “global narrative, [which] is about unlimited acquisition” that is of such grave concern (Peterson 2010, p. 249). While magazines devoted to the construction of consumer lifestyles may be taken for granted in the West, they are still being met with resistance in other parts of the world.

Conclusion: Do Magazines Truly Construct (Consumer) Lifestyles? It may seem troubling to many to suggest that magazines do all this lifestyle construction “work” and that readers are merely passive victims, recipients, or robots. As a critical scholar of the media, an avid consumer of and contributor to magazines, and a former advertising agency ­executive, I am deeply skeptical of the notion that audiences are mere pawns of publishers and their sponsors. With Storey (2017, p. 122), I reject the view that “those who consume these productions are ‘cultural dupes’, victims of an updated form of the opium of the people”; like Storey, I believe that “culture is not a body of ‘pre‐digested’ meanings, imposed on the duped by the culture industries; it is an active, social practice of making meanings.” As with other cultural processes, consumption “is an encounter between the discourses of the text and the discourses of the reader” (Storey 2017, p. 122). Still, while media messages, whether editorial or in advertising, do not create desire out of whole cloth and do not make people buy things, they can be quite successful at shaping, mirroring, and magnifying pre‐existing or latent desires and then “canalizing” (Lazarsfeld and Merton 1948, p. 114) those desires into the action of purchasing specific products. Magazines and their consumer(ist) content, then, are best understood as tools. Further, magazine readers – in the West and around the globe – actively seek out these tools; even in the most repressive of regimes, magazines devoted to fashion, cars, and travel are not required reading. Yes, such publications, whose unabashed, unhidden, and uncontroversial reason for being is to promote products and services, render these consumer purchases as glamorous and glossy, attractive and exciting; they tell us that items, and the lifestyles that incorporate them, are both enviable and within reach (Iqani 2012). And while such messages may be concerning to some critics, it cannot be denied that clothing and cars and luxury vacations were always already objects of (some) readers’ desires and central to their lifestyles  –  and that the magazines in which they appear simply reflect, respond to, and heighten their pre‐existing passions. As Radway argued more than three decades ago, mass‐produced texts such as magazines, like other commodities, are selected, purchased, constructed, and used by real people with previously existing needs, desires, intentions, and interpretative strategies. By reinstating those active individuals and their creative, constructive activities at the heart of our interpretative enterprise, we avoid blinding ourselves to the fact that the essentially human practice of making meaning goes on even in a world dominated by things and by consumption. (1991, p. 221)

Consumerist magazines, in other words, do not transform people, against their will, into consumers. Additionally, not all magazines place their focus on consumption or on the world of things. Many of today’s most popular publications hail us not as consumers but as parents, as teen girls, as Hispanic women, as members of the LGBT community, as heterosexual men, or as Egyptian boys. And yet, in the pages of even these magazines – publications that speak to us about our

178 Weiss concerns and interests as members of groups defined by our genders, ethnicities, nationalities, life stages, and societal roles – built into content about who we are or aspire to be are inescapable messages about consumption, and about lifestyles in which consumer behavior plays a central if not always determinative role. Can it be said, then, that magazines “construct” these (consumer) lifestyles? Perhaps not. But they are undeniably among the more powerful, useful, instructive, and persuasive tools that readers can, and do, regularly and actively wield to guide and implement their own lifestyle construction.

Notes 1 See also www.magazines.com, www.discountmags.com, and www.magazinepricesearch.com, which use categorization schemes similar to MagazineLine’s. Their consumerist categories include Audio and Video, Aviation, Bridal, Fishing and Hunting, Gun and Knife, Photography, and Real Estate & Home Building. 2 Ethical/green consumerist content can also be found in a variety of mainstream magazines. See, for example, Smith’s (2010) analysis of putatively green consumerist rhetoric in Glamour, Marie Claire, Self, and Vanity Fair. 3 McCracken (1993, p. 181) refers to this “mission” as “safe consumerism.”

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14

The “Woke” Sex Discourse Sexuality and Gender in Online Consumer Magazines Chelsea Reynolds

Introduction “When it comes to your body, it’s important that you have the facts,” asserted a recent feature in Teen Vogue. “Being in the dark is not doing your sexual health or self‐understanding any favors” (Engle 2017a, para. 1). Consumer magazines have historically helped girls and young women navigate puberty, dating, and sex. But the Teen Vogue story was different. It wasn’t about fellatio techniques or pubic hair removal. It was about anal sex. “This is anal 101, for teens, beginners, and all inquisitive folk,” the story continued (Engle 2017a, para. 7). Alongside sex acts and the typical dating fare, Teen Vogue introduced readers to LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer)‐friendly sex advice and pro‐POC,1 pro‐mental health sex coverage (Wertheim 2017). Stories calling for better sex education became a mainstay for the brand. During the six‐month tenure of former2 editor‐in‐chief, Elaine Welteroth – one of the youngest editors‐in‐ chief in Condé Nast’s history and the second African-American person to hold the title – Teen Vogue took on a “woke” political voice. The Vogue subsidiary raised eyebrows and generated clicks by challenging traditional sexual scripts. And yet it was the anal sex story that catapulted Teen Vogue into digital publishing infamy. In an act of protest, a conservative mommy blogger filmed herself burning a copy of Teen Vogue, then posted it to Facebook. The hashtag #PullTeenVogue took over Twitter. In an op‐ed for Fox News, Todd Starnes wrote that “the magazine’s editors would have you believe that a bunch of teens and tweens are frolicking across the fruited plain having anal sex with Lord‐ knows‐what” (Starnes 2017). Conservatives across the country were riled by Welteroth’s editorial mission. But the magazine defended its goals. In a Twitter rant, Teen Vogue’s then‐Digital Editorial Director3 Phillip Picardi stressed that “Until queer sex, love, and families are included in education, we’re doing a dangerous and potentially lethal disservice … to a growing population. Gen Z will be our queerest and most fearless generation yet” (Picardi [pfpicardi] 2017). In the editorial team’s eyes, Teen Vogue was filling a pedagogical need for sex content. Picardi’s comments spotlighted the evolving roles magazines play in young people’s sex lives. Consumer media have historically acted as a sexual “super peer” for teen girls (Brown et al. 2005), providing advice with the finesse of a sexually experienced classmate. But increasingly, magazines also serve as a political advisor. Upsetting the political economy of the legacy publishing industry, niche‐marketed, digital‐only magazines are redefining sex advice and transforming content delivery (Abad 2018). Women’s consumer titles such as Cosmopolitan have The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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­ arnessed feminist discourse for decades (Ouellette 1999), but today’s “woke” online magah zines are taking sexual politics to new levels. The “woke” magazines push intersectional feminism, queer acceptance, body positivity, and self‐care. But they do so using a curious dogma. If young women’s magazines have traditionally adopted the voice and tone of a sexually active upperclassman, the new “woke” magazines act like an educated, wealthy LGBTQ activist. This chapter examines the “woke” stories about gender, sex, and sexuality published on leading consumer magazine websites.

The “Woke” Sex Discourse The “woke” sex discourse is sex writing that links romance, dating, and self‐care advice with resistant political agendas. Youth‐targeted titles such as Teen Vogue and LGBTQ outlets such as Grindr’s Into magazine and Condé Nast’s Them have adopted brand strategies that integrate social justice ethics within the magazines’ editorial mixes. While women’s fashion glossies and men’s lifestyle mags drove sex coverage from the Golden Age of publishing through the 2000s, the late 2010s have ushered in a distinct era of sexual magazine content. Consumer lifestyle magazines are turning to web‐based platforms and embracing more diverse audiences. Their editorial mix, which combines social justice and sex content, capitalizes on the contemporary political zeitgeist. Bloomberg recently reported that Condé Nast has profited as a result of the “Trump bump” (Chayka 2017), during which consumers have turned to magazines for political commentary and leftist analysis. “Woke” sex content seems to be a reaction to the oppressive structures of our current government. The word “woke” traces its lineage to Black media and African-American Vernacular English. To “stay woke” is to be vigilant of systemic injustice and intersectional oppression. The feminist magazine Bustle reported that “To use ‘woke’ accurately in a sentence, one that captures its ­connotations and nuances, you’d need to reference someone who is thinking for themselves, who sees the ways in which racism, sexism and classism affect how we live our lives on a daily basis” (Foley 2016). The directive to “stay woke” has been traced to neo‐soul artist Erykah Badu. “Woke” discourse re‐emerged on Black Twitter as part of the #BlackLivesMatter movement f­ollowing police brutality against young men of color in the U.S. (Foley 2016). However, as we move into an era of intense political polarity, being “woke” has also come be to associated with a certain type of activist‐poseur, someone whose interests are more neoliberal than intersectional. Think Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau or German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Today, neoliberal politicians and business leaders know it’s important to look woke,” read a recent article published in Vice. “In our free market economy, you can enact policies and make business decisions that increase inequality, harm workers from all backgrounds and continue to destroy the environment, but if you put in an appearance at a Pride rally or speak about the need for ethnic diversity in the workplace then you’re all good” (Rickett 2017). Being “woke” at once means advancing the leftist ideological agenda, while also being more concerned with identity politics than nuanced political engagement. I use “woke” in this chapter to refer to magazine stories that employ leftist politics and diversity as a sales tactic, thus falling into the latter definition of “wokeness.”

The “Woke” Consumer Magazines The “woke” consumer magazines are a new generation of leftist, intersectional, digital‐first ­publications produced by corporate entities. For magazine media, a strong voice and political perspective has often been a matter of brand identity. But corporate magazines’ activisms have been called into question. Cosmopolitan has been critiqued because it “preaches equal pay, access to birth control, and sex‐positivity, which are all important issues. But it rarely touches on the

182 Reynolds race and class issues that necessarily intersect with gender issues. It’s Sheryl Sandberg who’s offering advice to readers, not bell hooks” (Jones 2013). Like Cosmo, the new “woke” consumer magazines belong to profitable corporate entities, and the “woke” sex discourse enjoys a certain shock value, which is titillating for readers and advertisers. As scholars, we can celebrate magazines for pushing back against destructive, hegemonic discourses about sex, but we must also problematize their contributions to capitalist publishing structures and normative ideologies about sex.

“Woke” Mission Statements

In this chapter, I analyze sex articles published in “woke” consumer magazines – two Condé Nast brands, Teen Vogue and Them, and in Grindr’s gay men’s magazine, Into. Teen Vogue launched in 2003 as a sister title to Condé Nast’s flagship fashion magazine, Vogue. “Back then, (Teen Vogue) was mostly indistinguishable from the other teen magazines I read: CosmoGirl (for sassy white girls), Seventeen (for ambitious white girls), YM (for white girls prone to toxic‐shock syndrome),” wrote Jazmine Hughes for The New York Times Magazine. “Teen Vogue – for rich white girls – was explicitly dedicated to fashion, less ‘finding a prom date’ and more ‘finding a prom color palette’” (Hughes 2017). But in 2017 editor‐in‐chief Elaine Welteroth took the helm, moving the brand into social justice territory. Today, Teen Vogue’s media kit describes the magazine as a lifeline for “woke” youth. Its mission statement states that: Teen Vogue is the young person’s guide to saving the world. We aim to educate, enlighten and empower our audience to create a more inclusive environment (both on‐and offline) by amplifying the voices of the unheard, telling stories that normally go untold, and providing resources for teens looking to make a tangible impact in their communities (Teen Vogue 2019).

Like Teen Vogue, Them is also a Condé Nast brand. Since Welteroth left Teen Vogue to pursue an acting career (Arnold 2017), former digital editorial director Phillip Picardi has stepped in as Teen Vogue’s chief content officer. He holds the same title at Them, which launched as Condé Nast’s leading LGBTQ platform in October 2017. According to interviews with Picardi, Them is the first independent brand launched by the publishing megalith in more than a decade (Brannigan 2017). According to its mission statement: them, a next‐generation community platform, chronicles and celebrates the stories, people and voices that are emerging and inspiring all of us, ranging in topics from pop culture and style to politics and news, all through the lens of today’s LGBTQ community. (Them 2019)

Them uses a mix of professional journalistic writing and crowd‐sourced stories. Lifestyle reporting is interwoven with branded content, such as Philip Picardi’s photo essay about LGBTQ couples kissing in Burberry’s new fashion line (Picardi 2018). Although Them’s mission statement is LGBTQ‐inclusive, the sampled sex stories focused more on transgender and nonbinary identities than did the other magazines. Grindr’s public‐facing magazine, Into, targets a similar LGBTQ audience, but is predominantly focused on the gay men who use Grindr’s geo‐location based dating app. “If content is king these days, then everyone really wants to wear the crown…” wrote Jonathan Schieber for TechCrunch. “Pitching itself as the millennial response to Out Magazine, INTO features a similar mix of culture, lifestyle, entertainment, news and features … and the company even hired Out’s former editor at large, Zach Stafford to run the site” (Schieber 2017). Under Stafford’s leadership, Into also pushes sex content that promises to transgress against the mainstream gay magazine discourse. A portion of Into’s mission statement reads as follows: “Into creators that play, activists that slay, and queens that throw shade. We’re into conversations and listening. We’re into stories about how we’ve evolved and paving new paths” (Into 2019).



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Into, Teen Vogue, and Them promise to reject the normative structures of the publishing industry. This research investigates whether and to what extend these magazines succeed in meeting the representational goals of their mission statements.

Magazines and Sexual Scripts I place the “woke” sex discourse within a research narrative about magazines, sexual scripting, and self‐representation. I interrogate whether “woke” sex discourses are fundamentally transforming mediated knowledge about sexuality, or whether they reinforce stereotypes about sex, gender, dating, and romance. For generations, magazine media have reflected and shaped societal norms about sex (Durham 1996), surveilling women’s sexual behavior and championing men’s pleasure. Mainstream magazines have provided sex advice within the context of a heterosexual script, “which defines the courtship strategies, commitment orientations, and sexual goals considered appropriate for each sex” (Ward et al. 2015). Teen magazines have also used heterosexual scripts in media for girls and young women readers (Carpenter 1998; Joshi et al. 2011). Research conducted a generation ago showed that adolescents rated media as a primary source for information about sexual health and sexuality (Amonker 1980; Andre et  al. 1989; Ward 2003), and 35% said magazines were their leading source for information about the subject (Hoff and Greene 2000). Today, magazine media have taken sex content online, competing with sexual scripts provided through pornography and social media. Sexual scripts are the societal sexual norms we learn from living and developing in a culture (Bowleg et al. 2004; DeLamater and Hyde 2004; Matlin 2008). Just as an actor learns her role from a script, social actors learn their sex roles from societal, interpersonal, and individual sexual scripts (Bowleg et  al. 2004). Like all forms of subjectivity, we learn our sexual scripts from media, friends and family, romantic relationship, and personal experiences, as well as from our churches, educational systems, and even our government (Althusser 1971). Mainstream consumer magazines have historically surveilled women’s sexual behavior, producing sexual scripts that value female chastity and relegate women to the domestic sphere. According to a content analysis of nearly 250 articles published in the magazine Seventeen between 1974 and 1994, sexual scripts were “expanded to recognize female desire, ambivalence about sexuality, homosexuality, masturbation, oral sex, and even recreational sexual activity” (Carpenter 1998). But even resistant sexual scripts sometimes carry oppressive functions. In the same study, Carpenter asserted that “Seventeen’s editors generally resolved controversies in ways that reinforced dominant gender and sexual norms” (p. 158). As intersectional feminism has evolved from a marginalized political theory (Crenshaw 1991) to a trendy buzzword, and as the #MeToo movement, #BlackLivesMatter, and Women’s Marches have ushered in new generations of social justice activists, we have seen magazine media harness the contemporary zeitgeist. Many mainstream women’s magazines have attempted to re‐frame the sexist discourses that have visualized sex as a tool for keeping men in heterosexual relationships (Walsh‐Childers et al. 2002), and that have scripted women as caretakers and protectors of men’s sexual egos (Farvid and Braun 2006). Recently, glossies such as Women’s Health have urged readers to attend sex parties (Davies 2017), while Cosmopolitan has spotlighted women’s bisexuality in numerous stories (Dingle 2016; Hills 2017). Likewise, men’s magazines have started to feature racy new articles about topics such as male makeup models (Woolf 2016) and butt plugs (Saint Thomas 2017). “Stop being so heteronormative and get with the program,” urged one GQ writer in an article titled “Can a Manly Man Wear Makeup?” (Hotchkiss 2017). Even Playboy has secured its spot in the new “woke” media landscape, featuring for the first time a transgender playmate as a print magazine centerfold (Salam 2017). Digital platforms increasingly change the ways in which the public receives information about sex and sexuality. Studies show that LGBTQ teens have consistently turned to the internet to

184 Reynolds test and transform their identities, and to ease the coming‐out process (Bond et al. 2009; Craig and McInroy 2014; Gray 2009). The gay press has also moved online, attracting new eyes with boundary‐pushing narratives about queer acceptance. Legacy outlets like the Gay Times and local alt‐weeklies continue to influence LGBTQ people in the digital sphere. Despite their ­relevance, researchers have identified problems in these alternative media’s representations of LGBTQ culture. Popular LGBTQ media have been criticized for over‐representing gay men, neglecting bisexual and transgender people, and under‐representing people of color (Drushel 2017). A recent content analysis of social justice magazines found that white, thin‐bodied p ­ eople were overrepresented on magazine covers, and that feminist and gay rights magazines featured sexualizing photos more often than animal rights magazines, for instance (Wrenn and Lutz 2016). Although LGBTQ media are an important element of community representation, they often eroticize certain bodies and sexual lifestyles, contributing to surveillance of acceptable queer identities.

Research Methods This chapter contributes to a discussion about digital media representations of sexual diversity by identifying sexual scripts in magazines known for their cutting‐edge sex content. I analyze the “woke” sex discourse in Into, Teen Vogue, and Them, which challenges dominant narratives about sexuality disseminated in popular consumer magazines. I investigate whether the “woke” sex discourse achieves more authenticity in sexual representation, or whether it merely normalizes certain sexualities while marginalizing others, contributing to a system of objectification and othering that has been essential to magazines during the last century years. To do so, I posit two primary research questions: 1. How do the “woke” consumer magazines frame gender and sexuality? 2. How does the “woke” sex discourse harness political ideology within consumer‐focused content? In response to these questions, I conduct a brief critical discourse analysis (CDA) of 30 sex articles published in Into, Them, and Teen Vogue. CDA is an ideologically invested, qualitative approach that identifies hegemonic and counter‐hegemonic formations in discourse (van Dijk 1989). For the purpose of this research, discourse refers to a sociological phenomenon – the ideological process of constructing knowledge about a topic (Foucault 1978). Although CDA is often cited by journalism studies scholars as a method, coding is actually the process used to thematically analyze textual data. In this chapter, I coded my sample of “woke” consumer magazines for descriptive codes, e.g. “what is talked or written about,” and values codes, e.g. “perspectives or worldview” (Saldaña 2015) present in the articles. I then collapsed those codes into themes, known as pattern codes, which “pull together a lot of material into a more meaningful and parsimonious unit of analysis” (Saldaña 2015). Pattern codes are described alongside qualitative evidence in my findings section.

Sampling Because this was an exploratory study of a relatively new media phenomenon, I selected a convenience sample of 10 recent stories about gender, sex, and sexuality published in each of the titles during late winter 2017 and early spring 2018. In total, I analyzed 30 articles published in the three titles. The articles from Teen Vogue were selected by typing “sex” into the search field on the magazine’s website, then identifying stories primarily about sex or sexuality. Them’s website does not offer a search tool, so I identified potential stories about sex by scrolling through the magazine’s Twitter feed. I read and selected articles that primarily focused on sex



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or sexuality. Into’s editorial mix primarily covers sex and sexuality‐related content, so I narrowed my sample by selecting stories published in Juan Pablo Brammer’s sex and dating advice column, “Hola Papi!”

Findings and Analysis Into, Teen Vogue, and Them have successfully branded leftist ideology for audiences of politically engaged millennial readers. The “woke” consumer magazines sell content that has an overall message of resisting normativity, while simultaneously adhering to capitalist logics common to the mainstream magazine industry. The “woke” sex discourse is defined by its editorial focus on marginalized (non‐white, non‐heterosexual, non‐cisgender) communities, its intersectional feminist worldview, its focus on mental health, and its emphasis on consent and risks associated with sex. By diverging from historical archetypes of masculinity and femininity found in consumer lifestyle magazines, the “woke” consumer titles have carved out a new niche in digital publishing. However, the “woke” sex discourse also adheres to capitalist logics, failing to fully meet a key component of “wokeness”: class‐based critique. In the following pages, I describe dominant patterns present across the sampled content, providing qualitative evidence for this ­contemporary form of sexual scripting, which champions queer resistance within a sales‐focused publishing framework.

Representation of Marginalized Groups The “woke” consumer magazines are meant to appeal to readers who have not typically been represented in mainstream media. By catering to the LGBTQ community, communities of color, and folks who identify across the romantic spectrum, Into, Teen Vogue, and Them insert themselves into the leftist political discourse. This intersectional approach to sex and relationships puts diversity front and center in each magazine’s editorial mix. Matching today’s political trends, the “woke” magazines use intersectional feminism to signal engagement in community‐ level discourse. Vigilance against hetero‐ and cis‐normativity, ableism, racism, sizeism, and ­ageism fosters an air of authenticity in these publications, despite their corporate ownership. Further, by analyzing multiple dimensions of power and problematizing sex and gender roles even within the LGBTQ community, the “woke” sex discourse embodies the Millennial and Gen Z zeitgeist, demonstrating the evolution in identity politics –  both in publishing and in culture at large. After all, according to Them, “It’s really hard to talk about desire, and the political nature of desire, because we want to believe that desire isn’t political” (Them 2018). The “woke” sex discourse explicitly politicizes sex, sexuality, and gender in the name of social justice. However, at their core, the “woke” consumer magazines survive by selling editorial and advertising content to LGBTQ readers, relying on the same normative publishing structures as the rest of the magazine industry.

LGBTQ Audiences Each of the magazines analyzed is marketed to an audience that does not fall nicely within the bounds of heterosexual, cisgender culture. Gay men are the primary target market for Into, while trans and nonbinary folks seem to comprise the intended audience for Them. Although it is the subsidiary of a traditional women’s fashion magazine, Teen Vogue caters to gender‐diverse and sexual minority readers, answering to trends data showing that Gen Z and Millennials are more genderqueer and sexually diverse than previous generations. The “woke” consumer titles also pay lip service to other less‐represented genders and sexual orientations, including asexual and aromantic people, intersex people, and polyamorous folks. The “woke” magazines have identified and filled a content hole.

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Gay Men

Part of the new editorial strategy appears to be identifying power imbalances in LGBTQ culture. Stories in the sample framed gay men as having comparable social privilege  –  a transgressive move considering that Into’s primary audience is gay men, and gay men also make up a portion of Them’s target market. “Many people in the gay community suck, and I don’t mean in the good way,” wrote Into’s Juan Pablo Brammer in response to a reader who complained he didn’t feel gay enough. Brammer’s critique suggested that many gay men are too concerned with popularity, physique, and social media followers. Brammer wrote: “There are gay guys, for example, who achieve a certain number of Instagram followers and then refuse to associate with people who don’t look flashy enough in their stories. They suck” (Brammer 2017a, para. 15). Representations of gay men in Them followed a similar trend. In a first‐person listicle about gay online dating, one writer described a night out with friends at a club, each of whom was distracted by a blue screen. “A Tinder match, a WhatsApp texting buddy, a California acquaintance from ages ago who occasionally sent through a cute selfie – here we were…” writer Fran Tirado lamented (Tirado 2018, para. 3). Other portrayals equated gay men with sexual promiscuity, vanity, conspicuous consumption, and social media addiction. Using alcohol and drugs  – ­specifically alkyl nitrites, known as poppers – was also significant to narratives about gay men. Despite critiquing the gay lifestyle, these stories re‐affirmed stereotypes about gay men, and linked them with social and financial capital.

Lesbians

Lesbian women played a substantially less significant role in the sample’s editorial mix than did gay men. The only story explicitly featuring lesbians positioned them in opposition to gay men, playing off another age‐old trope: Lesbians and gays are like oil and water. In Into’s “Hola Papi!” column, Brammer responded to the following question: I’m a lesbian, but most of my friends are gay men. I have a really solid network of chosen family and consider myself really lucky! My girlfriend, on the other hand, says she is not a fan of hanging out with gay men and has never had a gay man friend because they are simply not into the same things. (2017b, para. 2)

Brammer (2017b) wrote back, asserting that he understood the reader’s girlfriend’s reasons for “Being leery about gay men’s misogyny and their weird lesbian jokes” (para. 12), “Being a gay woman and being hesitant about entering gay male spaces” (para. 11), and “Having an instinctual distrust of men” (para. 14) But in a list of things he doesn’t understand, he included “Not wanting to meet people without knowing anything about them other than their sexual orientation” (para. 18) and “Assuming you’ll have nothing in common with a person because he’s a gay guy” (para. 22). Brammer tried to bridge the gap between lesbians and gay men, while also drawing attention to it. Other references to lesbians in the sample included a Teen Vogue story about virginity myths, which quashes the presumption that lesbian women who have never had male partners are virgins, and a passing reference to perceived lesbophobia in books that contained bisexual characters. Not only did lesbians receive less coverage than gay men did, but they also were not presented in a positive light. The “woke” sex discourse about lesbians did not challenge but, in fact, contributed to stereotypes about angry, exclusivist lesbian women.

Bisexuals

Despite gay men and lesbian women’s lack of (positive) representation in this sample of stories, bisexual people’s struggles were spotlighted with more empathy. A story published in Teen Vogue discussed a study about the particular emotional setbacks bisexual people face compared to their gay and straight counterparts. Quoting the study’s author, Teen Vogue reported that “bisexual people are often invisible, rejected, invalidated, [and] stigmatized in the heterosexual community



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as well as the traditional LGBTQ communities” (McNamara 2017a, para. 6). Stories in them highlighted bisexual characters in contemporary literature and discussed a bisexual, trans woman’s experiences with dating. “Thankfully, bisexuality and sexual fluidity seem to be on the rise in terms of representation in the bookish world, although it is still often derided,” wrote Ilana Masad for Them in 2018 (para. 2), suggesting that “woke” media across genres had a duty to improve portrayals of bisexuality. The “woke” consumer magazines, however, called out the problematics of gay culture and pitted lesbians against gay men, all while championing bisexuality and discouraging stigma against bi people. Importantly, none of the stories analyzed ­mentioned pansexuality, an emerging preferred term for reference to people who date across the gender spectrum.

Transgender People

Given gay men and lesbians’ historical privilege in the queer community, the “woke” consumer magazines seem to have prioritized representation of genders and sexual communities that have faced compacted oppression. Even more so than bi folks, for instance, trans people were represented positively in the sample. In stories such as Them’s “Why Dating Another Trans Person Makes It Easier for Me to Love My Own Body,” trans acceptance was championed by writers who identify as transgender or nonbinary. A writer recalled how sleeping with another trans woman made her more secure in her own identity: “We talked … about how many ways there were to be women, men, humans. How wide womanhood could feel. How if there is a map of womanhood, it must be vast – and that vastness is beautiful.” Although neither Teen Vogue nor Into featured stories explicitly about transness, trans‐inclusive content was present in the former. One story about intersex teens featured a quote from a trans‐supportive biology teacher, who explained “you can be male because you have two X chromosomes, but your heart and brain are male. And vice – effing – versa” (McNamara 2017b, para. 5). Some stories used trans‐inclusive language to describe different ways of being trans, while others focused on the ways in which trans identity can develop over time. In a Them column called “Bed Hang: ‘Born This Way’ Actually Stifles the Fluidity of Queer Identity,” one contributor stated that “you can start off identifying as bisexual and then queer and then wonder why you feel more or less queer than you should and then realize OH WAIT MAYBE IT’S MY GENDER” (Pham and Walker 2018, para. 14), identifying fluidity as an aspect of both gender and sexual identity. These stories helped interrogate stereotypes about trans identity, providing appropriate terminology and trans‐­ accepting stories as a media intervention. However, not all trans‐related content was celebratory. Writers shared their stories of despair during transitioning, and others adhered to essentialist logics that conflated trans folks’ pre‐ transition gender with their biological sex. A story in Them, titled “On Sexual Consent, From a Woman Who Used to Be a Man” (Talusan 2018) described the writer’s feelings about rape culture post‐transition vs. pre‐transition, describing their pre‐transition gender identity as “man” and post‐transition as “woman.” “To me, as someone who has known what it’s like to be both a man and a woman, and who has experienced plenty of sex as both a man and a woman, it doesn’t sound like what Aziz Ansari did to Grace was rape,” the writer opined (Talusan 2018, para. 7). Today’s liberal discourse does not condone dead‐naming or dead‐gendering4 a trans person who has recently transitioned, although one writer seemed to do so to herself. She wrote that she “wanted the pains and the pleasures and the pedestrian things I thought represented womanhood. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I nearly drank poison” (Bellot 2018, para. 11). The messy realities of transness are a central part of the “woke” sex discourse. Today’s consumer magazines encourage readers to accept themselves as well as trans and non‐binary people they meet, while also acknowledging the painful coming‐out process and the sometimes not‐quite‐ getting‐it‐right experiences with pronouns, dead‐names, and the like. Even when queer stories are w ­ ritten by queer writers, such narratives can be problematic.

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Queer People

The “woke” sex discourse uses the word “queer” as an umbrella term that covers members of the LGBTQ community, and it also emphasizes the political process of “queering” culture – essentially deconstructing normativity. While some stories, like those in the “Hola Papi!” column used “queer” as a synonym for “gay,” most articles used “queer” to mean acceptance of the diversity of the human experience. One columnist wrote that he wants to be someone “who is truly accepting of all and who only longs to make the world a better, queerer, and more fashionable place” (Chamberlin 2018, para. 7), a statement that seems to be the modus operandi of the “woke” consumer magazines as a whole. Other stories used queerness to contextualize the fluidity of sexual and gender identities: “In the end, whether you’re gay, straight, bi, queer, or any other sexuality, isn’t that [personality] what love is about, really? Not about what is under someone’s clothes, because the body is a changeable, bendable thing …” (Masad 2018, para. 10), mused a columnist for Them. By embracing sex and gender fluidity, and by acknowledging the complexity of identities, the “woke” consumer magazines resist mainstream sexual scripts about masculinity and femininity, defined sex roles, and the like. Additional stories contributed to the de‐stigmatization of queer people by reminding readers that identities are not binary. “Aromanticism is a spectrum!” declared a writer for Them. “While some people simply identify as aromantic, others may use a whole variety of words to describe their experience of romantic attraction” (Plonski 2018, para. 6). Spectrums were a big part of the “woke” sex discourse. For instance, Teen Vogue quoted intersex advocate Emily Quinn, who affirmed the non‐binary way of thinking. “We’re often taught that there are only male or female bodies,” Quinn said. “But there’s actually a whole wide variety of possibilities when it comes to human biology” (Kheraj and Papisova 2017, para. 4). The “woke” sex discourse championed queer politics and queer ways of understanding gender, sexuality, and other identities, re‐educating readers who have been raised in an essentialist culture. Although gay men and lesbians were sometimes ­portrayed in unpleasant light, bi, trans, and queer representation felt like more of a priority to the writers.

Gender, Sex, and Romantic Diversity Given their target markets, the woke consumer magazines also covered people who identify as asexual and aromantic, intersex, non‐monogamous, and kinky. These are groups that have ­historically been absent from mainstream magazines’ sexual scripts. Stories about these sexual outsiders further developed the “woke” consumer magazines’ intersectional brands while playing a pedagogical role for readers. And like the intersectional worldview used throughout the sampled stories, coverage of lesser‐understood sexualities, romantic styles, and gender identities fostered authenticity within the publications. To know about these identities, writers would need to be up on conversations happening outside the confines of mainstream narratives about sex. To write about them is to flex a representational muscle.

Asexual and Aromantic

To illustrate how the consumer magazines have embedded themselves in the countercultural sex discourse, consider a series Them published about the asexual and aromantic spectrum. One story, called “7 Facts You Should Know About Aromantic People,” defined the differences ­between aromantic and asexual people, asserting that “Aromanticism (or aromanticity) is an ­orientation in which someone does not experience romantic attraction. Aromanticism is often confused for asexuality, but asexuality is only a lack of sexual attraction. Not all asexuals are ­aromantic, nor are all aromantics asexual” (Plonski 2018, para. 3). Clearing up stereotypes about nontraditional sexual and romantic styles fits with the larger intersectional rhetoric used



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by the “woke” consumer titles. Another story written by an aromantic writer asserted in the subhed that “I may not want romance for myself, but I will always relish the joy of others” (Jernigan 2018). By destigmatizing these lesser‐known identities, Them reached beyond normative definitions of queerness and sex positivity.

Intersex People

Toward that end, Teen Vogue also published stories that teach readers about lesser‐known biological sexes. Two stories in the teen‐targeted outlet focused on intersex individuals – people born with primary sex characteristics of both binary genders. “People’s bodies are more complex than you would think, blowing our ideas of biological sex right out of the water,” affirmed one article (Kheraj and Papisova 2017, para. 2). Putting intersex statistics into context, the story further reported that “1.7% of the population is born intersex (which as we mentioned has been debated), which means it may be just as likely that you’re born intersex as born a redhead” (para. 7). Features such as these help young people see the complexity of the gender spectrum – a topic that may not be addressed in high school or college sex ed. courses.

Poly and Kink Communities

By dismantling gender binaries, the “woke” consumer magazines help young people understand that there is more to sex and gender diversity than the LGBTQ acronym suggests. Coverage of polyamory, non‐monogamy, kink, and BDSM5 has also helped readers understand that marriage and emotional commitments are not the only forms of love or sexual attachments. In its articles about aromantic and asexual relationships, Them made a point of describing partnership styles that deviate from the traditional “first comes love, then comes marriage” script. In the story “7 Facts You Should Know About Aromantic People,” the writer calls out the problematics of monogamous normativity: The idea that romantic monogamous partnership is necessary for happiness and desired by everyone is called amatonormativity. Amatonormativity is harmful for everyone – not just aromantics – because it encourages people to enter or stay in unhealthy relationships, and causes them to distance themselves from other people in their lives when they are in a relationship. (Plonski 2018, para. 13)

Into and Teen Vogue also voiced their support for marginalized kink communities. Revising cautionary discourses about teen sex habits, Teen Vogue published a “Consent and BDSM: What You Should Know” guide for teens, focusing on obtaining consent during sex acts that require power exchange. “With a rising interest in kink and BDSM, and the ever‐prevalent rape culture, understanding the intricacies of consent can become more complicated – and are more important than ever,” Teen Vogue explained to its readers (Engle 2017b, para. 1). The magazine was careful to distinguish dramatic literary and cinematic representations of kink, such as 50 Shades of Grey, from the realities of the BDSM lifestyle. Stories also focused on affirmative sex practices, ensuring readers know the difference between power play and abuse.

Intersectional Identity Markers Through their coverage of gender and sexual outgroups, the “woke” consumer magazines locate their ideologies within the leftist political discourse. They acknowledge the complexities of power relations not only within the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks 2004), but also within the contexts of queer, sex‐positive culture. In stories about sex, Into, Them, and Teen Vogue gave editorial prominence to intersectional forms of oppression that manifest during dating and relationships. The “woke” sex discourse addressed issues of racial identity, mental health, age, and body size in stories throughout the sample.

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Race and Weight

In commentaries on the gay community, Into columnist Juan Pablo Brammer and Them writers Corbin Chamberlin and Phillip Henry critiqued racial and body‐type exclusivity among gay men. “Many of you date men who look just like you, or men of color who can pass for looking just like you,” Henry (2018) wrote in a story about experiencing racism from white men while dating (para. 2). Others critiqued sizeism in the gay community. “I’m always so shocked and repulsed by the position of most gay men to be so unaccepting of fat individuals, knowing how unkind the outside world is to those who are different,” Chamberlin (2018) wrote (para. 7). On the other hand, Brammer fanned controversy when addressing gay desire. He defended race role‐play as a legitimate kink. “Sex is a wilderness where strange things crop up,” Brammer (2017c) wrote. “It is an arena where the subconscious creeps into the conscious, and where fantasy can become tangible reality. It’s no surprise power play shows up here” (para. 11). The “woke” consumer magazines were sensitive to systemic oppression and to the ways they manifest in gay desire, but they also presented contradictory views on whether oppression is oppressive or productive in LGBTQ culture.

Mental Health

The “woke” magazines also covered mental health disparities among LGBTQ people. For example, Teen Vogue explained that bisexual people have higher rates of mental illness. “Researchers say it’s often due to rejection from straight and queer communities,” read the story subhed, matter‐of‐factly (Herman 2017). By calling out exclusion coming from within LGBTQ culture, Teen Vogue took an intersectional political stance: Not all queerness is experienced equally. Stories published in Into and Them echoed that sentiment. When an “Hola Papi!” reader sought advice about promiscuous sex while experiencing mental illness, Brammer responded with compassion, dismantling the concept of “sluttiness” while recommending the reader see a therapist. In another “Hola Papi!” column, a reader lamented the loss of a promising relationship, which he blamed on his anxiety and depression. Brammer (2017d) shared his own experiences with bipolar disorder, stating “It’s happened to me too… But I can’t beat myself up over that. All I can do is move forward in health” (para. 27). The “woke” consumer magazines often provided assurance and affirmation about mental health alongside sex and gender content. From intersex teens to transgender adults, the message was clear: “love must start with us, not with external validation” (Bellot 2018, para. 18). These platitudes and feel‐ good messages were prominent in stories about mental health. Many stories addressed self‐ doubt and the crippling loneliness that often accompanies being “othered.”

Age

Even Teen Vogue framed its primary target market within the context of otherness. While Into and Them addressed racism and body shaming in the LGBTQ community, Teen Vogue focused on teenagers’ underrepresentation in discussions about sex and sexuality. Stories about everything from kink and contraception to alcohol and rape culture were framed from a pedagogical perspective, offering teens information about sex and gender that they may not have learned in school. “No matter how many abstinence‐only classes they sit through, it’s a known fact that young people are going to have sex,” offered one article about risks associated with the pull‐out method (McNamara 2017c, para. 1). “Since schools don’t always teach students how to use condoms, here’s a lesson on how best to protect yourself using condoms,” the story continued (para. 5). The contributors at Teen Vogue offered interventions for what they perceived as a faulty sex education system in the United States – a system that contributed to teen girls’ and young queer people’s continued mistreatment and exploitation. Across the sample, the “woke” sex discourse emphasized identities that are typically ­overlooked, stereotyped, or misunderstood in mainstream sex content. Into, Teen Vogue, and Them focused on intersectional factors that influence sex and dating, which – according to the



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magazines – included racism, mental health, body size, and age. These empowering messages helped illustrate the links between sex, romance, and other systemic forms of oppression.

Consent, Rape Culture, and Sex Risks Although the “woke” consumer magazines have strived to empower readers, they also appear to be cautionary about risks associated with queerness, womanhood, and sex in general. Perhaps in response to the contemporary zeitgeist, many stories across the sample addressed rape culture and questions surrounding consent. Uniquely, for a magazine targeting adolescents in the U.S., Teen Vogue also focused on dispelling sex myths, explaining sexually transmitted infection (STI) and pregnancy risks, and warning readers about ineffective modes of contraception. Stories about consent focused on defining the concept and providing examples of how it can be used during sexual encounters. In Teen Vogue, articles such as “Why You Can’t Always Consent to Sex If You’re Drunk” and “Consent and BDSM: What You Should Know” taught young people about the basics of “yes means yes” sex, but the youth‐targeted title also reminded readers that “‘Yes’ does not mean ‘yes to all.’” Them and Into further complicated definitions of consent, reminding readers that consent can also change during a sexual encounter. “Isn’t that one of the core tenets of sexual consent, that it can be revoked at any time?” Them inquired. “Why shouldn’t we be allowed to change our minds?” (Pham and Walker 2018, para. 14). However, some representations of consent were troubling, as in the case of a story published in Into’s “Hola Papi!” column. It started in a reasonable fashion as Juan Pablo Brammer (2017e) urged a reader to “Make (sex) safe. Make it consensual. Make sure it’s what you really want in this moment” (para. 24). But Brammer’s advice about consent devolved from there: “If it’s a half‐and‐half sort of deal, (you can’t really tell if you want sex or not but you’re going to do it anyway), don’t beat yourself up too much if you don’t feel too great afterwards,” Brammer wrote (para. 24). This wishy‐washy message was antagonistic toward the otherwise good work that the “woke” sex discourse does in promoting affirmative consent. Although not‐100%‐into‐ it sex is a reality of many ongoing sexual relationships, Brammer’s advice could be read as unhealthy permissiveness toward unclear boundaries during casual hookups. Although Into and Them covered consent prominently, neither publication addressed other significant risks associated with sex and dating. Teen Vogue, however, carried ample content about STIs, pregnancy, and contraception. An extensive article called “How Safe Are Condoms? 9 Condom Myths Debunked” (Strehlke 2017) helped teen readers understand condoms’ efficacy for preventing pregnancy and STI transmission. Other articles, such as “Teens Report Using Pull Out Method As Birth Control” (McNamara 2017c) and “Jiftip Penis Stickers Seal Penis Shut During Sex: Except the company that sells them says they may not work…” (McNamara 2017d) cleared up any potential misunderstandings about the efficacy of these birth‐control methods. By writing matter‐of‐fact stories, chock‐full of statistics, Teen Vogue demystified many of the risks associated with sex and sexuality. The “woke” consumer magazines framed some sex risks as preventable and others as inevitable. Rather than focusing on abstinence and monogamy, Into, Teen Vogue, and Them offered readers tools for having safer sex with multiple partners, from boyfriends and girlfriends to one‐ night‐stands. The “woke” sex discourse embraces the reality of rape culture, providing ample instruction on obtaining consent. However, emotional risks associated with sex were not prominently covered in any of the examined stories, despite the publications’ apparent interest in providing compassionate coverage of mental health from other angles.

Capitalism: a Contradiction The findings above provide qualitative evidence for a dominant representational paradigm (Hall 1997) in the sampled titles. On the one hand, the “woke” sex discourse reflects the political agenda of the young leftists, and with it the identity politics associated with feminism, queer

192 Reynolds theory, and critical race theory. On the other hand, it pushes the same capitalist agenda that has historically defined consumer publishing. Alongside Teen Vogue’s stories about condom use and negotiating consent appear ads for expensive clothing lines, featuring svelte androgynous teenagers. Into’s “Hola Papi!” advice column repeatedly pushes Grindr’s hookup application, with columnist Juan Pablo Brammer integrating Grindr’s marketing strategy into his editorial content. “First of all, don’t you dare delete Grindr?” Brammer (2017e) wrote. “… Sure, you’re having problems, but let’s focus on what matters here” (para. 7). What matters, apparently, is pushing Grindr’s downloads in the App Store. Even Them, whose trans‐friendly rhetoric espouses inclusivity on all fronts, pushes capitalism through stories that may seem innocuous on first read, but which embed corporate agendas. For instance, one writer urged readers to celebrate Valentine’s Day. “My defense of Valentine’s Day is the same reason I am still a Disney nerd at heart, and why I consume romance novels like candy,” she wrote. “It’s all about being free with that happiness, and openly sharing the mushy feelings we so often are made to feel embarrassed about” (Jernigan 2018, para. 15). What Them does not acknowledge is that in contemporary America, Valentine’s Day, Disney, and romance novels are expressions of capitalist ideology in the media market. And by including stories that idealize queer purchasing power, queer representations in pop culture (Lady Gaga, Glee, 50 Shades of Gray), and queer fashion, the “woke” sex discourse produces a new type of queer normativity – one that involves intersectionality in all areas but wealth inequality.

Conclusions: queerness and Corporate Interests This exploratory CDA examined 30 sex stories published in three digital, niche consumer magazines. I investigated how the “woke” consumer magazines use political frameworks to cover gender and sexuality. The “woke” sex discourse was defined as resistance to the heterosexual script found in women’s consumer magazines, “which defines the courtship strategies, ­commitment orientations, and sexual goals considered appropriate for each sex” (Ward et  al. 2015, p. 49). By covering LGBTQ identities, diversity in romantic attachment and gender expression, intersectional identity markers, safer sex strategies, and consent and rape culture, the “woke” consumer magazines dismantle the dominant sexual scripts found in consumer ­lifestyle magazines. However, Bitch magazine reminded us that being “woke” refers to someone “thinking for themselves, who sees the ways in which racism, sexism and classism affect how we lives [sic] our lives on a daily basis” (Foley 2016, para. 3). Although the “woke” sex discourse is critical of gay privilege, white privilege, cis privilege, monogamous privilege, and the like, it seems that critiques of capitalism are less present in the “woke” sex discourse than might be expected under a truly intersectional publishing model. The reality is that capitalist impulses are alive and well in the queer community, and they are reflected in media targeted to LGBTQ readers. The “woke” sex discourse harnesses leftist ideology to sell diversity content to diverse audiences. Into, Teen Vogue, and Them have successfully branded a blend of compassion and leftist political correctness that simultaneously sells to advertisers and contributes to the emancipation of marginalized groups. The strategy appeals to the “woke” consumer magazines’ audiences. In 2016, the research firm J. Walter Thompson found that only 48% of Gen Z consumers identify as heterosexual – down from 65% among millennials – and that the majority know someone who is nonbinary and uses gender‐neutral pronouns (Tsjeng 2016). The same study found that fewer than half of Gen Z teens primarily wear clothing marketed to their biological sex. Into, Teen Vogue, and Them seem to be tapping a consumer base of young people with diverse genders and sexualities, filling a distinct magazine media market niche, while providing politically compelling content that audiences find empowering. By contextualizing LGBTQ and other sex/gender



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minorities’ lived experiences within an intersectional feminist lens, the “woke” consumer ­magazines meet the demands of millennial and Gen Z readers who get their content online. Despite harnessing transgressive messages about identity and intersectionality, social class appears to be the missing link between the “woke” sex discourse in consumer magazines and truly radical leftist politics. Magazine scholars must be attentive to the necessary overlap between high‐profile, consumer publications and capitalist worldviews. Although readers and magazine media scholars can (and should) champion the “woke” consumer magazines for normalizing marginalized identities and diversifying editorial representation, we should also remain vigilant against marketing tactics packaged as legitimate political messages. The “woke” sex discourse serves an important cultural function in re‐defining sexual scripts, but it also produces a new form of queer normativity in which LGBTQ identity and sex positivity become tools for increasing corporate profit. By watering down leftist discourse, the “woke” sex discourse treads the line between emancipation and exploitation. It is worth examining whether class‐based critique is absent from the stories due to the high cost of entry into the corporate publishing industry. Many recent think pieces have critiqued financial elitism in journalism (Kendzior 2013; Oremus 2017; Rivera 2016). When writers belong to the nouveau bourgeoisie, and when readers are simultaneously enticed by social justice causes and advertisements for $4000 dresses (Cills 2017), a problem of representation emerges. Queer people on average make less money per year than straight men do in the United States, although heterosexual women still make less, on average, than lesbians or gay men (Pinsker 2015). Most do not live on the liberal coasts, and many fear coming out because it is a threat to their public safety (Walker 2017). The realities of LGBTQ existence do not match the “queerness is coolness” message propagated in the “woke” consumer magazines. Messages about low‐ and middle‐income queerness do not attract an audience that appeals to advertisers. It appears that the “woke” sex discourse is a sales platform for an idealized queer lifestyle as much as it is a representational transgression against patriarchal, cisgender, heterosexist norms in society. Less optimistically, it is possible that media giants such as Condé Nast and Grindr have identified new platforms for capitalizing upon readers’ marginalization. New reports show that the queer media market is largely untapped (e.g. Conn 2015; Martin 2018). The “woke” consumer magazines may view their audiences as the gatekeepers for earning potential.

Limitations and Future Research As with many exploratory studies, this research was limited foremost by its methodology. The convenience sample of 30 articles illuminates the ideological underpinnings of the “woke” sex discourse, but it may not provide a representative snapshot of ideology within all sex articles published in Into, Teen Vogue, or Them. Future research should examine a representative sample of sex‐related stories published across these outlets and should also expand to include other digital‐first consumer magazines that focus on sexuality and gender identity. Magazine media scholars should keep abreast of developments in the queer publishing market, as other major publishers beyond Condé Nast may expand into the LGBTQ market, and existing LGBTQ‐ friendly companies beyond Grindr may expand into magazine publishing. This research represents an early analysis of the queer publishing boom. This study identified an important crisis in representation in the consumer magazine industry: diversity content may not be produced by truly diverse writers. Interviews with staffers and ethnographies of Into, Teen Vogue, and Them’s production routines could illuminate the ways in which writers do (or don’t) identify with the queer community, as well as the decision‐making processes that lead to the development of “woke” sex discourses. Further, scholars should be careful to examine counter‐hegemonic sites of queer sex discourse production, such as DIY zines, online blogs, queer message boards, and the like. The “woke” consumer magazines are limited by the

194 Reynolds same professional norms and processes that other consumer media experience. Truly oppositional messages about queerness will be located within media that resist capitalist modes of ­production, i.e. media that do not view queerness as a sales tactic. Because the current study used a critical‐qualitative research method, the findings are also necessarily ideologically invested, and my research has an explicit political orientation. As a queer woman and former national magazine writer, I bring in my own perspectives to the analysis: I am a skeptical champion of queer representation in consumer media but see the limitations of production under capitalist publishing models. Future scholars may wish to analyze the “woke” sex discourse by using less subjective methods, such as quantitative content analysis. Alternatively, this research line could be amplified by a stronger theoretical background in political economy.

Notes 1 The abbreviation POC refers to people of color. 2 Elaine Welteroth left her role at Condé Nast in January 2018. She was replaced by Lindsey Peoples Wagner, Teen Vogue’s youngest African‐American editor, in October 2018. 3 Picardi is now the editor‐in‐chief of Out. 4 Using the wrong pronoun to refer to a transgender person with the wrong pronouns or using their pre‐transition name. 5 Urban Dictionary defines BDSM as “an overlapping abbreviation of Bondage and Discipline (BD), Dominance and Submission (DS), Sadism and Masochism (SM).” See https://www.urbandictionary. com/define.php?term=BDSM.

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196 Reynolds Hills, R. (2017). What it’s really like to be a bisexual woman. Cosmopolitan. http://www.cosmopolitan. com/sex‐love/news/a43388/what‐its‐really‐like‐to‐be‐a‐bisexual‐woman (accessed 1 April 2019). Hoff, T. and Greene, L. (2000). Sex Education in America. Menlo Park, CA: Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. hooks, b. (2004). The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Simon and Schuster. Hotchkiss, S. (2017). Can a manly man wear makeup? GQ. https://www.gq.com/story/male‐makeup‐ acne (accessed 1 April 2019). Hughes, J. (2017). Elaine Weltheroth, Teen Vogue’s refashionista. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/08/31/magazine/elaine‐welteroth‐teen‐vogues‐refashionista.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Into 2019. About Us. accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.intomore.com/about. Jernigan, L. (2018). I’m aromantic and asexual – and I love Valentine’s Day. Them. https://www.them.us/ story/aromantic‐asexual‐valentines‐day (accessed 1 April 2019). Jones, A. (2013). Is Cosmopolitan ‘deeply feminist?’ The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2013/12/cosmopolitan‐deeply‐feminist/355713 (accessed 1 April 2019). Joshi, S.P., Peter, J., and Valkenburg, P.M. (2011). Scripts of sexual desire and danger in US and Dutch teen girl magazines: a cross‐national content analysis. Sex Roles 64 (7–8): 463–474. Kendzior, S. (2013). Who is a ‘journalist’? People who can afford to be. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera. com/indepth/opinion/2013/09/201391764312806487.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Kheraj, E. and Papisova V. (2017). What it means to be intersex. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue. com/story/what‐it‐means‐to‐be‐intersex (accessed 1 April 2019). Martin, A.L. Jr. (2018). Queer (in) frequencies: SiriusXM’s OutQ and the limits of queer listening publics. Feminist Media Studies 18 (2): 249–263. Masad, I. (2018). These books show that bi folks are far from greedy. Them. https://www.them.us/story/ bisexual‐representation‐in‐books (accessed 1 April 2019). Matlin, M.W. (2008). The Psychology of Women. Belmont, CA: Thomas Higher Education. McNamara, B. (2017a). Bisexual people open up about their identity in video for GLAAD and planned parenthood. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/glaad‐planned‐parenthood‐bisexual‐ awareness‐week‐video (accessed 1 April 2019). McNamara, B. (2017b). This biology teacher disproved transphobia with science. Teen Vogue. https:// www.teenvogue.com/story/teacher‐destroys‐transphobia‐science (accessed 1 April 2019). McNamara, B. (2017c). Teens report using pull out method as birth control. Teen Vogue. https://www. teenvogue.com/story/teens‐report‐pull‐out‐method‐birth‐control (accessed 1 April 2019). McNamara, B. (2017d). Jiftip penis stickers seal penis shut during sex. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue. com/story/jiftip‐penis‐stickers (accessed 1 April 2019). Oremus, W. (2017). The media’s ‘bubble’ problem is really a diversity problem. Slate. https://slate.com/ business/2017/04/the‐medias‐bubble‐problem‐is‐really‐a‐diversity‐problem.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Ouellette, L. (1999). Inventing the Cosmo girl: class identity and girl‐style American dreams. Media, Culture and Society 21 (3): 359–383. Pham, L. and Walker, H. (2018). Bed hang: ‘born this way’ actually stifles the fluidity of queer identity. Them. https://www.them.us/story/bed‐hang‐born‐this‐way‐and‐the‐fluidity‐of‐queer‐identity (accessed 1 April 2019). Picardi, P. [pfpicardi] (2017). If It’s OK with you guys, I’m gonna talk about anal sex for a wee lil thread. Twitter. https://twitter.com/pfpicardi/status/885922401736851458?lang=en (accessed 1 April 2019). Picardi, P. (2018). We dressed LGBTQ+ couples in Burberry’s epic new Rainbow Collection. Them. https://www.them.us/story/burberrys‐epic‐new‐rainbow‐collection?utm:source=socialandutm: medium=twitter (accessed 1 April 2019). Pinsker, J. (2015). Unequal pay: The gay wage gap. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/ archive/2015/06/gay‐men‐women‐lesbian‐earnings‐wage‐gap/396074 (accessed 1 April 2019). Plonski, L. (2018). 7 Facts you should know About aromantic people. Them. https://www.them.us/ story/facts‐you‐should‐know‐about‐aromantic‐people (accessed 1 April 2019). Rickett, O. (2017). Stop pretending these global leaders are woke baes. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_ nz/article/a3e55j/stop‐pretending‐these‐global‐leaders‐are‐woke‐baes (accessed 1 April 2019). Rivera, J. (2016). I grew up thinking journalism was just for rich white people. I was mostly right. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2016/7/8/12119342/unpaid‐internships‐journalism (accessed 1 April 2019).



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Salam, M. (2017). Playboy to feature its first transgender playmate. The New York Times. https://www. nytimes.com/2017/10/19/arts/playboy‐playmate‐transgender.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Saldaña, J. (2015). The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. Sage. Schieber, J. (2017). Grindr launches INTO, a new media property. TechCrunch. https://techcrunch. com/2017/08/15/grindr‐launches‐into‐a‐new‐media‐property (accessed 20 September 2019). Starnes, T. (2017). Parents outraged over Teen Vogue anal sex how‐to column (but magazine still defends it). Fox News. http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/07/18/teen‐vogue‐defends‐teaching‐kids‐ how‐to‐engage‐in‐sodomy.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Strehlke, S. (2017). How safe are condoms? 9 Condom myths debunked. Teen Vogue. https://www. teenvogue.com/story/9‐condom‐myths‐debunked (accessed 1 April 2019). Talusan, M. 2018. On Sexual Consent, From a Woman Who Used to Be a Man. Them. accessed 1 April 2019. https://www.them.us/story/consent‐patriarchy‐and‐aziz‐ansari. Teen Vogue (2019). Mission Statement. Condé Nast. http://www.condenast.com/brands/teen‐vogue (accessed 1 April 2019). Them (2018). Mission Statement. Condé Nast. http://www.condenast.com/brands/them (accessed 1 April 2019). Tirado, F. (2018). 14 Rules for dealing with your pretend internet boyfriend. Them. https://www.them. us/story/14‐rules‐for‐dealing‐with‐your‐pretend‐internet‐boyfriend (accessed 1 April 2019). Tsjeng, Z. (2016). Teens these days are queer AF. Broadly. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/ kb4dvz/teens‐these‐days‐are‐queer‐af‐new‐study‐says (accessed 1 April 2019). Walker, H. (2017). How transgender and queer people avoid violence. Them. https://www.them.us/ story/what‐queer‐and‐trans‐people‐do‐to‐avoid‐violence (accessed 1 April 2019). Walsh‐Childers, K., Gotthoffer, A., and Lepre, C.R. (2002). From ‘just the facts’ to ‘downright salacious’: teens and women’s magazine coverage of sex and sexual health. In: Sexual Teens, Sexual Media: Investigating Media’s Influence on Adolescent Sexuality (eds. J.D. Brown, J.R. Steele and K. Walsh‐ Childers), 153–171. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Ward, M.L. (2003). Understanding the role of entertainment media in the sexual socialization of American youth: a review of empirical research. Developmental Review 23 (3): 378–388. Ward, L.M., Vandenbosch, L., and Eggermont, S. (2015). The impact of men’s magazines on adolescent boys’ objectification and courtship beliefs. Journal of Adolescence 39: 49–58. Wertheim, B. (2017). Who will mourn Teen Vogue? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/11/04/style/teen‐vogue‐print‐magazine‐readers.html?_r=0 (accessed 1 April 2019). Woolf, J. (2016). The new face of Covergirl is a guy. GQ. https://www.gq.com/story/covergirl‐guy‐ james‐charles‐makeup (accessed 1 April 2019). Wrenn, C.L. and Lutz, M. (2016). White women wanted? An analysis of gender diversity in social justice magazines. Societies 6 (12): 1–18.

15

Gatekeepers and Gal Pals The Narrative Strategies of Celebrity Magazines Andrea McDonnell

Introduction Since 2001, celebrity gossip magazines have claimed top spots on newsstands across America, Europe, and Australia; the most popular titles – Us Weekly, Ok!, Star, and People attract millions of readers each week. The genre’s explosive rise in circulation began in the early 2000s, when, in rapid succession, a number of publications adopted decisively similar standards in terms of layout, content, and tone, rebranding themselves as full‐color, glossy weeklies, which we now dub celebrity gossip magazines. Thanks to their pervasive appeal and seemingly instant success, the narrative strategies, visual representations, and modes of address employed by these texts may seem new to us. The juicy tidbits they offer may seem unique to this up‐to‐the‐minute, fame‐obsessed, reality‐show‐driven culture that we live in. Yet, while celebrity gossip magazines have developed new codes, they also share much in common with fan magazines of the early twentieth century. This chapter considers the visual and rhetorical strategies employed by celebrity magazines during the Golden Age of Hollywood as they relate to, and differ from, contemporary publications. Specifically, I consider two popular magazines in 1936, Photoplay and Modern Screen, alongside two of the most‐read titles in 2016, Us Weekly and People, in an effort to understand the evolution of the genre and its lasting appeal to readers over the course of the past eight decades.

Then and Now: the Purpose and Pleasures of Fan Magazines In 1936, the global economy was still recovering from the deepest and longest depression on record. Struggling to recover from the first World War and on the cusp of a second, that year the USA saw an unemployment rate of nearly 17% (Smiley 1983). Yet, despite the economic hardships – or perhaps in an escapist response to them – audiences flocked to the relatively new medium of film, with between 40 and 50% of the entire US population in attendance at movie theaters each week (Pautz 2002). Developments in filmic technologies, including the advent of sound and, later, the use of Technicolor, produced a series of exciting changes that made movies, and their actors, seem ever‐more realistic. Fan magazines, platforms for studio‐sanctioned publicity during the teens and roaring twenties, were soon granted greater access, pushing the boundaries of what audiences could learn about their favorite players. As Joshua Gamson notes The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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in his study, Claims to Fame, by the 1930s the magazines’ tone had shifted and the idols of the silver screen, once anointed gods and goddesses, were now presented as “mortals,” who just happened to occupy “lavish Hollywood homes,” living the good and glamorous lives that most could only dream of during this period. This shifting discourse helped to create a “greater sense of connection and intimacy between the famous and their admirers” (Gamson 1994, p. 29). Anthony Slide, writing about the history of Hollywood fan magazines, contends that this shift in print coverage had a direct and critical impact. “The movies presented the star to the viewer,” Slide notes, “but the fan magazine could reach beyond the visual image and examine and reveal the ‘real’ personality – his or her life, loves, and most intimate thoughts” (Slide 2010, p. 6). As a result, fan magazine readership soared; by 1933, the top publications in the industry – Modern Screen, Silver Screen, and Photoplay – were each selling around 500 000 copies per week at newsstands (Slide 2010, p. 122). Fast‐forward to the early 2000s, and Americans, faced with wartime politics and a sluggish global economy, once again began to turn to celebrity magazines. In 2016, Us Weekly had 12 million weekly readers (Us Weekly Media Kit 2017, p. 4) and People boasted 39 million (People Media Kit Stats 2016). Though movie ticket sales have declined dramatically, audiences now use a staggering array of web sites, social media platforms, entertainment programs, and even mainstream news content to stay up to date with their favorite celebrities. Reality television shows like The Osbournes, Newlyweds, and Keeping Up with the Kardashians trade any remaining semblance of the star as a distanced idol in favor of sly, winking accessibility. Savvy celebrities now promise their fans constant access to their most private thoughts in exchange for adoration, transforming followers into lucrative promotions and licensing deals. Celebrity gossip magazines provide a weekly roundup of paparazzi pics, posed, publicist‐approved chit chats, and “private” stories, bolstering the notion, now completely imbued in our media culture, that celebrities are just like us. Of course, gossip narratives benefit the famous, enhancing their renown and fortunes and propping up an ever‐expanding array of celebrity industries, but these benefits are enjoyed by a relatively small cohort of actors who participate, either directly or indirectly, in the machinery of celebrity culture: performers, editors, bloggers, publicists, photographers and, by extension, stylists, trainers, chefs, assistants, and their ilk (Gamson 1994, pp. 57–78). It is, in fact, audiences who keep the industry and all its ancillary players humming. Sustained reader engagement is the fuel that propels fan magazine sales, but how has the genre maintained our attention? Why is it that readers continue to find celebrity gossip so pleasurable? Studies suggest that readers use fan magazine content as a mechanism for bonding with other readers, expressing their values and beliefs, and engaging in sociable conversations with friends and acquaintances (Feasey 2008; Hermes 1995; McDonnell 2014). In addition, gossip about celebrities tends to be more light‐ hearted and game‐like than gossip about friends and loved ones, with little chance of negative repercussions or hurt feelings (Gamson 1994, p. 176). Casual conversation about celebrities also serves as a kind of mass cultural social lubricant; most people know what’s new with the A‐listers, and so these individuals provide a kind of built‐in social network of people who are “knowable” and available for discussion (McDonnell 2014). What follows is an examination of the strategies employed by fan magazines, past and present, to hail their readers while also positioning themselves as key liaisons between the famous “them” and the rest of “us.” To assess these techniques, I conducted a close reading of four fan magazines, 80 years apart; two published monthly in 1936 (Modern Screen and Photoplay) and two published weekly in 2016 (People and Us Weekly). Using the Media History Digital Library archive, I examined every publication of Motion Picture and Photoplay between January and December, a total of 24 issues. Because the 2016 sample was significantly larger (104 issues), I randomly selected one issue per month per title, thereby considering 12 issues each of People and Us Weekly, spanning January to December 2016, which I reviewed in hard copy through a library collection. Cover images and headlines, regularly appearing columns, photographic and

200 McDonnell narrative styles, modes of address, and topics of interest were all considered, with particular attention given to similarities and differences across time and publications. What emerges is the dual role of fan magazines; they are at once gatekeepers – key‐holders who allow readers guided entry into the “real” world of the glamourous life  –  and at the same time, gal‐pals  –  chatty friends who connect us to a community of other readers and celebs, placing us in the conversation while offering up the latest gossip.

Gatekeepers From their earliest days, fan magazines have promised their readers a special kind of access to celebrities. In the early years of cinema, studio‐sanctioned stories revealed the “untold,” “true,” and “behind the scenes” “facts” that would make fans feel as though they were on set alongside their favorite players. Photoplay ran features entitled “We cover the studios” and “The private life of a talking picture” that took readers behind the scenes and into the movie‐making process. Full‐page photo spreads provided a snapshot of the visually stunning sets and studio lots, the lights and the cameras, and the stage set for action. Here, it is through the magazine that readers gain access, not only to photos and stories about celebrities, but also to a glimpse behind the curtain and into the world of Hollywood‐land. Today’s magazines do this, too; a recent People montage follows “Stars On‐Set!” and shows Katie Holmes in costume for her role as Jackie Kennedy and Shailene Woodley playing baseball for her role in an upcoming film.1 Yet today, this type of story, which foregrounds actors’ professional lives, stands out as an exception. These narratives have been largely replaced by information about the personal lives and intimate expressions of the rich and famous. By the 1920s, as the movie industry realized actors’ power to generate box office sales, the studios gradually began to make their actors more available to the gossip press (McDonald 2000). The more audiences learned about, and came to admire, certain actors, the greater the demand was for stories and images of those individuals. The new medium of photography was quickly replacing illustration, and photorealistic images of performers were now appearing alongside detailed stories about their “real” lives, feelings, and desires. Some stories continued to suggest that the actors were just like their on‐screen counterparts – “reel romance becomes real”2 and “their roles have affected their lives”3 – but many were now promising to tell about the “private life,” “real story,” and “untold tales” of favorite figures. “We bet that you would never guess,” begins coverage of “the glamorous Gail Patrick” in an October 1936 issue of Modern Screen. The first thing I discovered was that the camera hadn’t told us half the truth about her. She is ever so much prettier in person than she is on the screen. Moreover, she’s not at all the sultry, languorous type. She has a vivid, alive look; black hair that fairly glistens with vitality; brilliant, long‐lashed dark eyes, and a sparkling smile.4

Both the content and style of this narrative positions the magazine as a critical insider who can communicate, through photos and vivid prose, a sense of being there, with the star herself; of what it is like, in essence, getting to know her. It is this break between filmic and extra‐filmic versions of self that Richard de Cordova argues transforms the picture personality into a star (de Cordova 1990). This ability to access the star as an authentic individual is thereby made possible, through and only through the mediation of the magazine. A particularly fascinating example of this type of mediation appears in a recurring feature in Modern Screen: “Information Desk.” Here, readers can “learn the facts about their favorite players,” which are summarized in brief bios. Readers can also write in and ask questions – “those asked most frequently and the most interesting ones receive first preference.” A cartoon atop the  page (Figure 15.1) shows a character holding a question mark asking a man behind the



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Figure 15.1  Modern Screen, April 1936, p. 14. “Information Desk.”

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202 McDonnell “information desk”: “Does Mae West use padding to give her curves?”5 The style is at once informative and cheeky, egalitarian and irreverent. It privileges the audience’s interest and ­creates a platform for reader engagement and interactivity via the opportunity to write in. Yet through it all, it is the magazine that remains the source of knowledge and truth. The same can be said of the celebrity address logs, which both Modern Screen and Photoplay post monthly, encouraging readers to write in to the stars’ studio addresses. Once again, it is the magazine’s insider knowledge that makes it ­possible for the reader to interact with the star. Other regular sections pioneer the trademark gossip columns that have become the industry standard, mixing newsy reporting with a montage of out‐on‐the‐town paparazzi photos. In Photoplay, “Cal York’s Gossip of Hollywood” blends photos of actors and countesses, often dressed to the nines, and reports on evenings out, witty banter, and famous faux pas.6 “What goes on in Hollywood? Our news snoop’s busy telling you all, from society to sports” boasts Modern Screen’s chatty monthly column “Good news.” Atop the page, an illustration of a reporter and cameraman on one side pursue a glamorous dancing duo in formal wear on the other. Today’s publications rely on similar columns; weekly sections entitled “Star Tracks,” “Scoop,” and “Chatter” (People) and “Hot Hollywood,” “Hot Pics,” “Red Carpet,” and “Loose Talk” (US) collage candid and posed photos, celebrity quips, and gossipy insight. Together, these tidbits provide the reader with a sense of being in the know, an update on the stars’ goings on and, perhaps, an opportunity to see them up close and off‐guard (Holmes 2005). In this way, the magazines claim to offer the pieces of a puzzle, which, once connected, reveal the authentic celebrity self. Insider information about the stars’ personalities and appearances are coupled with stories about the intricacies of celebs’ daily experiences and goings‐on, often told in fantastic detail. Stars’ shopping preferences, for instance, are documented in a consumerist whirl of options, photographed and identified for the readers’ knowledge and convenience. “May we suggest,” begins a December 1936 feature in Photoplay, wherein a parade of star‐inspired cosmetics, including “a fluted crystal set of powder and rouge to lend glamour to your face and your dressing table” and “a smart set of compact, lipstick and cigarette case in black with gold‐and‐ white trim to wear with your best black dress” are presented to the reader in a series of charming illustrations, accompanied by handwritten, cursive suggestions (Figure 15.2). The personal tone and intimacy of the handwritten notes creates a sense of connection between the reader and its author. A similar feature, “Gathering Gifts with Gracie,” presents the star herself as a guide, noting: “Going shopping with Gracie Allen is fun, because she always knows just what she’s going to buy. First, gifts to beauty … and how luxurious is the bottle.” Readers can, by the way, write in for a chance to win the featured products, which Allen is shown holding and peering at whilst donning a fur stole. A similar 2016 spread in People presents a “Father’s Day Gift Guide,” in which “celeb dads pick presents any dude would love to receive,” including a Prince album, Brooks Brothers socks, cologne, and a skin care set recommended by actor Rob Lowe.7 Here, female readers are treated to advice from male stars, with the hint that the men in their lives will, like these famous dads, enjoy such tokens. Today’s titles take such inventories even further, documenting celebrity diets with timelines, lists, and color photos  –  People pictures Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix and actress/mogul Jennifer Aniston revealing “What I Eat in a Day,” diets that include “hot lemon water,” a “­protein shake,” and “chips and homemade guacamole.” Meanwhile, Us combs the contents of celebrities’ handbags in a popular, recurring feature that asks, “What’s in my bag?” Each week, a new photo reveals the spilled out contents of famous females’ purses, such as musician Cyndi Lauper’s tote, which contains a novel, mascara, an elastic exercise band, and some crystal rocks that “ground me, like a little rock that I got when I was in Australia.”8 These details provide readers with an intimate knowledge of the stars, whose willingness to make these apparently random details of their lives available to the public allows readers to feel as though they can know and connect with famous women.



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Figure 15.2  Photoplay, December 1936, p. 74. “May we suggest…”

This technique is further reinforced through stories about celebrities “at home.” Home tours bring the reader into the intimate sphere, the stars’ most sacred and private spaces, such as bedrooms, bathrooms, and dressing closets. Here again, the magazine proves its talent in bringing readers into the stars’ inner sanctum in delicious detail. For Photoplay, nothing could be more revealing than sitting down to dinner with the stars and so, each month, the magazine presents a nearly full‐page photo of a celebrity’s dining table, lavishly set, and explained to the reader. In the February 1936 edition, we are tableside at a modern luncheon hosted by Dolores Del Rio (Figure 15.3). The flower bowl, flocked with gilded birds, is “hand‐made antique Mexican;” the china, “Wedgwood’s ‘Patrician’” pattern. In a separate photo, Del Rio is pictured in her home, which is described as being “as modern as tomorrow’s newspapers” and her luncheons “justifiably famous.” An entire column is devoted to a description of the meal and its preparation by Del Rio’s cook. The story, and the series of which it is a part, positions the reader as a guest at the celebrity table. Recent stories take a similar, yet less formal approach. In Us Weekly, Lauren Conrad tells us “how to throw a summer barbeque,” as she poses tableside and gushes over the “laid‐back” and “unfussy” vibe she prefers. A red checker tablecloth is topped with flowers, and  utensils are wrapped in patriotic bandanas.9 We are invited to be part of the glamorous

204 McDonnell

Figure 15.3  Photoplay, February 1936, p. 74. “Luncheon at Dolores De Rio’s.”

dining experience. To pull up a chair and imagine, in extensive detail, what it would be like to be welcomed into her home. But home tours aren’t limited to the kitchen. A July 2016 issue of People takes readers into Jill Kargman’s “New York City carriage house,” where the actress drinks a mug of coffee beneath a white and pink canopy bed, and behind Tamar Braxton’s “luxurious bar,” as the singer sips champagne beside zebra print chairs, towering orchids, and bottles of bubbly.10 In a similar look, Photoplay depicts Shirley Temple in bed with her stuffed dog and choice story book, smiling at the camera in her polka‐dot pajamas. As Adrienne Lai notes, photos of the star at home, in her (so to speak) natural environment, present the celebrity in an intimate, authentic setting, thus contributing to the celebrity’s currency as a “real” person, one who is genuine and sympathetic (Lai 2006, pp. 215–230). Meanwhile, the reader is afforded tremendous access to a star’s life. Not only do we feel privileged and chosen to be welcomed in this way, but we also gain the ability to learn about the star’s personality and idiosyncrasies via our observation (often guided by the magazine) of her environment, tastes, and personal possessions. In all these ways, fan magazines serve as gatekeepers to both the celebrity herself, and to her world. In positioning themselves as critical intermediaries, the magazines reinforce their importance and solidify their role as links between the glittery world of the rich and famous and an ever‐curious public. But the gatekeeper tropes also offer pleasurable engagement for readers,



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who are treated to the experience of seeing behind the curtain, gaining a voyeuristic window into the stars’ lives. What happens on‐set? What fashions do celebs really keep in their closets? What does my favorite star eat for dinner? These details, some complex, others completely and utterly banal, allow us to feel a sense of kinship and likeness with the stars. While these stories claim to bring us into the celebrity world, in reality they work to bring stars into ours, to paint them as relatable and understandable people rather than distant, mysterious creatures. Of course, in our twenty‐first‐century media economy, audiences no longer need magazines to learn about the latest celebrity goings‐on. There are countless sources – blogs, social media platforms, apps, and even traditional news sources – ready to dish the dirt. Further, readers today may be far more cynical than their grandparents about the claimed truthfulness of the printed page. In an age of reality television, sound bites, and Wikipedia, we may be skeptical of headlines that make claims, only to refute their own words a few weeks later (think of the countless Jennifer Aniston pregnancy stories!). So, while contemporary gossip magazines still present themselves as gatekeepers, the pleasures they offer must extend beyond that of secret‐keepers. What other affordances do fan magazines offer their readers? How do they continue to engage us? What role do they play in our lives?

Gal Pals Most fan magazine readers are women; in 2015 76% of Us readers and 72.5% of People readers were female (MRI Fall 2015). The editorial focus of such magazines, both then and now, has been on women. For example, almost every fan magazine in 1936 and 2016 features a female star on the cover. Preceding the transition to high‐quality color photos in the late 1930s, each cover of Modern Screen displays a life‐like illustration, a closely cropped drawing of Katherine Hepburn, or Ginger Rogers, or Carole Lombard’s face, eyes gazing up or out at the reader, chins tilted thoughtfully, playfully, defiantly.11 Photoplay employs similar techniques, its headlines in bold font, its headshots in close‐up. In 2016, Us and People maintain this tradition; their central cover image typically features a female celeb, either tightly framed around her face, like Lauren Conrad on the 30 May cover of Us, or in a full‐length shot. But today’s magazines ­jettison the relative simplicity of their forerunners, surrounding their primary cover shots with a frenetic blend of headlines, inset images, thought bubbles, and instructive arrows, hailing the reader with a something‐for‐everyone approach. What remains constant across these images, however, is the emphasis on female stars and female experiences. Both early publications and the titles of today target their contents to female readers, ­featuring stories about the personal concerns of women, the “private lives” of female stars – romances, babies, and domestic affairs  –  and advertisements marketing female‐oriented products, from ­lipsticks and cigarettes to yogurt and diet pills. Further, contemporary fan magazines, influenced by editor Bonnie Fuller’s (Us Weekly, Star) penchant for the exclamatory, the scandalous, and the bright pink, have adopted a specific rhetorical strategy, employing sassy, female‐focused headlines and catch phrases in sharp, short captions (Tyre 2002). While these developments have prompted a popular perception, even among the genre’s devotees, that celebrity magazines are “trashy” and silly (McDonnell 2014), they have also helped to generate relatively strong sales, despite the widespread decline of print in the digital economy of the twenty‐first century (Fine 2004). The genre’s female‐centric editorial focus is noteworthy not only because it creates a sense of shared community among female readers (Feasey 2008; McDonnell 2014), but also because it allows the magazines to position themselves as critical intermediaries, gossipy gal pals whom the reader can know and trust, always ready and willing to dish up details about the most noteworthy and well‐known female stars. To function in this friendly capacity, the magazines utilize a series of rhetorical and esthetic cues. First, celebrities are often referred to by their first names only, a technique which marks the

206 McDonnell star as an individual who is both ordinary and previously known, both to the magazine and the reader. In day‐to‐day conversation, we are typically on a “first‐name only” basis with those who are close to us, friends and family members, but not necessarily coworkers or bosses, for instance. Today, this technique has become so commonplace that we instantly recognize names like Oprah and Cher, Kim and Angelina. When Us Weekly proclaims “Madonna’s Nightmare”12 or when People notes that “Taylor and Calvin are getting very serious,” these publications express an expectation that the public already knows exactly who these celebs are. Similarly, in 1936, Photoplay ran a monthly series of full‐page, colorized images, featuring stars with their first names emblazoned in bold font – icons such as Joan (Blondell) (Figure 15.4), Irene (Dunne), and Bette (Davis). By presenting the stars in such a knowing, informal fashion, the magazines invite readers to think of famous women as ordinary people who are accessible and available to be gossiped about. The Photoplay first‐name series also employs another of the genre’s key rhetorical techniques, the use of personal pronouns such as “we,” “you,” and “us,” which again linguistically connect magazine, star, and reader in a friendly triad. Of Bette Davis, the mag gushes, “Her eyelashes are as light and charming as her conversation. You meet her, recall your most gay, untroubled moments.”13 Other 1936 stories feature actors explaining, “How we feel about becoming

Figure 15.4  Photoplay, March 1936, p. 22, “Joan.”



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movie stars.”14 A story titled “confessions of an extra girl” explains what it’s really like to be an unnamed movie actress; the anonymous writer pleads – “please believe me when I say that I know whereof I speak.”15 This confessional tone is mirrored in today’s publications, as Yoko Ono reveals “25 things you don’t know about me”16 and Kelly Ripa tells “My side of the story.”17 Here again, the personal mode of address suggests a friendly, even divulging, relationship between reader and celebrity. The personal nature of these narratives, typically told from a first‐person vantage, once again suggest a sense of comradery, even intimacy. In the 23 May 2016, issue of People, model and reality star Holly Madison describes her experience “Leaving my Playboy nightmare behind,” explaining how she “forged a new life” after splitting from boyfriend Hugh Hefner.18 Similar stories feature comedienne Amy Schumer opening up about, “The real me” as she describes her relationship with an abusive ex and actress Hayden Panettiere discussing her experience with postpartum depression, telling readers “It’s okay to ask for help.” These stories not only present a vulnerable, first‐person account of their subjects but, in doing so, break down the aura of the star, making her knowable and relatable. More casual stories about celebrity life, including holiday photo albums (“Mona Barrie on Vacation,” “The Kardashians Hit the Slopes!,” and “A Royal Tour of India”)19 further this sense of connected knowing, offering a snapshot of the glamorous life while also serving as a kind of virtual postcard from a vacationing friend. Photos of stars sunning in swimwear, riding bicycles, and admiring their pet pooches create a sense of normalcy and personable engagement. Then and now, pics of Loretta Young jauntily walking her spotted spaniels or Allison Williams strolling through New York City with her golden retriever Moxie, paint a relatable portrait of stars who seemingly share our affections and pleasures.20 Indeed, since 2001 an entire editorial feature has been devoted to convincing readers that stars are “Just like Us.” In every issue, Us Weekly presents a collage of images that detail the “normal” day‐to‐day goings on of celebrity life. Shots show Goldie Hawn, in casual work out wear, “hold[ing] on tight!” as she strolls “in L.A. with her Chihuahua.”21 Model mom Alessandra Ambrosio is pictured afloat a giant blow‐up flamingo, holding her son and “chilling with my baby boy.”22 Even more plainly, a 29 February pic exclaims, “They text and walk!” and shows actress Vanessa Hudgens “multitasking” on her phone. A prominent bubble in the center of the page remarks, “Stars – they’re just like US!” Images of the rich and famous engaged in the banal and unremarkable support the claim that celebrities are ordinary, while also reinforcing their star status – these women are famous; otherwise, no one would care about their cell phone use or morning strolls. Still, the “Just like US” spread cleverly plays on the title of the magazine in which it is featured, suggesting that the stars are one of “us,” part of the community created by the magazine itself. Twentieth‐century magazines use similar strategies to convince readers of the stars’ ordinariness and thereby establish them as friendly figures. Stories feature stars revealing tidbits about themselves that speak to their humanity. A Photoplay headline proclaims, “Stars are human after all,” and goes on to detail how Jean Harlow – described as a close friend of the author who shockingly made it big despite her “shiny nose” – was suddenly catapulted from ordinary life to a world of fame and fortune.23 Other stories reveal, “They love to save!,” or “They hated to do it,” and even insist that stars are “jealous of all you girls, city‐bred or small‐town, who lead perfectly normal, natural lives – who do your jobs, close your desks when the work is done, relax, have a good time.”24 All of these stories paint celebrities in a paradoxical fashion; glamorous and aspirational, stars also express common concerns, annoyances, and longings, which they share with readers as one would share one’s emotions and life events with a close friend. There are instances where the line between reader and star is not just thin, but actually becomes non‐existent, where we are asked not only to believe that celebrities are like us, but that they are us. The most classic example of this is what I call the star‐as‐reader image. Here, a photo shows a celebrity reading a copy of the magazine in which said photo appears. A June 1936 issue

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Figure 15.5  Photoplay, June 1936, p. 86, “Shirley Temple reads her Photoplay on the set.”

of Photoplay features a photo of Shirley Temple as she “reads her Photoplay on set.” Temple, sat in a child‐sized director chair, holds the March 1936 issue of Photoplay, on which she appeared as the cover star (Figure 15.5).25 Today’s magazines use this same technique (McDonnell 2014). The star‐as‐reader image lets readers know that celebrities read Photoplay, the same Photoplay that you yourself are reading at this very moment. In a single image, we find a meta‐commentary, a visual demonstration of the fact that star and reader are one and the same. Similar stories work to achieve this same sense of equality in different ways. A September 1936 feature in Photoplay titled, “The stars look up and see themselves as others see them,” brings readers behind the scenes at a charity benefit where “the stars were both audience and cast;” the reader, meanwhile, watches the stars, watch themselves.26 As fan magazines provide access to the most intimate details of celebrities personal and “private” lives, they encourage readers to think of the stars as members of their own friend, or even family, circles. We are invited to take part in celebrity weddings, to share in the joys of a pregnancy or a birth, and to become linked to celebrities as though they were a part of our real‐ world kinship communities. In this way, readers may begin to see celebrities not as distant others, but as members of what Joke Hermes calls our “extended family.” As Hermes contends



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in her study, Reading Women’s Magazines, “the extended family repertoire … helps readers to live in a larger world than in real life – a world that is governed by emotional ties … it engenders a highly personal form of address in which solidarity and connectedness resound” (1995, pp. 126–127). This repertoire offers readers a feeling that we are part of a larger community, one that extends beyond our immediate circle of intimate relations. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that weddings and children have been a favorite, recurring feature of fan magazines for the past 80 years. For instance, a July 1936 issue of Modern Screen, entitled “And the bride wore…” spins around Ginger Rogers’ advice for young women putting together a wedding trousseau; of course, a bridal gown and attendant options are shown, but Rogers also models cocktail dresses, travel suits, and even the highest fashion in pajamas for the bride‐to‐be. Another feature trumpets, “Here comes the bride!” as Joan Crawford in floor‐ length bridal gown of duchess satin, bouquet in hand, walks down the aisle.27 The 7 March 2016 issue of Us provides a similar portrait, featuring photos of reality star Audrina Patridge’s pre‐ wedding prep, as she tries on gowns in anticipation of her upcoming nuptials.28 These stories vividly present wedding‐day excitement, allowing the reader to feel as though she were “really there.” Intimate details, such as the brand of dresses selected, and the fact that the couple wants to wed barefoot, draw us ever closer to the stars’ inner circles, allowing us to take on the role of invited guests, or even members of the bridal party.29 Narratives about children have a similar effect. A March 1936 story in Modern Screen takes the reader along on child‐star Shirley Temple’s busy day, “from eight to eight,” as photographs document her studies, time with older brothers, and bedtime prayers.30 That same year, in “All work and no play,” Temple and other famous children are pictured with pet horses and dogs, riding bicycles, and enjoying “fun at a nearby amusement park” (Figure 15.6). Today, famous children are similarly featured; an August 2016 issue of People pictures Prince George of England on the cover, chronicling “his life at preschool and the palace – all the details” for his third birthday celebration. The story inside reveals his breakfast routine (cereal with sliced bananas), clothing picks (a whale sweater, organic cotton shorts, and t‐strap shoes), and his current obsession (wheels).31 Today’s stories center not only on famous children, but also on famous parents who happen to be expecting. Pregnancy narratives, omitted from earlier publications likely due to their sexual implications, are now a mainstay of the gossip press, providing readers insight into this most intimate time for moms‐to‐be. Readers are invited to share in the excitement of the expectant mom, as though the celebrity were a close friend or family member with a baby on the way. In all these ways, fan magazines present themselves as gossipy gal pals, close friends who can be divulged to and trusted by stars and readers alike. Their intimate mode of address, personal subject matter, and attention to the ordinary elements of famous women’s extraordinary lives combine to create a sense of excited, personable engagement, a knowing and relatable portrait of what it means to be a young woman in the world. These narratives directly address the concerns of female readers, many of whom may be experiencing similar life moments and concerns in their own lives (McDonnell 2014). But if fan magazines are engaged with celebrities’ day‐to‐day worlds, they are also invested in readers’ lives. In particular, they offer input as to how to make the most of one’s beauty, wardrobe, and romances. In the 1930s, advice giving was a mainstay of the genre. Columnists like Modern Screen’s Mary Biddle and Madame Sylvia dished out tips on various topic from “How to hold your husband,” to how to “be individual” and stand out in a crowd.32 Writers instructed their readers on how to “take your beauty inventory” (“first take stock of yourself, give credit where it’s due, then work hard on your liabilities”), and how to “keep your complexion and figure lovely” in summertime.33 Much of the talk here is about self‐improvement, with plenty of rules and instruction to go around in service of, allegedly, uplifting one’s moral and physical self. Everything from what to drink to lose weight – strawberry juice with cracked ice, never alcohol – to what kinds of face

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Figure 15.6  Modern Screen, December 1936, p. 10, “All work and no play.”

creams to use and to what kind of exercises to do to keep your man interested, is discussed in detail. The message is uplifting, celebrating individuality and the ability of every woman to evoke star‐quality, but also warning of the damage suffered by women who “let themselves go.” Today’s magazines take a similarly instructive, but perhaps less heavy‐handed approach. Instead of direct advice, offered from an individual writer, the mags present words of wisdom from the stars themselves (46‐year‐old actress Ellen Pompeo describes “How I’m aging in Hollywood”) and “trend reports” that show the latest in crop tops, wedged shoes, and halo hairstyles.34



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Advice‐driven content again reinforces the magazine’s role as a friend and confidant, one who can steer readers in the right direction, using the stars themselves as guides. The tone is playful and upbeat, told from a female perspective with a female audience in mind. The overall effect is to reinforce a sense of a women’s community that extends from female stars through the pages of the magazines and into the real lives of readers. Yet, the genre’s emphasis on advice has shifted, and twenty‐first‐century publications tend to focus less on guiding the reader and more on allowing the reader to be the judge and the jury. Further, fan magazines have long invited readers to take part in an interactive exchange. In the 1930s, one could weigh in via columns (Modern Screen’s “between you and me” page allowed fans to share entertaining stories about their celebrity encounters) or votes and polls. Photoplay asked readers to “pick the best picture of 1935,” providing a “medal of honor ballot” that participants could fill out and send in. “Undoubtedly,” the accompanying text reads, “you have had many a discussion with members of your family, friends and acquaintances on the relative merits of a picture … this award is made by you, the readers of Photoplay. No board of judges sits in to decide this award. The votes are counted and the majority rule. It is the only decision of its kind where the public absolutely has the whole say.”35 These assessments, ­however, were limited and infrequent. Contemporary magazines ask readers to weigh in far more frequently, and now the judgment is aimed at the celebrities. Us Weekly hosts a recurring section entitled “Who wore it best,” which asks 100 people in Times Square or Rockefeller Center to compare outfits worn by two or more famous women. A similar section, “Love it or hate it?” again demands an opinion – and a strong one at that. Readers, of course, may agree or disagree with the majority preference. In all these instances, readers are hailed as active participants in celebrity stories. Here our perspectives and opinions not only matter, but they are necessary, because we are treated as invited and valued participants in a collective conversation. That we are now called upon to judge the celebrities themselves – directly in terms of their fashion and beauty choices and more subtly as we read about their lifestyles and romances – marks a shift in the nature of the textual conversation. Where readers were once expected to look to the magazines for advice, happily served up as by a trusted girlfriend, today’s readers expect to be the advisors, surveilling and critiquing the bodies, faces, fashions, and lives of famous women. This shift is part of a larger move in celebrity culture, one that edges ever‐further away from a model that is aspirational and celebrating of an elusive star quality and toward one that insists that anyone can be a star and that it is the public who determines the success or failure of the famous. Today, we build them up, we watch them fall, and fan magazines are there to fill us in every step of the way.

Conclusions As this analysis has shown, the fan magazines of the early twentieth century have much in common with current celebrity titles. These publications continue to promise readers access to celebrities, information about the lives they lead, the chance to share in their joys and, increasingly, to commiserate with their sorrows. They offer us the opportunity to feel stitched in to a larger community, comprising readers and stars alike, who share in life’s ups and downs but, through it all, experience many of the same frustrations and pleasures that we know so well and feel so deeply. Women readers, in particular, are hailed through direct address, the use of personal pronouns, and via stories about the personal life experiences of young women, including romances, childrearing, fashions, and hostessing. While it may seem quaint or even sexist to suggest that these themes represent women’s concerns today, studies show that stories in this vein allow young women the opportunity to grapple with these life questions, even as they face political and professional concerns that are not addressed in these magazines (Feasey 2008; Johansson 2006; McDonnell 2014).

212 McDonnell Fan magazines also work to humanize famous figures in our society, to bring the stars down to earth and make them seem “just like us.” The visual and rhetorical cues used to position celebrities as everyday people allow us to think about stars as knowable individuals, persons who can be accessed and understood. In this way, we come to feel as though the star is someone who we can know and talk about with others. By providing this link, the magazines themselves get to become our gal pals, friends with whom we can chat about our famous mutual friends. This shift has become increasingly pronounced in recent years, as our attitudes toward celebrity have evolved. The deferential tone that twentieth‐century fan magazines cultivated, the air of remove and sense that, though ordinary, these folks were simply just a bit different from us, a bit more glamorous, somehow innately special, has vanished. We now expect celebrities to expose everything about themselves, to lay bare their faces and bodies, to open their refrigerators, closets, and hearts to us, to hold nothing back. It is an expectation of availability that has been cultivated via social media, an extreme level of exposure that, perhaps, even the gossip mags are not comfortable with. Though People may publish Kate Hudson’s Instagram selfies or take us through “a day in my life” with Leona Lewis, the magazines retain an editorial wall between star and reader, publishing on a weekly basis rather than posting 24/7.36 While digital content may be faster, cheaper, and provide even greater access, fan magazines continue to offer a sense of access and community. As this study has shown, though times have changed, the techniques employed by print publications have remained largely the same. Today, as in 1936, these texts offer an opportunity to put aside the economic and political realities of our day, to escape to Hollywood‐land, to the promise of glamorous friends and easy living that allegedly anyone, with enough luck, talent, or perseverance, can achieve. But while these narratives may be fantasies, the sense of interpersonal connection and the possibility for friendly conversation and gossip afforded by the magazines is, in fact, quite real. For this reason, readers have turned to fan magazines for the past 80 years and continue to do so even as digital content occupies an increasingly prominent and timely alternative to print.

Notes 1 People, 13 June 2016, p. 12. 2 Modern Screen, October 1936, p. 69. 3 Modern Screen, October 1936, p. 47. 4 Modern Screen, October 1936, p. 14. 5 Modern Screen, April 1936, p. 14. 6 Photoplay, May 1936, pp. 32–33. 7 People, 13 June 2016, p. 97. 8 Us Weekly, 16 May 2016, p 4. 9 Us Weekly, 4 July 2016, pp. 48–52. 10 People, 25 July 2016, pp. 78–90. 11 February, August, and September 1936, respectively. 12 Us Weekly, 15 February 2016 cover. 13 Photoplay, February 1936, p. 19. 14 Photoplay, October 1936, pp. 32–33. 15 Modern Screen, January 1936, p. 46. 16 Us Weekly, 7 March 2016, pp. 10–11. 17 People, 23 May 2016, cover. 18 People, 23 May 2016, p. 72. 19 Photoplay, May 1936; Us Weekly, 25 April 2016, pp. 42, 46. 20 Modern Screen, July 1936, p. 35; Us Weekly, 4 July 2016, p. 22. 21 Us Weekly, May 16, 2016 p. 24. 22 Ibid. 23 Photoplay, September 1936, pp. 24–25.



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24 Modern Screen, April 1936, pp. 34–35. 25 Photoplay, June 1936, p. 86. 26 Photoplay, September 1936, pp. 41–43. 27 Modern Screen, January 1936, p. 17. 28 Us Weekly, 7 March 2016, pp. 50–53. 29 Ibid. 30 Modern Screen, March 1936, pp. 42–43. 31 People, 8 August 2016, cover and page 52. 32 Modern Screen, January 1936, pp. 14–15; Modern Screen, March 1936, p. 22. 33 Modern Screen, April 1936, pp. 18–19; Modern Screen, July 1936, pp. 60–61. 34 People, 8 August 2016, p. 97. 35 Photoplay, January 1936, p. 59. 36 Magazines are increasingly moving content online, creating further opportunities for up‐to‐the‐ minute posting, but the print publications maintain a weekly publication schedule.

References de Cordova, R. (1990). Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Feasey, R. (2008). Reading Heat: the meanings and pleasures of star fashions and celebrity gossip. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 22 (5): 687–699. Fine, J. (2004). Magazines recorded declines in late 2003. Advertising Age 75 (8): 39. Gamson, J. (1994). Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America. Oakland: University of California Press. Hermes, J. (1995). Reading Women’s Magazines: An Analysis of Everyday Media Use. London: Polity. Holmes, S. (2005). ‘Off guard, unkempt, unready?’: deconstructing contemporary celebrity in Heat ­magazine. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 19 (1): 21–38. Johansson, S. (2006). ‘Sometimes you wanna hate celebrities’: tabloid readers and celebrity coverage. In: Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture (eds. S. Holmes and S. Redmond), 343–358. London: Routledge. Lai, A. (2006). Glitter and grain: aura and authenticity in the celebrity photographs of Juergen teller. In: Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture (eds. S. Holmes and S. Redmond), 215–230. London: Routledge. McDonald, P. (2000). The Star System: Hollywood’s Production of Popular Identities. New York: Columbia University Press. McDonnell, A. (2014). Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines. London: Polity. Pautz, M. (2002). The decline in average weekly cinema attendance. Issues in Political Economy, 11. http://org. elon.edu/ipe/pautz2.pdf (accessed 20 September 2019). People Media Kit (2016). Stats. https://web.archive.org/web/20161212145910/http://static.people. com/people/static/mediakit/stats.html (accessed 15 August 2019). Slide, A. (2010). Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star‐Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press. Smiley, G. (1983). Recent unemployment rate estimates for the 1920s and 1930s. Journal of Economic History 43: 487–493. Tyre, P. (2002). A new guilty pleasure: who’s that reading the revamped US? Uhh…Us. Newsweek 140 (7): 3. Us Weekly Media Kit (2017). Us Weekly reader profile  –  MRI Fall 2016. https://web.archive.org/ web/20170921201506/https://srds.com/mediakits/UsWeekly‐print/US‐MediaKit.pdf (accessed 15 August 2019).

16

Gender in Magazines1 Elizabeth Groeneveld

Introduction Any analysis of magazines virtually necessitates engaging with gender. For one, women’s magazines and men’s magazines are significant genres within the magazine industry, both in number of publications and in breadth of circulation. As of 2017, among the top 10 most widely circulating magazines in the USA, three women’s magazines  –  Good Housekeeping, Family Circle, and Women’s Day – make the list (Alliance for Audited Media 2017). Researchers have made the case for many years that magazines play a significant role in constructing gender identities (Dill and Thill 2007; Duke and Kreshel 1998; Vigorito and Curry 1998), even as readers have agency in how they negotiate these identities (Kehily 1999; Ticknell et  al. 2003). This chapter outlines the history of how magazines have catered to gendered readerships, introduces the ways in which gender in magazines has been studied, and considers some ways that the study of gender in magazines might be developed. The goal of the chapter is to encourage and facilitate further research employing the following: (i) an intersectional approach (Crenshaw 1995) that considers the connections between gender, race, class, and other identity categories; (ii) a perspective that historicizes magazines within a longer publishing trajectory and oeuvre; (iii) an attentiveness to the capitalist marketplace in which these publications circulate; (iv) a holistic view that considers the interactivity of the different elements that comprise a magazine (i.e. advertisements; images; editorials; letters; etc.); and (v) an expansive definition of what counts as a magazine that helps capture publishing in the digital age.

Gender in Magazines: Historical Context Gender is a particularly salient category within magazine studies because these publications have targeted readerships based on gender for almost the entire history of their production. The first journal for women is widely credited as The Ladies Mercury, which was published in 1693 in England (Braithwaite and Barrell 1979, p. 5). Topics featured in this publication included love, marriage, behavior, and dress (Dancyger 1978, p. 13). Other publications for women soon ­followed, primarily taking the form of ladies’ diaries and almanacs through to the late eighteenth century, when a recognizable women’s periodical press began to emerge (Braithwaite and Barrell 1979, p. 5). It was not until the eighteenth century, however, that the word “magazine” The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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was first used to describe a periodical publication: Edward Cave, an English bookseller, launched the first general‐interest men’s magazine, The Gentleman’s Magazine, or, Monthly Intelligencer in 1731 (Williamson 2016, p. 14). In 1733, the launch of The Lady’s Magazine, or, Monthly Intelligencer was announced, although no copies of the magazine to survive to confirm its existence (Waters 2015 p. 234; see also Adburgham 1972). Gender has thus been a crucial way in which magazines have defined themselves and their audiences from their very earliest days of publication. United States‐based magazines emerged during the eighteenth century as well. Frank Luther Mott (1957) credits Andrew Bradford’s 1741 American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies as the first in the United States (p. 24). Amy Aronson (2002) identifies the first US women’s magazine as Ladies Magazine and Repository of Entertaining and Instructive Knowledge, established by William Gibbons in 1792 (p. 1). Mott, however, notes that the first US magazine to name women as readers – the 1784 publication Gentlemen and Lady’s Town and Country Magazine from Boston (p. 29)  –  predates Ladies Magazine. Studies of early American magazine subscription lists (Gardner 2012; Nord 1989) suggest that most readers were wealthy, although this was somewhat variable by region (Gardner 2012, p. 106). Because subscriptions were often listed in the husband’s name, regardless of the intended audience within a household, it is difficult to gain a clear sense of early magazines’ readerships from subscription lists. The early magazines for men and women were aimed at an upper‐class audience, but England’s 1870 Education Act helped increase literacy among all economic levels within society (Braithwaite and Barrell 1979, p. 8). This change gave rise to new magazines – such as penny weeklies like Home Notes (1870), Girl’s Own Paper (1880), and Home Chat (1895) – targeted to working‐class women, as well as magazines targeting a growing middle‐class readership (Dancyger 1978, p. 84). Similarly, Dunae (1980) notes that the Act “led to an increase in ­publications for the young, and the end of the decade boys’ books and periodicals occupied one of the largest sectors of the publishing industry” (p. 106). On both sides of the Atlantic, new technological developments in printing technology, transportation, and education also helped make periodicals more widely available during this period (Cohoon 2006, p. xvi). Periodicals proliferated, and readerships grew. These developments in English society  –  legislative, economic, and technological  –  all helped to create space for and shape women’s and men’s magazines, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in the forms that contemporary readers would find recognizable, as magazines, today. The turn of the century saw the emergence of the New Woman, a figure who crystallized hopes and anxieties about the changing shape of gender on both sides of the Atlantic. As Barbara Green argues, “the periodical press became an ideal site for debates about gender” (2009, p. 194). This period, according to Green, “saw the creation and rapid expansion of the field of feminist journalism – movement and advocacy papers, avant‐garde periodicals, literary reviews aimed at feminist readers, and more” (2009, p. 191). Topics covered in the feminist press during the early twentieth century included international feminism, race and empire, domestic issues, the vote, socialism, literary and cultural matters, femininity, and so on (Green 2009, p. 195). The growth of feminist periodical publishing during this period is symptomatic of the emergence and sustainability of counterpublic spheres, which sought to challenge dominant ideas about gender and to provide spaces of connection among women’s rights advocates (Green 2009, p. 196). The 1920s and 1930s saw what was arguably a conservative response to the New Woman phenomenon, in the form of new mass‐circulation weekly women’s magazines, such as the British‐based Woman’s Own (1932). Other magazines, such as Modern Woman (1925) and Woman (1937), participated in “the new commercial culture of homemaking” (Hackney 2006, p. 24). According to Jill Greenfield and Chris Reid (1998), “by the end of the 1930s there were over fifty magazines aimed at women readers, several of which had attained readership figures in

216 Groeneveld the hundreds of thousands” (p. 61). Greenfield and Reid argue that the interwar period placed “enormous emphasis” on “the renewal of the [gender] binary, and supposedly ‘natural’, roles of men and (married) women in the workplace and home, respectively” (1998, p. 162). But, there was also a new form of domestic ideology within these commercial magazines that “recast home craft as a modern activity and the housewife as an agent of ­modernity” (Hackney 2006, p. 26; see also Greenfield and Reid 1998). Magazines like Woman’s Own “blurred the distinction between editorial and commercial content to create a publishing f­ormula attractive to readers. In doing so, it became the model for future women’s magazines” (Greenfield and Reid 1998, p. 161). Studies of the women’s magazines from this period ­emphasize both the important roles these periodicals played in shaping constructions of gender and their lack of a fully monolithic vision of women’s “place.” The post‐World War II period saw, again, an increased conservatism in gender discourses within popular magazines. Marjorie Ferguson’s (1983) study of Woman, Woman’s Own, and Woman’s Weekly finds that dominant themes during this decade included “getting and keeping your man,” a valorization of the homemaker, and an idealization of family life (p. 44). In her analysis of the magazines of this era, Nancy A. Walker (2000) uncovers similar themes; yet, she also cautions against a monolithic view of the messages these magazines promulgated for their readers (p. vii). The growth of television also affected the magazine industry: the tube was an appealing medium to advertisers because it could reach a broad audience and be viewed by multiple household members simultaneously. In response to this loss of revenue, women’s magazines adopted market segmentation strategies. According to Mary Ellen Zuckerman (1988), this niche marketing approach allowed magazines to reach more specialized groups, which in turn drew advertisers back to the publications through the appeal of targeted ads (p. xiii). Women’s magazines led the shift toward “market segmentation,” but other magazines soon followed suit (Groeneveld 2016, p. 84). This economic imperative shaped discussions of gender in magazines, as – increasingly – lifestyle publications emerged that targeted particular formulations of gender identities shaped by class, race, and sexuality. The 1960s and 1970s were marked by a burgeoning of feminist periodicals associated with the women’s liberation movement. Albert Krichmar’s (1972) sourcebook of women’s rights serial publications lists over 200 in circulation between 1968 and 1972, not including official National Organization of Women (NOW) publications and more regional publications. Cynthia Ellen Harrison’s (1975) sourcebook of feminist periodicals, including newsletters of various feminist organizations, lists almost 200 Canadian and American publications in circulation in 1975 alone. This was a period of major growth for independent media, a change due in part to increasingly easy access to the technologies of mass production. As Kathleen Flannery (2005) argues, periodicals were “generally inexpensive, available as long as the mimeo machine or cheap deal on offset printing held out” (p. 25). Women, as Flannery notes, “learned how to run a press with minimal resources, drawing on volunteers, sharing equipment and sources, often inviting others to make free use of materials, and borrowing from other textual sources with a relaxed or nonexistent sense of copyright” (Flannery 2005, p. 29). Feminist periodicals of this era were as wide‐reaching in their foci as their numbers. The following broad thematic categories were the most noticeable: lesbian periodicals, such as ­ Amazon Quarterly (1972–1975), Conditions (n.d.), Dyke Magazine (n.d.), and Sinister Wisdom (1976–1994); arts magazines, such as Aphra (1969–at least 1975), Feminist Art Journal (1972–at least 1975), and Blatant Image (1981–1983); women’s rock magazines, such as Bitch (n.d.); publications for women over 40, such as Broomstick (n.d.) and Primetime (1971–1977); academic publications, such as Calyx (n.d.); periodicals for women of color, such as Revista Mujeres (n.d.), Sage (n.d.), and Third Woman (n.d.); professional publications, such as Medica (n.d.) and Harvard Women’s Law Journal (n.d.); and political magazines, such as Second Wave (n.d.) and Woman: A Journal of Liberation (1969–).2 However, much of the scholarly work on



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periodicals from this era is centered on Ms. magazine, which was the first openly feminist ­magazine to enter the marketplace with the dual goal of competing directly with non‐feminist women’s magazines and reforming the magazine industry from within (Farrell 1998; McCracken 1993). Overall, second‐wave periodicals participated in a much broader burgeoning of alternative and independent presses, and politicized the process of creating a print publication in important and vital ways. The 1980s saw the expansion of popular women’s magazines, including Elle, Working Woman, Marie Claire, and New Woman, into overseas markets through international editions (p. 49). This decade was characterized by an intensification of the kind of lifestyle segmentation strategies employed by magazines in the 1950s (Gough‐Yates 2003, p. 73). Of particular note is the rise of men’s magazines like i‐D and The Face, which, as Tim Edwards (2003) notes, “are precisely men’s lifestyle titles as opposed to men’s interest magazines” (p. 133). These magazines are considered part of the rise of the “New Man,” a figure who embodied a more cosmopolitan masculinity, was unafraid of embracing his more “feminine” side, and  –  perhaps most crucially – was interested in shopping (Gill 2005). These magazines helped pave the way for the growth in popularity of other men’s lifestyle magazines in the 1990s, such as FHM, Maxim, GQ, loaded, and Arena. The 1980s were also notable for the launch of Sassy magazine (1988–1996). Founded by Sandra Yates, Sassy was a US‐based magazine for teenage girls that sought to reinvent the teen girl magazine genre. Editor Jane Pratt encouraged her staff writers to write using the tone of an older sister, an approach that cultivated strong bonds between Sassy writers and readers. Discussions of sexuality were open and honest within the magazine: Sassy was accepting of lesbian, gay, and bi‐ sexualities, and was the first teen magazine in the USA to publish condom ads. Sassy helped pave the way for a new cohort of “third‐wave” feminist magazine launches in the 1990s (Groeneveld 2016, pp. 24–26). These magazines – BUST, Bitch, HUES, Venus Zine, and Rockrgrl – emerged out of zine culture and helped redefine feminism in the 1990s and early 2000s. The growth of the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s fundamentally reshaped the magazine publishing landscape. Almost all men’s and women’s magazines now exist either entirely online or as hybrids of online and print content. New magazine launches during this decade included the feminist publications Shameless (print and online), Rookie (online only), and Knockback (print and online). The magazine form remains an attractive one because of its editorial voice, combination of visual and textual content, and amenability to advertising.

Defining the Genre In their most basic sense, men’s magazines and women’s magazines are genres defined by whom they take to be their primary reading audience; however, women’s magazines and men’s magazines also construct gender in particular ways. Women’s magazines often contain information about fashion, domesticity, news, sex, and relationships. The gendered reader of a woman’s magazine is often also constructed as heterosexual and middle‐class. Yet, women’s magazines, as Walker argues, are “complex and multi‐faceted,” meaning that the construction of gendered (and classed, raced, and sexual) identities within their pages are rarely only conservative or retrograde (p. xvi). Nonetheless, women’s magazines have often been a target for feminist criticisms of their adherence to normative gender scripts. Betty Friedan’s (2013) The Feminine Mystique targeted women’s magazines as contributing to the “problem that has no name.” In 1968, the famous Miss America pageant protest saw participants throwing women’s magazines into their “freedom trashcan.” Perhaps because of this criticism of the genre, studies of women’s magazines tend to separate out women’s magazines from feminist magazines (Endres and Lueck 1995, 1996; Humphreys 1989). However, magazines such as BUST, Ms., and Teen Vogue straddle – or have attempted to straddle – this generic divide.

218 Groeneveld Unlike women’s magazines, men’s magazines cater to different parts of a man’s life rather than the totality of his masculinity, argues Marjorie Ferguson (1983, p. 2). Indeed, men’s magazines have traditionally been framed as centered on specific interests, such as sports, health, and politics. However, the growth of men’s lifestyle magazines in the 1990s has resulted in a generic shift that now puts the focus more on cultivating particular forms of masculinity. A key to understanding generic differences between men’s and women’s magazines is to examine the advertising within them. Jonathan Bignell (2002) notes that, “The largest categories of products advertised in women’s magazines are cosmetics, clothes, and food… The largest categories of products advertised in men’s magazines are cosmetics, clothes, and cars” (p. 58). While women’s magazines also contain ads for cars, financial services, and watches, men’s magazines typically contain ads for electronic equipment, videos, and computer games that are lacking in women’s magazines (Bignell 2002, p. 58). While cosmetics and clothing advertising is common to both men’s and women’s magazines, advertisers still target women as the primary food purchasers and preparers, while men are constructed as more interested in technology and gadgets.

Transgender Representation Women’s and men’s magazines tend to assume a cis‐gendered subject position for their readers. Nonetheless, magazines have been important sites for the publication of stories about transgender individuals. The most famous examples may be Time magazine’s (2014) story on “The Transgender Tipping Point,” which featured Laverne Cox on the cover, and Vogue magazine’s (2015) cover story on Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition. Nonetheless, mainstream recognition of celebrity trans figures does not necessarily represent the issues or concerns faced by everyday transgender people. Publications such as TransSisters: A Journal of Transsexual Feminism (1993), TV/TS Tapestry Journal: For All Persons Interested in Crossdressing and Transsexualism (1978), Original Plumbing (2009), TG Life (2004), and FTM Magazine (2014) have provided resources and community connection for trans folks over the past several decades. With the exception of some writing on Original Plumbing, there is little scholarly work, to date, that examines trans magazines (Arcurio 2013; Tiffe 2013; Eckstein 2014).

Methodological Approaches to Studying Gender in Magazines There is a rich array of scholarly work on gender in magazines, as well as great variance among the methodological approaches used in these works. Some scholars analyze magazines in terms of the ideological messages about gender that are conveyed to readers (Ferguson 1983; Friedan 2013; McCracken 1993). This approach is helpful but has been criticized for its inattentiveness to the ways in which readers interpret magazines. Other scholars prefer to employ discursive analyses that allow them to more readily access both dominant and counter‐narratives within magazines; this approach emphasizes an understanding of magazines as heterogeneous and polyvocal texts (Aronson 2001; De Ridder and Van Remoortel 2012; Farrell 1998; Walker 2000; Winship 1980). Ethnographic or sociological methods that involve interviews or focus groups allow scholars to engage more directly with how readers respond to, take up, or reject the messages within magazines (Ballaster et al. 1991; Currie 1999; Frazer 1996; Hermes and Schutgens 1992). Still other scholars examine the production end of magazines to focus on the ways in which economic formations shape the construction of gender in magazines (Gough‐ Yates 2003). Each of these approaches allows scholars to ask different kinds of questions about gender in magazines. Some scholarly work also uses women’s and men’s magazines to ask questions about the influence of advertising (Ford et al. 1998; Madsen and Ytre‐Arne 2012; Tan et al. 2013; Wiles et al. 1996). Other studies use women’s and men’s magazines to consider various issues related



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to health (Cook 2000; Dixon et al. 2008; Gattuso et al. 2005; Hill and Radimer 1996; McKay and Bonner 1999). This work is often concentrated in journals whose main foci include advertising, business, or health education. While this work is less concerned with magazines as a genre, the fact that magazines are the focus of such studies speaks to the continuing influence (or perception of influence) of men’s and women’s magazines within popular culture.

European Women’s and Men’s Magazines English‐language studies of European magazines outside of the United Kingdom are scant, perhaps due to language barriers. Of these studies, some focus primarily on the advertising content of magazines (Madsen and Ytre‐Arne 2012; Morris and Nichols 2013). As such, these studies do not devote as much attention to the overall ecology of the magazines. Foreign‐language magazines that have received some gender analysis in English‐language academic writing include feminist magazines, such as Opzij (1972, The Netherlands), Emma (1977, Germany), and Bang (1991, Sweden); Swedish women’s magazines (KK and Tara); the women’s art magazine An. Schlage (2000) from Austria; the Scandinavian “new lad” magazines Slitz (1996), M! (1997), and Mann (1996); and the turn‐of‐the‐century French women’s magazines La Vie Heureuse (1901) and Femina (1902) (Andreassen and Lettinga 2011; Gresaker 2017; Hermes and Schutgens 1992; Madsen and Ytre‐Arne 2012; Mesch 2013; Midden 2012). Some of these studies consider the intersections of gender and religion, with a particular focus on the representation of religious minorities (Andreassen and Lettinga 2011; Gresaker 2017; Midden 2012).

National Contexts This section examines some of the women’s and men’s magazines from different countries around the world. Each of these countries has its own particular magazine publishing economy that links up to varying degrees with our global context. Canada. No examination of gender in Canadian magazines would be complete without the mention of Chatelaine magazine, which was established in 1928 and continues to operate to this day. The website for Chatelaine boasts that it is the number one website for women over 18 in Canada (Chatelaine 2018). Valerie Korinek’s (2000) study of this venerable women’s magazine during the 1950s and 1960s uncovers its activist past. Other notable Canadian feminist magazine titles include Herizons (1983–1987, 1993–), Branching Out (1973–1980), La Vie en Rose (1980–1988), and Makara (1975–1978) (Godard 2002; Jordan 2010). Little scholarly work, to date, focuses on men’s magazines in Canada. Australia. The scholarly literature on gender in Australian magazines is primarily focused on the representations of masculinity in men’s magazines (Barnett 2015; Cook 2000; Schirato and Yell 1999). For example, Chelsea Barnett analyzes the post‐war Australian magazine, Man, which “told a story of desperately unhappy men, frustrated with a model of responsibility central to … suburban life” (2015, p. 153). Other studies examine the emergence of men’s lifestyle magazines in the 1990s, which were distinct from “magazines such as Penthouse, Playboy and Picture” (Schirato and Yell 1999, p. 81). Studies on Australian women’s magazines tend to focus less on the genre itself and more on the ways in which various issues pertaining to women’s health were articulated within the pages of these publications (Dixon et al. 2008; McKay and Bonner 1999; Sha and Kirkman 2009). South Africa. South African women’s and men’s magazines have been shaped by the apartheid era, resulting in a distinct Black Afrikaans press. Nicolette Louw (2009) studies two Black women’s magazines published during the 1960s, Grace (1964–1966) and The Townships Housewife (1968–1969), focusing on how Black women readers negotiated the gendered ­identities presented within their pages. Other South African magazines that have been aimed at Black women include True Love (1974), Pace (1978), and Thandi (1985) (Ferreira 2011).

220 Groeneveld The South African men’s magazine press includes international editions of FHM, Men’s Health, and GQ. Bl!nk (2004–2007) and DESTINY MAN (2009–) are South African men’s magazines targeted toward affluent black men (Viljoen 2011, p. 310; Knaggs 2006), while MaksiMan (2001–2006) was “the first Afrikaans Christian men’s magazine” (Viljoen 2011, p. 308). Each publication presents a uniquely South African version of gendered identity. Egypt. Some scholarly work tracks the trajectory of Egyptian women’s magazines, examining how these publications articulate different forms of gender identity for Egyptian women. For example, Fruma Zachs’s (2014) study of the magazines Al Fatat (The Young Girl, 1892–1994) and Anis al‐Janis (The Intimate Companion, 1898–1908) examines how these two publications, both established by Syrian immigrant women (Hind Nawfal and Alexandra Khuri Avierino) “grew to be the public voices of women in general and women immigrants in particular, [and] shed light on women immigrants’ activities in the service of other women but also for their new local society” (Zachs 2014, p. 365). Other work on Egyptian women’s magazines examines their coverage of women’s issues, viewing these publications as key sites for shaping conversations about gender (Booth 2001; Flora 1979). Japan. Japan has a vibrant magazine culture that has been active throughout the twentieth century and beyond. In her article on Japanese women’s magazines, Keiko Tanaka (1998) identifies six distinct magazine publishing periods in Japan. The first, from 1900 to the end of World War II, presented a form of “enlightened educationalism” to its readers (p. 110). Some magazines established during this period have had exceptionally long print runs, such as Shufu no Tomo (The Ladies’ Journal of Housekeeping, 1917–2008) and Fujin Gaho ̵ (Illustrated Women’s Gazette, 1905–), which continues to publish as of 2018. The second period, from 1946 to the early 1950s, was one of rapid economic recovery and saw the launch of a number of new magazines, including Shufu to Seikatsu (Housewives and Life, 1946–) and Fujin Seikatsu (Women’s Life, 1946). According to Tanaka, the magazines of this period were primarily focused on providing practical advice to readers (p. 111). Postwar Japan had an occupational administration in the form of the GHQ/SCAP (General Head Quarter/Supreme Commander of Allied Powers), and Japanese publications were under surveillance during this period (Matsuda 2012, p. 522). Shufu no Tomo often included articles by female GHQ/SCAP officers during this period, and, as Hiroko Matsuda (2012) argues, this magazine, and its contemporaries, frequently propagated a notion of democracy that “was articulated as white middle‐class Americans’ way of life” (p. 529). The third period dates from the second half of the 1950s and extends to the late 1960s. According to Tanaka, this period saw the rise of higher‐circulation magazines that promulgated an idealized and aspirational luxury lifestyle (Tanaka 1998, p. 111). Titles included Katei Gaho ̵ (Illustrated Home Gazette, 1958), Madamu (Madam), and Hai Fasshion (High Fashion). Tanaka points out that this period saw the increased popularity of English and French language titles as well as the launch of the first celebrity magazines (Tanaka 1998, p. 111). The fourth period (the 1970s) was marked by increased economic growth and a trend toward cosmopolitanism. Launches during this period included An An, Non’no, and Croissant, targeted toward women in their early 20s (Assmann 2003, p. 3). The men’s lifestyle magazine Popeye was launched in 1976 to cater to a similar age demographic. According to Kazue Sakamoto (1999), these new periodicals published in roman script looked Western and had titles with no meaning in Japanese (1979). As part of the overall cosmopolitan ethos, travel was a central feature of these magazines (Sakamoto 1999, p. 182). In assessing the influence of these magazines, Sakamoto notes that “in 1988, a popular book called The Croissant Syndrome was published,” blaming Croissant magazine “for driving unmarried women to postpone marriage and … make poor life choices” (Sakamoto 1999, p. 177). The fifth period (1980–1985) is distinguished by the launch of Japanese editions of Western magazines and new Japanese launches with Western‐sounding names, such as Lee (1983),



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ViVi (1983), and Classy (1984). The era also saw an intensification of niche marketing (Tanaka 1998, p. 112). The final period that Tanaka identifies is the late 1980s saw the launch of p ­ ractical household advice magazines, such as Orange Page (1986) and Lettuce Club (1986); these magazines were extensions of retail outlets. Overall, the literature on Japanese women’s magazines is extensive, but contemporary Japanese magazines and men’s magazines represent a potential area for further exploration and research growth. Iran. A notable periodical among Iranian women’s magazines is Zanan (Women), which was established in 1992 by Shahla Sherkat. Zanan is a reformist publication and has ­published on “theories of feminism in the West, the unjust treatment of women in Islamic societies, and the significance for Iranians of international conventions on human rights and the rights of women and girls” (Esfandiari 2005, 84). According to Ziba Mir‐Hosseini (2002), it was the first magazine to “challenge unequal gender rights” (p. 105). A later magazine, Bad Jens (2000–2004), did the same, identifying itself as an “Iranian feminist newsletter,” but primarily addressing a reading audience outside of Iran (Bad Jens 2002, n.p.). The oldest women’s magazine in Iran, Zan‐e Ruz (Today’s Woman), was an important precursor to Zanan: the founder of Zanan, Shahla Sherkat, had previously worked at Zan‐e Ruz, but was critical of the magazine’s turn toward conservatism following the Iranian revolution (Esfandiari, 2005, p. 84). Other women’s magazines published in Iran include Neda (The Call), published by the Women’s Society of the Islamic Republic, and is characterized by Mir‐Hosseini as “women of the power elite demanding a share for themselves in politics” (2002, p. 104); and Payan‐e Zan (Woman’s Message), which is published by the Islamic Propaganda Office of Qom and is considered the “voice of clerical orthodoxy” (Mir‐Hosseini 2002, p. 108). The editorial board consists entirely of male clerics (Mir‐Hosseini 2002, p. 109). Overall, the existing literature on Iranian women’s magazines focuses on the intersections of gender and Islam.

Conclusion: Directions for Future Research This chapter has demonstrated that the construction of gender has been, and remains, one of the most salient features of magazines, particularly the women’s and men’s magazine genres. Most research on women’s and men’s magazines now proceeds with the understanding that these are complex texts that do not present a unified representation of gender. Future research on gender in magazines would benefit from an intersectional approach that is attentive to the ways in which gender, class, race, sexuality, and other identity categories interlock within different publications (Collins 2014; Crenshaw 1995; May 2015). While there is a great deal of research that examines issues of gender representation within magazines, fewer studies have investigated the production and industry side of magazines as they relate to gender (see Duffy 2013, and Gough‐Yates 2003 for important exceptions). Further emphasis on this perspective would help us understand the ways in which changes within the magazine industry help shape the forms of gender representation that we see within magazines. One of the most revolutionary changes in the industry is the ascendance of the Internet. While print magazines remain – and new print magazines launch – the Internet has fundamentally reshaped the magazine industry and the ways in which women’s and men’s magazines reach their audiences. Future research should work toward a more expansive definition of the “magazine” beyond its print format, and examine the ways in which online and hybrid publications are working with and reshaping gender representations. One of the most salient features of women’s and men’s magazines is their adaptability to social, cultural, and technological changes. My prediction is that these publications will continue to reinvent themselves repeatedly in the decades to come.

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Notes 1 A special thanks to Chris Banks, Chelsea Charbonneau, and Iyanna Moton for their research assistance in support of this chapter. 2 Because of the ephemeral nature of these periodicals, complete dates of publication are not always available.

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Dill, K.E. and Thill, K.P. (2007). Video game characters and the socialization of gender roles: young ­people’s perceptions mirror sexist media depictions. Sex Roles 57: 851–864. Dixon, H., Dobbinson, S., Wakefield, M. et al. (2008). Portrayal of tanning, clothing, fashion, and shade use in Australian women’s magazines, 1987‐2005. Health Education Research 23 (5): 791–802. Duffy, E.B. (2013). Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Duke, L.L. and Kreshel, P.J. (1998). Negotiating femininity: girls in early adolescence read teen magazines. Journal of Communication Inquiry 22 (1): 48–71. Dunae, P.A. (1980). Boys’ literature and the idea of empire, 1870–1914. Victorian Studies 24 (1): 105–121. Eckstein, A. (2014). Trans‐masculinities in original plumbing: community, queer temporality, and embodied experiences. Undergraduate Honors thesis. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado. Edwards, T. (2003). Sex, booze, and fags: masculinity, style, and men’s magazines. The Sociological Review 51: 132–146. Endres, K.L. and Lueck, T. (eds.) (1995). Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Consumer Guides. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Endres, K.L. and Lueck, T. (eds.) (1996). Women’s Periodicals in the United States: Social and Political Issues. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Esfandiari, H. (2005). Iranian women, please stand up. Foreign Policy 155: 84–85. Farrell, A.E. (1998). Yours in Sisterhood: Ms. Magazine and the Promise of Popular Feminism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ferguson, M. (1983). Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity. London: Heinemann. Ferreira, N. (2011). Grace and the Townships Housewife: excavating black South African Women’s magazines from the 1960s. Agenda 25: 59–68. Flannery, K. (2005). Feminist Literacies, 1968–75. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Flora, C.B. (1979). Changes in women’s status in women’s magazine fiction: difference by social class. Social Problems 26 (5): 558–569. Ford, J.B., Voli, P.K., Honeycutt, E.D. Jr., and Casey, S.L. (1998). Gender role portrayals in Japanese advertising: a magazine content analysis. Journal of Advertising 27 (1): 113–124. Frazer, E. (1996). Teenage girls reading Jackie. In: Turning it on: A Reader in Women and Media (eds. H. Baehr and A. Gray), 130–137. New York: Edward Arnold. Friedan, B. (2013). The Feminine Mystique. New York: W. W. Norton. Gardner, J. (2012). The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Gattuso, S., Fullagar, S., and Young, I. (2005). Speaking of women’s ‘nameless misery’: the everyday construction of depression in Australian women’s magazines. Social Science and Medicine 61 (8): 1640–1648. Gill, R. (2005). Rethinking masculinity: men and their bodies. The London School of Economics and Political  Science 16. http://fathom.lse.ac.uk/Seminars/21701720/21701720_session2.html (accessed 28 February 2019). Godard, B. (2002). Feminist periodicals and the production of cultural value: the Canadian context. Women’s Studies International Forum 25 (2): 209–223. Gough‐Yates, A. (2003). Understanding Women’s Magazines: Publishing, Markets, and Readerships. New York: Routledge. Green, B. (2009). The feminist periodical press: women, periodical studies, and modernity. Literature Compass 6 (1): 191–205. Greenfield, J. and Reid, C. (1998). Women’s magazines and the commercial orchestration of femininity in the 1930s: evidence from Woman’s Own. Media History 4 (2): 161–173. Gresaker, A.K. (2017). Sex, violence, and the religious other: the gendering of religion in Scandinavian men’s magazines. Men and Masculinities 20 (2): 230–253. Groeneveld, E. (2016). Feminist magazines. In: The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (eds. N.A. Naples, R.C. Hoogland, M. Wickramasinghe and W.C.A. Wong). https://doi. org/10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss427. Hackney, F. (2006). “Use your hands for happiness”: home craft and make‐do‐and‐mend in British women’s magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. Journal of Design History 19 (1): 23–38.

224 Groeneveld Harrison, C.E. (1975). Women’s Movement Media: A Sourcebook. New York: Bowker Company. Hermes, J. and Schutgens, V. (1992). A case of the Emperor’s new clothes? Reception and text analysis of the Dutch feminist magazine Opzij. European Journal of Communication 7: 307–334. Hill, J.M. and Radimer, K.L. (1996). Health and nutrition messages in food advertisements: a comparative content analysis of young and mature Australian women’s magazines. Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior 28 (6): 313–320. Humphreys, N.K. (1989). American Women’s Magazines: An Annotated Historical Guide. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. Jordan, T. (2010). Branching out: second‐wave feminist periodicals and the archive of Canadian women’s writing. English Studies in Canada 36 (2–3): 63–90. Kehily, M.J. (1999). More sugar? Teenage magazines, gender displays, and sexual learning. European Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (1): 65–89. Knaggs, A. (2006). The space between: discursive constructions of masculinity in contemporary South African men’s lifestyle magazines. Master’s thesis. Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, South Africa. https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/item/15005/thesis_hum:2007_knaggs_ a.pdf?sequence=1 (accessed 28 February 2019). Korinek, V.J. (2000). Roughing it in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties. University of Toronto Press. Krichmar, A. (1972). The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, 1848–1970: A Bibliography and Sourcebook. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. Louw, N. (2009). Grace and the townships housewife: excavating South African black women’s magazines from the 1960s. Master’s thesis. Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Madsen, O.J. and Ytre‐Arne, B. (2012). Me at my best: therapeutic ideals in Norwegian Women’s ­magazines. Communication, Culture, and Critique 5: 20–37. Matsuda, H. (2012). America, modernity, and democratization of everyday life: Japanese women’s ­magazines during the occupation period. Inter‐Asia Cultural Studies 13 (4): 518–531. May, V.M. (2015). Intersectionality. In: ReThinking Women’s and Gender Studies (eds. A. Braithwaite, C. Orr and D. Lichtenstein), 155–172. New York: Routledge. McCracken, E. (1993). Decoding Women’s Magazines: From Mademoiselle to Ms. New York: St. Martin’s Press. McKay, S. and Bonner, F. (1999). Telling stories: breast cancer pathologies in Australian women’s magazines. Women’s Studies International Forum 22 (5): 563–571. Mesch, R. (2013). Having it all in the Belle Epoque: How French Women’s Magazines Invented the Modern Woman. Stanford University Press. Midden, E. (2012). Feminism and cultural and religious diversity in Opzij: an analysis of the discourse of a Dutch feminist magazine. European Journal of Women’s Studies 19 (2): 219–235. Mir‐Hosseini, Z. (2002). “Debating women”: gender and the public sphere in post‐revolutionary Iran. In: Civil Society in the Muslim World: Contemporary Perspectives (ed. A.B. Sajoo), 95–122. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers. Morris, P.K. and Nichols, K. (2013). Conceptualizing beauty: a content analysis of U.S. and French ­women’s fashion magazine advertisements. Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies 3 (1): 49–74. Mott, F.L. (1957). A History of American Magazines, 1, 1741–1850. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nord, D.P. (1989). A republican literature: magazine reading and readers in late eighteenth‐century New  York. In: Reading in America: Literature and Social History (ed. C.N. Davidson), 114–139. New York: Oxford University Press. Sakamoto, K. (1999). Reading Japanese women’s magazines: the construction of new identities in the 1970s and 1980s. Media, Culture, & Society 21: 173–193. Sha, J. and Kirkman, M. (2009). Shaping pregnancy: representations of pregnant women in Australian women’s magazines. Australian Feminist Studies 24 (61): 359–371. Sreenivas, M. (2003). Emotion, identity, and the female subject: Tamil women’s magazines in colonial India, 1890–1940. Journal of Women’s History 14 (4): 59–82. Tan, Y., Shaw, P., Cheng, H., and Kim, K.K. (2013). The construction of masculinity: a cross‐cultural analysis of men’s lifestyle magazine advertisements. Sex Roles 69 (5–6): 237–249.



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Tanaka, K. (1998). Japanese women’s magazines: the language of aspiration. In: The Worlds of Japanese Popular Culture: Gender, Shifting Boundaries, and Global Culture (ed. D.P. Martinez), 110–132. Cambridge University Press. Ticknell, E., Chambers, D., Van Loon, J., and Hudson, N. (2003). Begging for it: new femininities, social agency, and moral discourse in contemporary teenage and men’s magazines. Feminist Media Studies 3 (1): 47–63. Tiffe, R. (2013). Original plumbing: performing gender variance through relational self‐determination. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 9 (4): 1. Vigorito, A.J. and Curry, T.J. (1998). Marketing masculinity: gender identity and magazines. Sex Roles 39 (1–2): 135–152. Viljoen, S. (2011). Papa don’t preach: fatherhood in a south African Christian men’s magazine. Communication 37 (2): 308–331. Walker, N.A. (2000). Shaping Our Mothers’ World: American Women’s Magazines. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Waters, M. (2015). Periodical writing. In: The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789 (ed. C. Ingrassia), 226–241. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiles, C.R., Wiles, J.A., and Tjurnlund, A. (1996). The ideology of advertising: the United States and Sweden. Journal of Advertising Research 36 (3): 57–66. Williamson, G. (2016). British Masculinity in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1731 to 1815. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Winship, J. (1980). Inside Women’s Magazines. London: Pandora. Zachs, F. (2014). Cross‐Glocalization: Syrian women immigrants and the founding of women’s magazines in Egypt. Middle Eastern Studies 50 (3): 353–369. https://doi.org/10.1080/00263206.2013.863757. Zuckerman, M.E. (1988). A History of Popular Women’s Magazines in the United States, 1792–1995. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Further reading Babicheva, J. (2011). Discursive constructions of femininities in contemporary Russian women’s ­magazines. Dissertation. University of Alberta, Canada. ProQuest (NR89262). Davidenko, M. (2014). Multiple femininities in two Russian women’s magazines, 1970s–1990s. Journal of Gender Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2016.1233864. Garvey, E.G. (2004). Foreword. In: Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 (ed. S.M. Harris), xi–xxiii. Boston: Northeastern University Press. King, A. (2008). International history of magazines. In: The International Encyclopedia of Communication (ed. W. Donsbach), 2748–2752. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Porteous, H. (2013). “There are no ugly women, only lazy ones” – the duty of beauty labour in contemporary Russian women’s magazines. In: Körper – Geschlecht – Wahrnehmung: Sozial‐ und geisteswissenschaftliche beiträge zue genderforschung (eds. H. Ehlers, G. Linke, N. Milewski, et al.), 133–156. Berlin: Lit Verlag. Schirato, T. and Yell, S. (1999). The new men’s magazine and the performance of masculinity. Media International Australia 92 (1): 81–90. Törrönen, J. (2014). Women’s responsibilities, freedoms, and pleasures. Feminist Media Studies 14 (4): 640–662.

17

Magazines’ Construction of Life Markers From Youth to Old Age Joy Jenkins

Introduction One characteristic that has consistently set magazines apart from other types of media is their ability to speak to carefully defined groups of readers. In some cases, these reader communities are built around a particular type of entertainment or hobby, such as sports, travel, or cooking. In others, audience members share an interest in a newsworthy topic, such as e­ conomics, global affairs, or politics. And in still other cases, readers unite around an important aspect of their identity, such as gender, ethnicity, and, as this chapter examines, age. As special‐interest periodicals flourished in the 1960s, thanks to lower printing costs, targeted marketing, and audiences’ growing interest in self‐fulfillment (Abrahamson 1996), magazines targeting groups defined by a specific intersection of age and gender also grew. Women’s lifestyle magazines, for example, have been published for centuries in the USA, evolving from titles such as Godey’s Lady’s Book, the trendsetter for similar periodicals in the nineteenth century, to mass‐ market magazines in the early twentieth century, such as Good Housekeeping, McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal, to the “Seven Sisters” of the mid‐twentieth century, including McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and Better Homes & Gardens (Aronson 2010). Although men had been the assumed audience of special‐interest, political, literary, and other genres of magazines, men’s lifestyle magazines are a more recent phenomenon, including GQ, Esquire, and “lad mags” like loaded and FHM (Crewe 2003). From Highlights to Seventeen to Glamour, these publications conjure memories of formative periods in readers’ lives, when they needed advice for navigating certain rites of passage, some abrupt and others gradual – such as constructing and honing one’s gender performance, choosing a career, dating, having sex, cohabiting or marrying, parenting, rising in the workplace, acquiring wealth, retiring, and dealing with declining health in preparation for life’s end. In serving as such guides, magazines shape the ways readers view ideal selfhood, defining how they should navigate the worlds around them, including both the public (school, work) and private (health, relationships) spheres. As Raisborough (2011) argued, lifestyle media such as magazines, by focusing on ordinary aspects of daily life, help readers “transform to a better, more efficient, happier self” (p. 4) while reinforcing a neoliberal ideal in which products lead to ­freedom, confidence, independence and, ultimately, empowerment. As a result, understanding the messages these magazines send, and readers’ responses to them, is vital.

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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This chapter considers the ways that magazines, throughout their history, have constructed life markers for their readers. I first provide an overview of scholarship on how magazines depict milestones in the lives of readers, progressing from youth magazines to women’s and men’s magazines to senior magazines. The focus on women’s and men’s magazines reflects the relative importance of gender during adults’ reproductive span, when they tend to be most active romantically regardless of sexual orientation and the presence of children – in contrast to childhood and old age when one’s gender construction and performance are usually seen as being of lesser magnitude. I also address the ways readers respond to these depictions, as well as how interactions with these magazines, and the ways they influence key moments in readers’ lives, have changed and might continue to change in the contemporary media landscape.

Magazines and Youth Many readers’ first interactions with magazines come through children’s titles. In the USA, children and youth have produced their own periodicals since the 1790s, with young people reflecting on topics such as war and politics, providing opportunities for considering “how young Americans have been instructed about their world and for examining their own cultural productions” (Weikle‐Mills 2012, p. 118). Contemporary children’s publications target readers as young as preschool age, with longtime popular titles including Highlights, Ranger Rick, National Geographic Kids, Cricket, and others linked to popular TV, movie, book, and video game characters and brands, many continuing to thrive in print (What’s New in Publishing 2018). These magazines remain popular for their ability to connect with children through stories, illustrations, and activities while potentially providing their first guidelines for how to engage with their parents, siblings, teachers, and peers. Research on children’s magazines is limited, but some studies have addressed the role of ­magazines aimed at young audiences in constructing understandings of how children should play, dress, behave, and interact. Like the magazines they will encounter as they age, children’s magazines, even those aimed at unisex audiences, can perpetuate gender stereotypes through the ways they present children’s images, activities, colors, and emotions in narratives, photography, and advertisements, including both models and real‐life readers (Spinner et al. 2018). Seeing their peers engaged in activities they recognize can have a significant effect on young readers, serving as social models for how they should behave. In fact, Spinner et al. found that exposure to depictions of real‐life children playing with toys that counter gender stereotypes can encourage more flexible thinking about what types of play and toys are acceptable, even if children maintain personal preferences for gender‐typed toys. Between children’s magazines and teen magazines, a market has emerged for the readers in between: “tweens.” Once an untapped market tied in with children, tweens are now targeted with a variety of products, including magazines, and young people in this group have “claimed the ‘in between’ title, thereby illustrating the shifting meanings and experiences of age” (Velding 2017, p. 507). Research has examined the ways these magazines, which tend to emphasize female audiences, construct gender and sexuality and lay the groundwork for assumptions that will follow these readers into their later media interactions. Tween magazines have been criticized for blurring the boundaries between children/teens and innocent/sexualized and creating a consumer market out of this age group (Vares and Jackson 2015), but they might also provide a safer space for media consumption for young readers than magazines oriented toward older teens, which include more mature information, images, and advertisements (Lumby and Albury 2010). There are other key differences in the content between magazines aimed at teens and those aimed at preteens, with mainstream teen magazines including more appearance‐focused content

228 Jenkins than mainstream preteen magazines, which include more information and empowerment frames (Daniels et al. 2016). Preteen magazines, in general, also tend to include a more diverse array of topics in both articles and advertisements, such as health (topics related to the onset of puberty), sports and physical activity, and advice for developing artistic talents. Girls’ Life magazine, for readers aged 8–14, also emphasizes appearance‐oriented content and products, teaching readers to engage in “beauty work” (Velding 2017), such as choosing the right clothing, applying makeup, and removing body hair. The magazine also includes advertisements for menstrual and acne products, suggesting that girls can use these items to feel more in control of their changing bodies. Tween magazines also instruct readers how to navigate social relationships. A study of magazines popular among tween girls in Australia, Sweden, and the UK (Bertilsdotter‐Rosqvist and Brownlow 2017) suggested three primary roles girls must fulfill to engage in “good friendships”: the hostess, the social fun girl, and the BFF (best friends forever). The hostess must look after her friends and create opportunities for them to have fun together; the social fun girl must be outgoing and seek out excitement and adventure; and the BFF has one best friend with whom she shares a close bond. These roles suggest a “hegemonic young femininity” (p. 65), emphasizing that girls should be friendly, pretty, and popular, while girls who are more passive, lonely, and less focused on maintaining the well‐being of a group of friends are constructed as troubled and immature. Studies have also addressed the effects of these representations on how tweens see themselves. A study (Tiggemann and Slater 2014) examining media use among girls aged 10–12 and ­comparing the effects of digital media with more traditional forms (TV and preteen and teen magazines) found that all forms of media exposure were connected with concerns about body image, and TV and magazines particularly reinforced a focus on the thin ideal and, in the case of magazines, body surveillance. Magazines with an older intended readership (aged 14–17) were also popular among younger female readers. A study examining how preteen girls (aged 10–13) in Australia discuss their tween and teen magazine‐reading habits (Vares and Jackson 2015) found that they saw some magazines as too “kiddish” and “childish”; they suggested that other teen magazines included too much sexual content; and they saw a few options as “just right” for learning how to navigate fashion, beauty, pop culture, and relationships. Because tween magazines focus on teaching girls how to navigate their gender and sexual identities, particularly through a postfeminist discourse, readers must “warily and responsibly self‐monitor their engagement with the prolific ‘sexualized’ representations they encounter lest they be seen as violating age‐based (a)sexuality norms” (Jackson and Goddard 2015, p. 243) – the boundaries between good girl, “girl power,” and the “sexualized” girl.

Teen Magazines The advent of magazines aimed specifically at teenage audiences is largely associated with the US magazine Seventeen, first published in 1944, which offers teen girls (but not boys) advice and guidelines about what is expected of them as they transition to adulthood. The publication recognizes teen girls not only as an important readership demographic but also as a valuable target for advertisers. The magazine’s original promotional campaign relied on a user prototype named Teena, a white, middle‐class 16‐year‐old with plans to attend college, marry, and stay at home to raise her family (Massoni 2006). She babysits for extra money; helps around the house; and enjoys sports, shopping, and movies. She also looks to the magazine for advice and direction on products she needs to improve herself as she grows up. In turn, Seventeen educates her on how to become a consumer, setting expectations for her life as an adult woman responsible for much of the family’s shopping. As Massoni described, “For the advertiser, Teena’s youth also holds the promise of a lucrative adulthood” (p. 38). Although the magazine positioned Teena as an



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influencer among her family, boyfriend, and peers, it also suggested to advertisers that teen girls are copycats and that selling to one means reaching an entire demographic with the potential to develop long‐lasting brand loyalties and shopping preferences. Over the ensuing decades, Seventeen continued to prioritize traditionally feminine topics that are also typical of adult women’s magazines, such as beauty, fashion, cooking, decorating, and crafts, but no monthly sections or columns focused on education, health, or sports (Peirce 1990). However, messages encouraging self‐reliance and independence in the process of growing up increased during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the feminist movement took hold in the USA. In 1971, Seventeen also included content by editors, readers, and advertisers that referred to women’s liberation, racism, and environmentalism, although these references decreased in the ensuing decades (Currie 1994). Despite some focus on feminist content in Seventeen, almost half of the magazine’s content in 1945 and more than half in 1975 and 1995 emphasized the construction of traditional femininity, particularly girls’ appearance (Schlenker et al. 1998). Teen magazines also flourished in the UK in the post‐World War II era, recognizing adolescent girls as a viable market (with long‐term promise) and reflecting the rise of youth culture in British society. McRobbie (1982) analyzed Jackie, a UK magazine for young women, which was founded in 1964 and grew significantly over the next two decades. The name of the magazine referenced an ideal girl who is British, fashionable, attractive, and modern. As McRobbie described, “Jackie introduces the girl into adolescence outlining its landmarks and characteristics in detail and stressing importantly the problematic features as well as the fun” (p. 2). In doing so, the magazine also approached its readers as a monolithic group, offering carefully cultivated advice on love, fashion, beauty, and music. The magazine, like its successors in the UK and elsewhere, also offered particular constructions of gender. The popular prototypes included the shy and kind blond, the wild and fun‐loving brunette, and the ordinary girl, all of whom vied for the attention of different types of boys: the light‐hearted and flirtatious one, the silly one, the emotional and shy one, and the dangerous one in need of “taming.” All these boys were presented as viable mates to whom the girls would eventually submit as they approached and entered adulthood. Tinkler (2014) described the rise of two types of periodicals directed at adolescent girls and young women in in the late 1950s in the UK: love‐comics and teen magazines. Love‐comics emphasized the promise of eventual adult self‐fulfillment through romantic love and marriage, while teen magazines celebrated the developing views, preferences, and worth of the individual reader. These magazines included elements of US teen publications, including quizzes and articles focusing on topics such as college, work, and travel. The goal of such periodicals was to help readers celebrate their individualities, with the implicit expectation that exploring one’s identity should occur before marriage. Teen magazines’ stereotypical construction of gender suggests, as was the case in YM ­magazine (Duffy and Gotcher 1996), that young women are expected to enter adulthood by achieving an unattainable beauty ideal, meeting male expectations for appearance and sexual availability, and ultimately gaining power through consumption of recommended products. These depictions have routinely mapped out the rites of passage expected of white femininity, but have rarely showed African-Americans, Asian Americans, or Hispanic Americans, and have never addressed gay and lesbian teens (Duffy and Gotcher 1996). Over several decades (1965–2000), US teen magazines have also presented female readers about to enter adulthood with complicated and contradictory views of masculinity, describing a “new man” who is emotional, thoughtful, and respectful of women but who can also exhibit “bad boy” behavior, such as cheating, lying, or using girls for sex (Prusank 2008). A discursive analysis of Seventeen magazine between 1945 and 1955 and 1995–2005 (Loke and Harp 2010) showed that in its first decade, the magazine presented men as smart and successful, equating masculinity with professional success. Articles also focused on male opinions of how girls should

230 Jenkins look and behave, and emphasized that girls should not demonstrate male traits, such as being opinionated or too athletic. By the next decade, however, depictions became more negative, representing the “sex‐obsessed callous and foolish boy,” (p. 10) who could also at times be insensitive and cruel, although the magazine still suggested girls should aim to attract him. Even quizzes have been shown to construct girls’ femininity, in some cases deviating from the assertive, independent images presented in other parts of teen magazines. Ostermann and Keller‐Cohen (1998) compared quizzes in American and Brazilian teen magazines, which differentiated between a perfect and a not‐so‐perfect girl, and suggested that girls should not be too independent or flirtatious, nor should they be too dependent or avoid flirting. An analysis of personality quizzes in CosmoGIRL! and Seventeen found that they largely emphasize romantic relationships, in addition to appearance and beauty achieved through purchasing certain ­products (Pattee 2009). Ultimately, such quizzes establish boundaries of acceptable behavior for young women through providing examples of the “right” and “wrong” ways to perform femininity. Magazines also serve as important sources of health information for teenagers, influencing their knowledge and beliefs about their bodies as well as about sexual and reproductive health. As Garner et  al. (1998) suggest, “magazines can give more explicit kinds of information to readers” (p. 60). However, they also encourage girls to develop traditional, advertiser‐driven female sexuality focused on (i) pursuing and maintaining heterosexual relationships; (i) achieving norms for physical attractiveness through fashionable clothing, makeup, and thin body ideals; and (iii) drawing male attention, with boys’ sexuality constructed more positively than girls’ (Durham 1998). In the 1970s, YM and Seventeen still espoused expectations of a girlhood innocence by covering dating etiquette, kissing, and breakups, while Teen, Glamour, and Mademoiselle openly discussed sex, the single scene, pregnancy, and abortion (Garner et  al. 1998). By the 1990s, however, all the magazines focused on and constructed sexual activity as a gate to adulthood, which girls could enter only if completed by a man. Therefore, girls were expected and ­encouraged to fulfill male ideals, while boys were presented as lacking the ability to navigate relationships and express their feelings; therefore, these responsibilities fell on the girl. Over three decades (1974, 1984, and 1994), Seventeen’s depictions of sexuality shifted from portraying adolescent girls as sexual objects and victims to presenting them as adultlike agents with their own sexual desires (Carpenter 1998). Coverage also began to suggest that girls may be ambivalent about sex, and included articles showing more openness toward homosexual relationships. Joshi et  al. (2014) found ambivalent messaging in more recent issues of Seventeen (1997–2007), particularly in terms of sex, relationships, and gender roles. Sex was portrayed as being both a part of long‐term, committed relationships and a “short‐term adventure” (p. 13), but most articles implied expectations of monogamy. Teen magazines exhibit similar characteristics outside the USA. Teen magazines in Australia, studied over a 10‐year period, described sex in the context of loving, usually long‐term ­relationships (a “romance” script) while emphasizing the social, physical, and personal dangers associated with sexual activity (a “protection” script) (Burns 2018). While the “romance” script offered details about how to attract and connect with a boy as a natural precursor to sex, the “protection” script constructed young women as potential victims who must please their partner and protect themselves from disease. A comparison of Seventeen and the German teen magazine Bravo! looked at the oft‐covered topic of virginity loss, which was constructed as a rite of passage signaling the transition from childhood to adulthood and also one that could shape later sexual attitudes and experiences (Carpenter 2001). Bravo! framed virginity loss more positively, emphasizing responsible pleasure‐seeking, while Seventeen focused exclusively on the negative implications. Letters to the editor published from 1997 to 2002 in Girlfriend magazine in New Zealand and Australia also constructed (heterosexual) sex as painful and potentially dangerous, with few



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girls requesting advice for pregnancy or STI prevention, although the advice doctor found ways to address these topics (Jackson 2005). US and Dutch teen magazines (Joshi et al. 2014) addressed virginity loss similarly, although the topic was not often covered. Dutch magazines framed the milestone more positively, reflecting the norms of a feminine society where teen sex is more normalized and seen as a relationship between partners rather than exploitation; they also referenced pregnancy as a negative consequence of sex less often than US magazines. The observed differences may reflect the fact that the USA has a much more masculine culture than the Netherlands. The cultural dimension of masculinity and femininity suggests key social differences in country cultures (Hofstede et al. 1998). In a predominantly masculine society, men are expected to be assertive, tough, and focused on material success and progress, while women are expected to be modest, tender, caring, and focused on quality of life. In contrast, a feminine society emphasizes that men and women should be modest, tender, sympathetic, caring, and focused on quality of life. Masculine societies also stress competition, performance, and economic growth, while feminine societies focus on equality, solidarity, compromise, preservation, and a welfare‐society ideal (Hofstede et  al. 1998). Portugal, which is less masculine than the USA but more masculine than the Netherlands, offers an interesting comparison case. A recent 40‐year analysis of magazines in Portugal showed an evolution in how women’s sexuality has been addressed, with female teen magazines now covering sexuality more frequently than other publications, including providing advice on how girls should initiate sexual activities while conforming to norms in which women must attend to men’s sexual and emotional needs (Dias et al. 2012). Research has also examined how young girls respond to the content of teen magazines. Adolescent readers of popular US magazines Seventeen, Sassy, YM, and Teen said they often looked to outside authorities for guidance on how to look and behave as part of their transition to adulthood, and valued the male perspective in teen magazines (Duke and Kreshel 1998). However, focus groups with middle‐class, regular teen‐magazine readers showed important differences between white and African‐American girls (Duke 2000). While white girls had a complicated relationship with the standards for appearance presented in teen magazines, including fashion, makeup, and body shape, African‐American girls were less interested in emulating these ideals because they did not reflect the ways their culture and communities suggested they should evaluate themselves on their path to adulthood. Focus groups conducted with 13‐ to 24‐year‐old adolescent girls and boys and young women and men in three US cities found that nearly all participants used magazine content and ads to find information about reproductive health, with some taking articles about birth control and medication to appointments with their physicians (Treise and Gotthoffer 2002). However, participants said magazines tended to focus more on “glamour issues,” such as AIDS, breast cancer, and prostate cancer, rather than on the “typical reader” and “real‐life situations,” such as talking to parents about sexual health, contraception, and sexually transmitted infections. Although a large body of scholarship has assessed the content and influence of girls’ and women’s magazines, fewer studies have considered the ways magazines address young male readers, and even fewer compare these genres. A study of UK teen magazines (Ticknell et al. 2003) suggests that magazines aimed at teen boys tend to emphasize leisure interests, in contrast to the strategies of magazines targeting female readers. For example, male‐targeted magazines such as loaded and FHM feature contradictory messages, combining pin‐ups of scantily clad women with features on sex, health, and activities such as “extreme sports.” Further, while girls’ magazines offer tips on navigating relationships and romance, magazines for young men present more ambiguous messages, suggesting a detached, “emotional shallowness” (p. 57) approach to dealing with commitment and emotional and moral conflict that prioritizes sexuality over love (Ticknell et al. 2003). These narratives might further complicate the already complex relationship young men have with understanding virginity loss as a key life event; with varying levels of

232 Jenkins physical, relational, emotional, and spiritual connotations; and the differing standards between boys and girls, in that virginity for a female is more acceptable than for a male, and “to be an empowered woman, a girl must lose her virginity, and vice versa, a male to be empowered must take a girl’s virginity (Palit and Allen 2016, p. 10).

Magazines and Adult Women Health information (often intertwined with beauty narratives) is a frequent focus of scholarship on adult women’s magazines, from sexual health to breastfeeding to cancer and menopause, and scholars have suggested that women’s magazines serve as important outlets for readers to learn about health topics relevant to their age (Hust and Andsager 2003; Warner and Drew Procaccino 2004). Mainstream women’s publications, however, rarely capture the full complexity of ­women’s health issues (Len‐Ríos and Hinnant 2014). As Roy (2008) suggested, “Women’s magazines are an important and distinctive discursive form as they integrate expert discourse on health found in medical journals with everyday practices and knowledges” (p. 464), instructing women how to manage their own health at different ages as well as that of their family. As such, women’s magazines tend to emphasize neoliberalist discourses in which youth‐preservation‐obsessed women pursue a “will to health” (p. 328) through individual behaviors, consumerism, and the pursuit of magazine‐directed ideals (such as wellness and weight loss) rather than by examining environmental or institutional causes of ill health (Hinnant 2009). This focus is also evident in content intended for African-American readers, where coverage of obesity focuses exclusively on individual factors rather than the environmental factors that can affect whether readers follow the solutions and advice provided (Campo and Mastin 2007). Similarly, health coverage in Canadian women’s magazines focuses on self‐control and personal determination, healthy regimens, the potentially negative consequences of one’s failure to follow the provided advice, cautionary tales of ordinary women, and inspirational stories (Roy 2008). A study of Australian women’s magazines (Newman 2007) found that messaging in the periodicals’ health forums continues to emphasize individual burdens of responsibility rather than broader factors, with many letters exploring stereotypical aspects of women’s beauty culture, such as weight, skin care, and breast size. Similar to teen magazines, reproductive health is also a frequent topic in women’s magazines. A content analysis of 50 periodicals (Walsh‐Childers 1997) showed that both women’s and teen magazines focused on a wide range of topics concerning women of childbearing age, including pregnancy, abortion, and contraception, while sexual health coverage in men’s magazines emphasized concerns about HIV/AIDS. Teen magazines discussed mostly unintended pregnancies, while women’s magazines and parenting magazines focused on planned pregnancies. Unsurprisingly, women’s magazines also embrace more mature views on sex and relationships. A survey of young women (Kim and Monique Ward 2004) suggested that those who more ­frequently read adult women’s magazines (Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire) were more supportive of assertive female roles, less likely to associate sex with physical or emotional risk, and less likely to endorse stereotypical ideas of the role of men in sexual relationships, in contrast to frequent readers of teen magazines (Seventeen, YM). Women of childbearing age who are about to have their first child or are already raising one or more children also look to magazines to navigate certain rites of passage specific to parenthood. Mass‐market magazines cover various facets of the entry into parenthood, critiquing the rise of gender‐reveal parties and elaborate baby showers and first birthday parties, instructing women what really happens during childbirth, publishing heart‐warming images of proud parents with their newborns, and detailing the sleepless nights and endless anxieties associated with family life. These magazines aim to offer relatable, real‐life insights into child‐rearing as a rite of passage while also idealizing certain approaches to pregnancy, childbirth, and parenthood.



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Parenting magazines such as Parents, Hip Mama, Green Parent, and many others, for example, offer content on pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, child development stages, and other topics aimed primarily at mothers (Greve Spees and Zimmerman 2003). These magazines not only present mothers in gender‐stereotypical ways, usually as children’s primary caregivers, but they also imply that mothers should be preparing their daughters for adult femininity by focusing on their appearance and choosing gender‐stereotypical children’s clothing (Greve Spees and Zimmerman 2003). Portrayals of childrearing practices are often quite influential; for example, depictions of breastfeeding in parenting magazines can have effects on breastfeeding rates (Foss and Southwell 2006). A content analysis of popular parenting, women’s, and African-American magazines found that breastfeeding was covered more often than formula‐feeding, but articles also presented contradictory messages: that breastfeeding is challenging but also the better choice, emphasizing health benefits for the baby and largely neglecting any risks (Frerichs et al. 2006). Further, issues such as public breastfeeding appeared less frequently than coverage of social and partner support for breastfeeding, despite the likely importance of these issues to readers. A study of the most popular magazines in England and Ireland for women aged 15–50 found that most included references to infant feeding (breast, bottle, or formula), and most addressed breastfeeding and formula feeding positively, such as breastfeeding’s potential to naturally aid post‐pregnancy weight loss, with many references coming in the form of articles about celebrities (O’Brien et al. 2016). Scholars have also critiqued the “yummy mummy” discourse, a mainstay of women’s and celebrity magazines that has been shown to shape notions of how women should manage their pregnant and post‐pregnancy bodies. The influence of celebrity motherhood begins with media obsession over “baby bumps” and continues with scrutiny of celebrities’ pregnancies and, ­eventually, critique of their post‐pregnancy bodies (Williams et  al. 2017). As Nash (2012) described, “Naked pregnant portraits of celebrities in women’s magazines embody the ethos of the ‘sexy’ and slender ‘yummy mummy’: this performance of a glamorous pregnancy is critical for maintaining celebrity currency” (p. 47). Summarizing scholarship on these tropes, Orton‐Johnson (2017) describes the “yummy mummy” as a mother who is sexually attractive and well‐groomed, while the “slummy mummy” has “let herself go” and struggles to balance motherhood with other responsibilities. These labels, Orton‐Johnson argues, reveal clear distinctions based on class, race, and other factors and suggest judgments based on appearance and morality. Narratives emphasizing “getting your body back” after pregnancy and childbirth are particularly influenced by celebrity culture, which “creates, maintains and perpetuates this ideal as a desirable and attainable part of being a ‘good’ mother” (Malatzky 2017, p. 26), despite the money, time, and effort involved. Interviews with women in Australia suggested that mothers and prospective mothers recognize this ideal while acknowledging that it creates problematic expectations for the maternal body and for mothers while leaving little room for alternative discourses (Malatzky 2017). In another study, non‐celebrity mothers compared their bodies to those of celebrity mothers and saw themselves as inadequate, with middle‐class mothers critiquing them while internalizing the beauty ideals they promoted and high‐income mothers more clearly embracing a sense of competition in regard to these ideals because they potentially had the means to attain them (Williams et al. 2017). Even young‐adult women who had never been pregnant showed vulnerability to the idealized way postpartum celebrities are featured in media imagery, internalizing the objectification evident in these depictions (Hopper and Aubrey 2016). Media representations can also shape the ways readers, particularly mothers, view how they should balance their parenting duties with their careers. A study considering how work–life balance is constructed in highly circulated UK women’s magazines (Sullivan 2015) found that although articles acknowledged that paid work is inevitable for many mothers, it was presented as incompatible with idealized notions of motherhood, typically without reference to workplace

234 Jenkins issues (long hours, employer demands, policy considerations) or ways men contribute to work and parenthood. Women, the representations suggest, must find their own resources and coping strategies to manage these tensions, rather than challenge them directly, suggesting maternal employment as a choice that should be addressed individually. Studies suggest that women readers recognize that the portrayals of certain life milestones in magazines frequently do not reflect reality. Often, the role of magazines is not so much to guide readers through major rites of passage but to provide a sense of community with others who are undergoing similar life stages and facing similar opportunities and challenges. Magazines also offer readers practical tips for their everyday lives and opportunities to fantasize about their ideal selves (Hermes 1995). In interviews with readers of a popular women’s magazine in Norway, Ytre‐Arne (2014) found that readers knew their particular experiences were not depicted, but they valued practical tips and the opportunity to escape from reality. They also recognized a “makeover discourse,” in which magazines “take reality as a starting point and then make it more glamorous or attractive” (p. 249). Similarly, interviews with US women’s magazine readers suggest they enjoy the fantasy world of magazines and actively incorporate conventional ideas of lifestyle and attractiveness in the context of their own experiences (Gauntlett 2008).

Magazines and Adult Men While women’s magazines create clear generational segments  –  from teen magazines to “mature” monthlies  –  for boys and men “there are few explicitly articulated assumptions about age in titles offered to men and little sense that the reader will graduate to a new publication having exhausted the pleasures of ‘boys’ stuff” (Ticknell et al. 2003, p. 49). Men’s‐ oriented magazines, such as GQ and Esquire, resemble Elle and Cosmopolitan in their focus on fashion and other products, but they suggest youthfulness as a key attribute of achieving this consumable masculinity (Ticknell et al. 2003). As such, men do not grow up through taking on emotional responsibilities but through entering the consumer economy. Although less often studied than women’s magazines, men’s magazines also shape readers’ self‐image and provide instructions for how to navigate the world. These periodicals encapsulate a wide range of interests and experiences, from long‐running publications emphasizing sports and images of scantily clad women to more recent periodicals focused on style, health, fitness, outdoor activities, and gay culture. Advertisers of lifestyle products did not see men as a viable market until the 1980s, but the rising popularity of publications such as loaded, FHM, and Maxim challenged these assumptions, even though readers claimed they only purchased magazines to casually flip through (Gill et al. 2005). Many of these publications, Gill (2003) argues, branded themselves as style magazines rather than simply men’s magazines, heralding the potential for publications relying on a “laddish” tone invoking references to women’s bodies and heterosexual sex. When loaded emerged in the UK in 1994, alongside titles like GQ and Esquire, it redefined the look, feel, and market for general interest men’s magazines – transitioning from a focus on the “new man” to the “new lad” as an idealized form of masculinity (Crewe 2003). These periodicals were aimed at men who were, or wanted to be, in their sexual and masculine prime. The “new lad,” in contrast to the “new man” (the target reader of the UK’s first lifestyle magazines for men) represented a masculinized response to the feminist movement (Benwell 2008). The “new lad” evoked ­overtones of sexism and homophobia while claiming a sense of irony and allusions to working‐ class culture (Benwell 2008). Men’s appearance also rose in importance in the construction of adult masculinity. An analysis of eight popular men’s lifestyle magazines in Canada (Ricciardelli et  al. 2010) found several



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depictions of prime‐of‐life masculinity: a laddist masculinity in FHM, Stuff, and Maxim; metrosexuality in GQ and Details; an older style of metrosexuality in Esquire; and muscularism in Men’s Health. Ideal male body images appeared in all magazines, implicitly pressuring readers to lose weight or gain muscle. Like women’s magazines, men’s magazines also instruct readers (often as young as their 20s) to counteract aging and seek a boyish look. Sports Illustrated, GQ, and Rolling Stone’s male body ideal has consistently become leaner, more muscular, and V‐shaped between 1967 and 1997 (Law and Labre 2002). The “John Wayne body,” idealized in the past, was easily achieved, but the new ideal “does not represent the body type most men have, just as female fashion models seen in the mass media do not represent the way most American women look” (p. 706). Furthermore, adolescent boys and young men often “grow up” sexually by learning sexual attitudes and behaviors from magazines, including pornographic magazines, such as Penthouse and Playboy, and “lad” magazines, such as Maxim and FHM (Taylor 2006). For example, lad magazine readers expect more diverse sexual behaviors but with lower levels of commitment, while pornographic and lad magazine readers have been found to espouse more permissive sexual attitudes (Taylor 2006). These periodicals also promote highly idealized, sexualized, and available depictions of women, which rarely represent the women readers encounter in their everyday lives. Men’s entry into fatherhood is another rite of passage that has occasionally received attention, specifically by parenting magazines. When Parenting, Baby Talk, Working Mother, Parents, and American Baby address men as fathers, they typically focus on their status as breadwinners and authority figures, highlighting their uncertainties as parents, and emphasizing their fatherhood struggles at the backdrop of mothers’ allegedly more capable parenting (Schmitz 2016). These depictions can shape the ways men view their roles as parents by diminishing the roles of fathers, especially single fathers, and same‐sex parents.

Magazines and Aging Just as the magazine market has embraced publications focused on the teen years, it has also seen the emergence of magazines geared to middle‐aged, aging, and older readers. Here, audiences can learn how to manage their finances, when to retire, what health issues they should be concerned about, how to survive menopause, and how to spend their newfound leisure time as retirees. From More to Reader’s Digest to Prevention, and AARP1 the Magazine, magazines for older readers tackle topics ranging from fashion to health to food to finance. For example, Saga magazine, the best‐selling monthly subscription magazine in the UK, focuses on readers over 50 and includes a range of topics, such as home and garden, health and wellbeing, money advice, entertainment, food and drink, travel, cars, technology, relationships, and style and beauty. While teen as well as men’s and women’s magazines often highlight the excitement and promise of youth, magazines for older adults often bombard their readers with articles teaching them how to manage the alleged perils of aging and frequently and excessively medicalizing what is a natural stage of life. Among readers who had reached the prime of their lives, biologically speaking, middle‐aged female readers were among the first to be identified as a viable marketing group as new magazines emerged in the mid‐1980s in the USA. Periodicals such as New York Woman, Lear’s, and Mirabella were created to serve that group (Kitch 2003). When these magazines folded as a result of advertising decline, their disappearance seemed to signal that as women – the primary readers of popular magazines for decades – age, they cannot expect to see themselves reflected in magazine content. The baby‐boomer‐targeted US magazines more (for women over 40) and my generation (for readers ages 50–55) sent similar signals by defining their readers as smart and

236 Jenkins savvy, with disposable incomes, which they were expected to use to defy the aging process, just like the beautiful celebrities on the magazines’ covers. Kitch (2003) elaborates further: In the end, the mission of magazines such as more and my generation is to celebrate not middle age itself but the reader’s ability to avoid looking or acting middle‐aged. Such a goal is built on consumer products that presumably allow the reader to continue to drink from the fountain of youth. This powerful commercial proposition—fueled by a huge Baby Boom audience that, if we believe demographers and social critics, is supremely self‐absorbed—is behind the phenomenon that is being credited as “progress” in the mass‐media depiction of middle‐aged women. (p. 7)

Although offering depictions of a group not often seen in magazine content, these publications also suggest that readers should do – and buy – all they can to ward off the signs of aging. By contrast, magazines directed to readers who are past middle age focus on defining their health needs and offering relevant advice on topics such as diet, mobility, diseases, and medical treatments. The popular AARP The Magazine in the USA, which spun off AARP Segunda Juventud, now AARP Viva, to reach Latino readers (Rose et al. 2013) provides information on physical activity, including by sharing personal stories and using ordinary people as sources. However, the presented health information for older adults is often limited or incomplete. Physical health is emphasized over issues of cognitive health, such as the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia (Rose et al. 2013). Furthermore, when major magazines popular among older readers address dietary supplements, safety concerns are often overlooked or omitted (Kava et al. 2002). Some magazines whose readers are middle‐aged or retired also discuss dating and sexuality, an important area considering the lack of representation of older‐adult sexuality in mass media. Wada et al. (2015) suggest that older men are glamorized as sexually desirable far more often and until a much later age than older women. Wada et al. further indicate that coverage of online dating among older populations in Canada both focuses on sexual decline (the effects of menopause, medications, long‐term romances, stress, lack of desire for women) and notes that sex becomes better with age and is key to good health. The popular problem‐solution approach employed by magazine content for teen and young readers is also evident in magazines for aging populations. Its use is illustrated by articles suggesting that conditions such as diabetes and arthritis can hinder sexual activity but that specific services and products can remove or alleviate the obstacles. Senior adults and LGBTQ couples are largely if not totally absent from such ­coverage (Wada et al. 2015). Magazines directed to middle‐age (between 40 and 50) women, such as Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and O, the Oprah Magazine, address sexual fulfillment differently from the often‐ positive depictions in magazines for younger women. In middle age, sex becomes work, especially for women who have to strive to satisfy their male partners’ desire for sexual variety and for the mothers of teenage children, whose sex lives they have to monitor, particularly if they are daughters (Clarke 2009). Menopause, an important physiological milestone for women, has been the topic of many magazine articles, but these depictions are rarely studied. Hust and Andsager’s (2003) analysis of articles in Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Essence, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and McCall’s suggests menopause is framed similarly to other women’s health issues. Women’s magazines provide more comprehensive coverage, including how to discuss menopause and how to alleviate symptoms, which, according to Hust and Andsager, has the potential to empower and encourage older female readers. Like other aging‐related topics, menopause was also often discussed in the context of maintaining appearance and fighting aging through diet and exercise. Men’s magazines, such as Esquire, GQ, Maxim, Men’s Health, and Men’s Journal, largely ignore the topic of aging. When they represent aging men, they frame them primarily as ­experienced and powerful members of society, depicting the ways male readers can harness



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social, economic, and political power through ambition and wealth (Clarke et al. 2014). Like women, men are also advised to remain physically active and sexual through consumption of age‐defying products, extending the time between “third age,” when they can enjoy affluence, good health, leisure activities, and social relationships, and “fourth age,” when they become more dependent on others and may face declining health (Clarke et al. 2014). Magazines also construct death in particular ways, from concerns about costs associated with end‐of‐life care to the ideal place to die to strategies for dealing with grief to questions over how to define death at all (is brain dead dead?). Media depictions provide important information to help people prepare for death and can shape their attitudes, feelings, and beliefs about death and what it means (Clarke 2006). A study of portrayals of death in popular English‐language magazines published in the USA or Canada, including teen magazines, women’s magazines, men’s magazines, and others (Clarke 2006), identified articles focused on topics such as euthanasia, suicide (political and social implications and deaths of celebrities or their family members), dramatic murders, issues connected to the right‐to‐die movement, and new strategies for extending life. The articles emphasized the timing of death as “[often] a matter of individual freedom, the result of personal preference and thus potentially or actually, under control” (p. 162). They also neglected the role of prevention, suffering, support of the bereaved, and connections with economics, race, gender, or similar concerns. These articles, therefore, reflected the individualistic, neoliberal strategies evident in magazine coverage of many other key life events.

Conclusion This chapter examined the formative role magazines play in constructing and shaping the way readers experience important rites of passage. These relationships often begin when readers are young, with children’s magazines instructing them how to interact with their parents, teachers, and one another, often in gender‐stereotypical ways. Then, magazines for “tween readers” blend the activities and interests of childhood with advice on navigating friendships, puberty, fashion and beauty, and relationships, themes that continue and mature into the frequently contradictory messaging in teen magazines. As readers enter adulthood, they can turn to women’s, men’s, and parenting magazines for advice on starting and raising a family and navigating health concerns, all while facing pressures to look and act “young,” pressures also evident in magazines targeting seniors. Despite magazines’ continued entanglement with gender stereotypes, a focus on consumption and appearance, and neoliberal ideals, readers – male and female and of all ages and life stages – continue to seek them out for insights on their families and relationships, their physical health, and their emotional well‐being. In offering a blend of expert advice and relatable stories, all presented in an appealing‐to‐read package, magazines create a reliable and familiar community that might make the journey of life a bit more bearable and enjoyable.

Note 1 AARP stands for the American Association of Retired People.

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Case Study: Beauty, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness How Three British Magazines Construct Feminine Adolescence, “Middle Youth,” and Maturity Joy Jenkins Introduction Like other legacy media, magazines are facing changes, challenges, and opportunities in an environment continually shaped by the rise of digital media consumption. But despite the expectation that today’s magazines exist on websites, social media, iPads, video, and otherwise, newsstands in the UK are still filled with the glossy print products that have been ubiquitous parts of the  media landscape for decades. A visit to a grocery store, convenience store, or bookstore ­confronts customers with an array of options for nearly every point in the life span, including magazines for children, teens, young women and men, parents, middle‐aged women and men, and older adults. Many magazines are aimed at people in their prime‐of‐life stage, who define themselves by their occupation or interests, such as athletes and artists. In January 2018 in the UK, newsstand magazines featured thin, beautiful models and celebrities of various ages, mostly white, some famous primarily in the UK and others internationally known. Younger (or younger‐looking) cover subjects displayed toned arms and legs and long, tousled hair, while older models wore demure blazers. As a whole, these covers aimed to appeal to women of various ages while sending a consistent message: women are to be thin, attractive, and confident, and these magazines can instruct them how. Because women’s magazines seek to sell particular readers’ attention to advertisers, they address their audiences with the presumption that they are speaking to mostly young, upwardly mobile women with disposable incomes, seeking heterosexual relationships (Gill 2007). They aim to create a friendly, intimate relationship with this aspirational audience, addressing them as equals and friends who delight in the shared pleasures of femininity while seeking personalized solutions (Gill 2007). Like tween and teen magazines, women’s magazines frequently present contradictory messages, invoking discourses of “authentic” and “real” beauty and individualized notions of empowerment while promoting products through which readers can achieve these aims (Duffy 2013). As women negotiate the transition from girlhood to young womanhood to adulthood, magazines continue to advise them on how to maintain a youthful appearance and attract the right kind of man. Although, in previous decades, many magazines catered to the dutiful housewife, their content now increasingly emphasizes postfeminist messages of individualism, consumerism, sexual liberation, and self‐improvement (Budgeon et al. 2011).

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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This chapter offers a snapshot analysis of the content of three British magazines – Shout, Red, and Prima – which have helped women navigate life stages from their teenage to their golden years, through tips to manage friendships, family, dating, career, parenting, retirement, and consumer products. As the following sections will show, these magazines deal in the ideal, offering both practicality and escape, and readers continue to flock to them for help enhancing their everyday lives.

Shout: A Teen Magazine Much of the scholarship on teen magazines, like that focused on magazines for younger female audiences, has focused on the ways these publications construct two formative aspects of adolescence: gender construction and dating/sex. From covers clad with fresh‐faced young models and celebrities in the latest fashions to “expert” advice on everything – from menstruation to attracting a boy, to navigating the first kiss and what to expect from the first sexual experience, to quizzes designed to help readers identify and overcome their flaws – teen magazines have served as glossy and engaging vehicles to help those at the threshold of adulthood recognize and achieve the teenage dream. In doing so, teen magazines have traditionally shaped girls’ attitudes and behaviors about their appearance and the ways they interact with others as friends and dating partners, often emphasizing traditional gender roles (Currie 1999; McRobbie 1991; Peirce 1990). This formula, however, appears to have met with decreasing market success, as illustrated by the recent folding of several teen magazines in the UK. One example of such a magazine is Bliss, whose last issue was published in 2014.1 A study of Bliss by Nice (2007) suggested that editorial content had become tabloidized, with advice content (love, life, style, sex) declining, and diet and body advice as well as sensationalized, often sex‐focused, real‐life stories increasing. Shout, published in the UK since 1993, is one of a decreasing number of teen magazines that have survived in the challenging market. It signals its efforts to stay current and relevant by marketing itself as “the magazine for teen girls today.” Its website, www.shoutmag.co.uk, features a minimalistic layout mimicking social media interactivity and promotes the periodical as “No. 1 for YouTubers.” The January 2018 print issue came packaged in a plastic bag dotted with pink hearts, red kisses, and emoji, and promising hot gifts, celebrity news, and contests. Inside, readers received a metallic silver “hair scarf,” a make‐up bag, and shimmery lip crème, cross‐marketing efforts intended to create consumers‐in‐training. The cover lines, presented in bright pink, black, yellow, and blue, reminded readers that 2018 is “Happy You Year” and that Shout would provide them with advice for what to wear, how to navigate crushes and first dates (or even stay “Single & Sassy”), and what to do if they became the subject of “nasty rumours.” Images of mostly white celebrities filled the space, with thin women in revealing gowns ­surrounded by young men with long, floppy hair wearing multi‐layered shirts and jackets. The opening page of the magazine told readers, “Aim to feel comfortable and confident in your own skin and aim to please yourself!,” suggesting a postfeminist focus on independence, confidence, and empowerment. Inside, readers were confronted with celebrity news (Taylor Swift’s new album, The Weeknd’s2 reunion with supermodel‐ex Bella Hadid), tweets, Snapchat photos, and Instagram pictures. Readers could also learn how to compose the perfect seasonal Instagram posts (a colorful bouquet in spring, pumpkin coffee in autumn, a bikini‐and‐pool image for summer); were provided lined notes for chronicling their 2018 “bucket list” and “secret dream”; and could enter to win a “vlog kit” to “reach your YouTube destiny”. Other features told readers how to deal with dry, oily, and sensitive skin (situated next to the necessary products); provided first‐date tips (“Dress to Impress!”); and counseled a reader on how to deal with a copycat friend. Colorful, full‐page illustrations proclaimed, “You are ­awesome,” “It’s a good day to be happy,” and “Dream big” while suggesting the coats, hats,



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shoes, makeup, accessories, and hairstyles that could aid these efforts. There was a quiz in which readers could “predict your future” (with all options including a white boy) a few pages removed from a “Why you don’t need a bae” checklist (“You’ll put yourself first and be independent!”). By the time the reader finished (the back of the magazine featured a full‐page image of Justin Bieber), she would likely feel informed, entertained, and potentially empowered, but she was also presented with images of what type of girl (friend, girlfriend, student, etc.) she should be: well‐dressed, confident, interested in celebrity culture, boyfriend‐seeking, and future‐oriented.

Red, a “Middle‐Youth” Periodical Young female readers could look beyond Shout to the wealth of other titles, including Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Elle, and Women’s Health, and later, Marie Claire, Vogue and Red. Now published by Hearst UK, Red (www.redonline.co.uk) calls itself “serotonin for the soul.” A third of its audience is in the 15–34 age group, and two‐thirds of its readers are over the age of 35 (Statista 2019a). It is a typical example of periodicals intended for young and middle‐aged women and intertwined with femininity and women’s culture, emphasizing private‐sphere topics  –  such as motherhood and family life, fashion, beauty, relationships, cooking, and knitting – and providing a space where female readers can escape the isolation of their busy lives and enter a virtual community offering diversion, advice, and support (Winship 2000). Women’s magazines, as Winship argued, “provide a combination of (sometimes wholly inadequate) survival skills to cope with the dilemmas of femininity, and daydreams which offer glimpses that these survival strategies do work” (p. 328). To achieve these daydreams, however, women are often encouraged to purchase certain products or aspire to certain appearances and ­lifestyles – trends also evident in the magazines they may have read as teens. When it was introduced in 1998, Red was aimed at women in “middle youth” – a “new breed of thirty‐something women who could afford plush pads and designer clothes but were still kicking up their heels, they were an elite set” (Byrne 2003). Eventually, however, as the “middle youth” lifestyle became more mainstream, the magazine broadened its focus to women in their late 20s to early 40s (Byrne 2003). The magazine now focuses on “real‐life luxury,” with fashion and beauty advice and inspirational content recognizing that magazines should not “add ‘­perfectionism’ to the list of ideals to which women are supposed to aspire.” Even so, by reading Red, women can “Be A Better You” and recognize the tools they need, from the magazine itself to Red events to sponsored products, to live better and happier lives. The cover of the February 2018 issue of Red featured ageless supermodel Elle Macpherson walking on a beach in an ethereal, black‐white‐and‐gray gown, her blond hair falling on her ­perfectly tanned shoulders. She would not tell readers how to achieve this look, however; her cover story, instead, focused on “how to ace it in business.” The cover lines, presented in blocky pink and white font, blurred the lines between the public and private spheres, telling readers they would learn “55 Ways to Get Happy,” including how to kick‐start a new career, reboot a relationship, and fix their finances. They could also update their style and home décor and learn how to eat well. Inside, executive editor Sarah Tomczak suggested that readers should “Love yourself (every day),” even while working, maintaining relationships, and caring for their families and friends. All this multi‐tasking, however, meant that women needed to take time for self‐care – fortunately this issue featured a Spa Guide, in addition to “tips and tricks to find joy.” The pocket‐size magazine, which relied on a clean design dotted with brightly colored ­portraits of celebrities, models, and products, took readers on a journey in which they could reinvent themselves literally from head to toe. An opening style section included “fire‐engine red  heels” described as “fierce” and “sexy,” followed by an array of denim, earrings, and purses at various price points (from a £18 River Island plaid hat to a £780 Tibi trench coat).

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Readers followed three Red staff members as they went in search of their perfect denim and read columnists’ musings on the restorative appeal of a girls’ weekend and the value of viewing “­success” not simply as long workdays but also as making a boyfriend as important as her career. Other features reinforced this work–life‐balance message, with Macpherson informing readers how she balances life as a supermodel, entrepreneur, and “wellness guru” (eat healthy, do workouts you enjoy, stay connected to family, find your passion). Flipping the pages, readers could find strategies for achieving Macpherson’s success, including visualizing their goals, and inspirational women’s tips for “futureproofing” their careers. Because women seek out magazines to navigate their career goals as well as their personal relationships, Red offered looks into a couples’ retreat; how to manage your finances; what can be learned from moving in with millennials (“Careers are like relationships: it’s important to be happy but they shouldn’t define your ­happiness.” “Demand good sex.”); and what it’s like to undergo in‐vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments. There were fashion features; recipe ideas (smoked haddock chowder, a rhubarb meringue tart with almonds); and a look inside a modern, neutral‐hued “elegant London home.” A beauty section instructed readers what to do about dandruff and described modern approaches to face‐lifts, while a “Self” section preached self‐care, from meditation to eating to “real‐world workouts.” The models were fresh‐faced, ethnically diverse, thin, and frequently smiling. The tone was you‐centric and uplifting. According to Red, women can have it all: a satisfying career, a happy home life, and time for self‐care and leisure, but they must also have the means for ­fashionable work clothes, fitness instructors, spa days, and travel.

Prima: A Magazine for Mature Women Women readers past the point of “middle youth” have been defined and targeted by marketers in terms encouraging these audiences to view themselves as being in the prime of their lives (e.g. Kitch 2003). Prima magazine (www.prima.co.uk), now also a product of Hearst UK, is an example of such a publication, with about 90% of its readers being over the age of 35 (Statista 2019b). Unlike the readers of Red, about half of whom live in households with children (Statista 2019a), only about a third of Prima’s readers live in households with children (Statista 2019b), possibly because the children have grown up. Prima was introduced by German publisher Gruner & Jahr into the UK market in 1986. The magazine is a “woman’s savvy best friend. The one who lives like you, talks like you, puts a smile on your face, and always comes up with brilliant new advice.” A Prima reader wants to be “on‐trend” without “blowing her budget.” She needs guidance to find her style and may be self‐conscious about her body and aging skin. She also enjoys knitting, sewing, and crafts and has a family to care for, but she wants to be inspired with stories from “real‐life women,” diet and work advice, travel suggestions, and gardening tips. The February 2018 issue, which was packaged with a glossy travel magazine, featured smiling, confident TV personality Lisa Riley promising to share with readers the secrets of how she lost 12 stone. Readers would also learn how to “Make a fresh start” with a fit and healthy body, more money, and a younger look. After reading, they would be able to manage stress and aches and pains, cook diet‐friendly recipes, find the best colors and styles for their unique look, plan a holiday getaway, and organize their home. The editor’s letter reminded readers that the new year brings new possibilities and opportunities to “think about who we want to be and what we want to achieve.” The magazine offered plenty of options for achieving a new‐and‐improved life, including an array of product features – from satin pajamas to fluffy slippers to candles and marble soap dispensers. Riley, in a pink‐hued cover feature, told readers about losing weight, why diets don’t work, surgery for post‐weight‐loss excess skin, the ­benefits of quitting smoking and drinking, and life with a supportive partner. In the pictures,



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she smiled and danced, w ­ earing a leopard‐print jumpsuit and a form‐fitting red dress. Her look was sexy but not overly revealing. Fortunately, readers could follow suit, as the subsequent fashion features offered ideas for jackets, skirts, sweaters, blouses, and coats that were colorful and fashionable but also age‐appropriate. Expert advice came in the form of a wellness expert instructing readers how to “help those you love as well as yourself,” with a write‐in stress test, tips for vision‐boarding and boosting self‐esteem, and a list of “3 simple ways to be happy.” Readers could also participate, and the “Women like you” section offered stories of readers enjoying fresh starts, such as a mum and entrepreneur who founded a website allowing students to find babysitting jobs, a divorcee who had “finally found happiness again” through losing weight and starting her own diet consulting business, and a 66‐year‐old children’s book author. Other features focused on house‐hunting, one mother’s determination to find a cure for the brain cancer that killed her teenage son, and follow‐up stories on women entrepreneurs featured in a previous issue. Readers received makeup and hair tips, weight‐loss stories, “feelgood style secrets,” and diet‐ friendly recipes (chicken satay salad, vegetable frittata, granola bars) from Riley’s cookbook. They learned why walking can help them get fit and lose weight for free, why they should ­monitor their cholesterol, how to navigate dating if they have children, and how to get started on Instagram. Prima also promoted their creativity, offering skirt patterns and steps for making homemade gifts, such as a heart‐shaped lavender sachet. Reading Prima introduces readers to women like them – with jobs, families, and bodies to maintain – and offers accessible, affordable ideas for enhancing their lifestyles. They can be informed, thoughtful, happy, and beautiful, effectively balancing their public and private lives.

Shout, Red, and Prima in the Digital Age By the end of the 2000s, many magazines saw declining advertising revenues, and some had closed completely, including teen and women’s magazine titles (Duffy 2013). In response, ­magazine companies began to reinvent themselves as brands, promoting not only their print products, but also digital content and working to understand the elusive “cross‐platform’ consumers” (p. 85). This was clearly the case for the three magazines explored in this case study, all of which had web and social media presences reflective of the digital habits of the age group of their readers. As of March 2019, Red and Prima had a presence on Facebook (with 164 110 and 31 494 page likes, respectively), Instagram (114 000 and 5762 followers, respectively), and Twitter (103 000 and 12 600 followers, respectively). However, they had much lesser followings on YouTube, where Red’s channel had only 2203 subscribers, while Prima did not have a channel and the last of its five videos was posted in 2016. By contrast, Shout magazine had posted 180 YouTube videos and had 4417 subscribers to its channel. The teen magazine was also active on Twitter (24 100 followers) and Instagram (12 600 followers), but its Facebook page appeared to have been archived and was no longer active. Other women’s magazines around the world have similarly explored the potential offered by the digital environment. Interviews with editors and writers of women’s magazine websites in the UK and Spain (Favaro 2017) suggest that their websites present topics of interest to all women, from fashion and beauty to relationships, and they aim to provide an honest, relatable product that fosters a sense of belonging among readers. Although these editors praised the flexibility online media provide – including staying connected with their readers and offering timely, funny, easily digestible, and authentic content, particularly about sex and relationships – they also expressed awareness of the limitations of focusing on listicles and shareability. Some ­magazine brands have also experimented with participatory production tactics, as in the case of Olivia, a Finnish consumer magazine aimed toward urban professional women – an experiment that showed readers did not always share the editors’ priorities or tastes (Aitamurto 2013).

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Conclusion This case study explored a subset of the dozens of magazines regularly available on newsstands in the UK. Despite many magazines’ adoption of continually updated online editions and other digital products, print versions remain a recognized part of the media landscape. The teen magazine Shout clearly reflects the liminal space these publications occupy, using a glossy, colorful print product – packaged with beauty products – to target young readers who are interested in celebrities, dating, fashion, and making a name for themselves on social media, suggesting a desire to empower girls while reflecting the traditional teen‐magazine emphasis on appearances and finding a boyfriend. Red, a magazine aimed toward young and middle‐aged women, emphasizes “real‐life luxury” in the form of advice for fashion, beauty, home decor, careers, food, and relationships. Women, Red (and, indeed, most women’s magazines) suggests, can have it all and, if they have the means, purchase their way to happiness. Finally, Prima magazine accompanies readers into their middle and later years, where they are likely caring for their families while investing in themselves in the form of weight loss, travel, and pursuing good health. These magazines aim to cultivate relationships with their readers in multiple spaces, from their print editions to their websites to their social media accounts, helping readers balance the demands of their personal and professional lives. They offer advice that is friendly and accessible while ­presenting idealized (often celebrity) lifestyles where women expertly balance their many responsibilities and concerns. These magazines reinforce that the pursuit of happiness is a journey well worth taking, leading to empowerment and independence, but it also requires adhering to consumerist and often stereotypical expectations for gender, aging, and self‐improvement.

Notes 1 Not to be confused with the California‐based surfing magazine Bl!sss (http://blisssmag.com). 2 The stage name of Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, a Canadian singer and songwriter.

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Peirce, K. (1990). A feminist theoretical perspective on the socialization of teenage girls through Seventeen magazine. Sex Roles 23 (9–10): 491–500. Statista (2019a). Monthly Reach of Red Magazine in Great Britain from October 2017 to September 2018, by Demographic Group (in 1,000s). https://www.statista.com/statistics/380992/red‐monthly‐ reach‐by‐demographic‐uk (accessed 10 March 2019). Statista (2019b). Monthly Reach of Prima Magazine in Great Britain from October 2017 to September 2018, by Demographic Group (in 1,000s). https://www.statista.com/statistics/381638/prima‐ reach‐by‐demographic‐in‐the‐uk (accessed 10 March 2019). Winship, J. (2000). Survival skills and daydreams. In: Media Studies: A Reader, 2e (eds. P. Marris and S. Thornham), 334–340. New York: New York University Press.

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Case Study: How Magazines Carry Western Consumer Values Around the World The Chinese Women’s Lifestyle Magazine Rayli and its Representation of Healthy Diets Ariel Chen and David Machin Introduction Since the Deng reforms of the 1900s and particularly China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the Chinese magazine industry has seen dramatic changes. The media in the country have moved from a state‐run propaganda system to one increasingly engaged with international media and their kind of format, style, and content, including advertising. Yet, China’s media system is nevertheless still defined by the country’s unique political, social, economic, and cultural environment (Huang 2007; Hanson and Zheng 2010). The state has continued to seek to moderate the impact of international media and the culture they carry (Chang 2007). For this reason, the process of the arrival, localization, and management of international media has been unique to China – and so has the way in which local media themselves have changed, taking on and adapting Western forms of consumer lifestyle culture. A look at several editions of local Chinese magazines from the 1990s to today reveals a massive transformation at a basic level in the type of content and design style. These have been greatly influenced by the waves of international titles that have arrived in China from Europe, America, and Japan, but there have also been transformations at a deeper level regarding the fundamental ideas, values, and identities that are communicated. What the people do, their priorities, and how they relate to the wider society has been changing. In this chapter we look at one such case: the Chinese women’s lifestyle magazine Rayli. This title was originally launched in 1995 through a licensing agreement with a Japanese partner, and has since become the best‐ selling women’s lifestyle magazine in China, with a circulation of around 1.3 million (Huson International Media, n.d.)1 issues and a 15.68% market share (KKNews 2016). It sells to affluent urban women in their 20s and 30s, and its features and advertisements promote mainly Japanese and Korean products, alongside the usual global brands of perfume, cosmetics, and accessories. What we want to show in this chapter is how magazine content and style have changed, but most importantly, how the ideas, values, and identities represented in them have evolved as the Chinese and the global lifestyle consumerism of Western culture have merged and become transformed. In this chapter, we look at the nature of these changes and ask about the role of magazines, not only as forms of entertainment or information, but also as vehicles for the spread of models

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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of how we live our lives and what priorities we should have as we do so. This question is ­especially important when how we should live and what we should do are aligned with the ­individualism of lifestyle consumerism, where actions and solutions are always coupled with the purchasing of products and services.

Magazines and Globalization Scholars have long been critical of the way in which global media forms, such as magazines, impact upon the local cultures they enter, particularly as they carry with them advertising and consumer culture (Schiller 1976). One view is that such media provide a potentially homogenizing effect on all that it meets (Tomlinson 1997) as readers engage with the kinds of ideas, values, and ways of life characteristic of this neoliberal culture. Scholars have also considered the extent to which these formats must be adapted and localized (Hafstrand 1995; Doyle 2006) to make them relevant to different national markets. As regards the specific context of China, research has shown that such changes can be seen across media platforms; for example, news formats have been gradually changing to follow Western media formats. This transformation includes the style of news bulletins and the manner in which they are presented by journalists (Lee 2003; Wu and Ng 2011). As regards television programming more broadly, scholars have shown changes in format and style, yet with the continuance of core local ideas and priorities (Wu 2008). Perhaps the most notable change across all media has been the vast shift in the quantity and nature of advertising, with a growth in consumer‐lifestyle promotions taking over from advertisements related to the utilitarian aspects of products (Chung 2006). Overall, it has been argued, Chinese media is increasingly oriented toward the “global culture‐ideology of consumerism” (Wu 2008, p. 100). Specific studies on Chinese magazines have argued that Chinese values that intertwine Confucianism, Marxism, and Maoism are making way for the promotion of Western consumer culture and neoliberalism (Feng and Karan 2011). Specifically, it has been shown that the portrayal of men and women in Chinese versions of international titles emphasizes self‐ ­ fulfillment and hedonism – traits and themes not formerly found in Chinese magazines (Firth 2008; Lee and Song 2012). Wu (2008) also points to the hybridized nature of global and local culture found in magazines, with a mixture of international and local models, celebrities, and consumer goods. One criticism of many studies of media globalization has been that the authors tend to employ an approach that is rather theoretical or takes notions of “the global” or “the local” for granted (Drotner 2004). In this sense, it has been argued that we need much more detailed analyses of the different ways in which this meeting of cultures takes place in media products (Aiello and Pauwels 2014). In this chapter, our aim is to do just this by carrying out a highly detailed analysis at a number of levels. Previous research has shown the value of such an approach to magazines, pointing to how “the local” can be used as a kind of gloss and formulated in a way that harmonizes well with the purposes of titles which are highly international and oriented to l­ifestyle consumerism (Machin and Van Leeuwen 2007). The “international” level here can comprise elements such as language style, form of address (both in language and in images), the logic that drives the people represented in the texts, and visual design. And the present authors have themselves already carried out such detailed analysis, specifically on changes in visual design in Chinese magazines, influenced both by Western and Japanese styles (Chen and Machin 2014). In this chapter, we explore how content, style, ideas, and values change over a 17‐year‐period from 2000 to 2017. We focus on how Rayli has represented healthy diets over this time. This is a useful and important topic for several reasons. First, diet has been consistently covered by Rayli across the timespan of our analysis, allowing a comparison to take place. Second, the

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notion of “healthy diet” is something that has been transformed in many Western societies as food has become massively commercialized, giving rise to obesity and other diet‐related i­ llnesses. Attending to this matter is high on the agenda of many governments. Furthermore, the public has increasingly demanded healthier eating options in stores and restaurants, a demand that has been met and fostered by the food industry. The result has been a massive increase in sales in products packaged as healthy or “good for you,” such as “healthy grains,” “energy boosting,” and “organic” (The Nielsen Company 2015). In 2019, such products are still largely absent from Chinese stores. But critics have observed that in Western societies what constitutes a healthy diet blurs with, and becomes colonized by, the interests of commercialism and food marketing (Lewis 2008). It is not so much that health itself is being promoted, but rather acts of consumption of foodstuffs simply branded as healthy and often aligned with other lifestyle products and services, such as fitness clothing and gym memberships. Healthy diet in this case has become less about being healthy and more of a lifestyle marker of success and social distinction (Rao et  al. 2013; Traverso‐Yepez and Hunter 2016). The meaning of food, therefore, shifts to a kind of entertainment of consumption, branded with ideas and values, like a pair of designer shoes (Shugart 2014). In this chapter, we show how some of these changes in the meaning of food and healthy diet can be seen emerging over time in Rayli. Some scholars have already been critical of how food and diet are presented in Western magazines. Schneider and Davis (2010) explored how portrayals of diet have changed over time in The Australian Women’s Weekly, shifting from food being related to taking care of others to being about caring for, and managing, the oneself. Healthy food has also become more related to self‐empowerment than health itself. The authors suggest these patterns reflect a Western trend of greater individualism and emphasis on self‐management over state intervention. O’Neill and Silver (2017) considered such changes in Cosmopolitan magazine, making two key observations. First, they see a shift from slimming and food avoidance to one of eating to improve one’s physical appearance and wellbeing. Second, they observe that the information given in this latter stage is a simple “hodgepodge of unrelated advice” (O’Neill and Silver 2017, p. 109). Again, what runs through these texts is the idea of empowering women by linking healthy diet with self‐improvement. In this chapter, we show how in Rayli, too, over time, the meaning of healthy food changes to become more aligned with the characteristics of food marketing in Western societies. But this shift happens in a very specific way, as it merges with and transforms more traditional ideas and values relating to Confucianism, duty, and social belonging.

Methods In this chapter, we draw on an approach called Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) (Machin and Mayr 2012). This method offers a set of tools for analyzing the details of language and visual communication to draw out the underlying ideas and values that may be less obvious at a casual glance. The motivation for doing this form of analysis is to reveal power interests buried in instances of communication. Such power interests will seek to represent events and issues in a manner that suits their own purposes and interests (Flowerdew and Richardson 2017). Such tools allow us to show what ideas and values are represented through communication about healthy food, and whose interests are served. We explain the exact tools we use in each section as we go along. But two terms are important in this form of analysis: discourse and ideology. Discourse (Foucault 1972) refers to models governing how we think about the world. For example, at any point in time there may be different competing models for how we think about



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health, representing a discourse in which the individual is responsible for managing and planning her own healthiness, or a discourse in which it is the responsibility of the state to do so. Some scholars argue there is currently a shift toward the former (Schneider and Davis 2010). Ideology (Fairclough 1989) points to the way in which such discourses tend to reflect specific world views and interests. The discourse in which a person is responsible for his own healthiness is said to reflect wider ideological shifts related to neoliberal societies, the hollowing out of the state, and an overall marketized model of how all things in society should operate (Ledin and Machin 2015). The aim of MCDA is to look at the details of instances of communication to show what kinds of discourses they carry, with a view to revealing what ideological interests they support and legitimize. To show the changing discourses of healthy diet in Rayli, we have chosen four articles from 2000, 2006, 2010, and 2017, from a database we have assembled of all editions of the magazine during this timeframe.

Analysis of Rayli We structure the analysis as follows: we begin by looking at what kind of food is presented in our selected examples from 2000 to 2017. We then look deeper at how the language used has changed. We show that this is highly important for the way in which content is presented to the reader as increasingly fun, lively, and personally engaging. We then look at ways in which the authority behind the information provided about food has changed and how this shift has led to linking food with fashion and entertainment. Finally, we look at how visual design and its uses give meaning to the information provided about healthy food. Visual design is not simply aesthetics, but also a key part of how discourses are communicated.

The Westernization of Healthy Food From 2000 to 2017, the kinds of foods presented within the discourse of health undergo a significant change. In Figure  19.1, from a 2000 issue of Rayli, we see a double‐page spread called “Healthy beauty drinks DIY.” The page presents six recipes for drinks/soups, each including three parts: ingredients, preparation method, and an expert’s explanation of why the recipe works. The main ingredients of these recipes are commonly used in Chinese medicine: for example, hawthorn, coix seed, mondo grass, and goji berry. They promise several remedies to concrete health and appearance problems such as “spots,” or offer help with “hair darkening,” “brightening the eyes,” and ‘“skin whitening.” The advice is presented by a Chinese herbal doctor ­pictured in a white clinician’s coat in the bottom left corner of the page: Hawthorn contains citric acid, cratargolic acid, flavonoids … it greatly helps with lowering ­cholesterol. … comforts the spleen, stomach, and liver. It has the function of helping digestion and smoothing bruises. Using the two together will have a really good result in cleansing the blood and losing fat. (p. 88)

Such information about healthy diet is very typical of that found in traditional Chinese ­herbology, which has a high official and professional status in China. By the mid‐2000s, the magazine transitions to recommending more Western types of healthy foods. In Figure 19.2, we see a double‐page spread from 2006 titled “Healthy feast of tomatoes.” The presented dishes are highly international: Australian scallops with grilled tomatoes, cinnamon beef roll with tomato, and tomato sorbet with lemon ice cream. The first page explains the

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Figure 19.1  May 2000 issue.

health benefits of different kinds of tomatoes. The presentation resembles the technical ­nutritional information found in the 2000 item: Oxidation leads to mass production of free radicals in skin. The existence of free radicals speeds up skin aging. Tomatoes are rich in the antioxidant lycopene. Lycopene can not only delay aging, but also suppress free radicals that lead to cancer, therefore preventing the occurrence of cancer.

But there are also several important differences, which, as we show, become more pronounced in more recent examples. Now the effects created by the ingredients are more vaguely described. In the 2000 text, the ingredients are described as having “the function of helping digestion, healing bruises.” We are told that “Using the two together will have a really good result in cleansing blood.” In the 2006 case, we are told tomatoes contain lycopene, and that this substance can “play a role” in preventing cancer. The claim is not a direct one, which has been observed to be a feature of advertising language, using a so‐called “lower modality” to create associations without making promises (Cook 1978). A high modality, or high level of commitment in the case of the tomatoes, would be “eating tomatoes prevents cancer.” In this sense, the “advice” aligns more with marketing speak than with professional knowledge. We also see that the recipes are linked not only to their potential health functions, but also to their capacity to represent upscale consumption and lifestyle. For example: “Fresh and delicious tomato dishes gave us visual and taste enjoyment. Let’s enjoy the five‐star tomato feast together: taste gourmet foods and experience healthy lifestyle (p. 362).” The item also lists the kinds of products that contain tomatoes and shows which ones are available in China. So, health appeals here shift to merge with what Shugart (2014) suggests is a coupling of food with entertainment and lifestyle.



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Figure 19.2  November 2006 issue.

By 2010, we see a further transformation in the kinds of foods presented in Rayli. The double‐page spread shown in Figure 19.3 is titled “Seven lessons on prevention: creating a body constitution that does not put on weight.” This item offers the following seven tips: avoid ­coldness, both for your body and in your attitude; set clear goals; understand body routines; enhance metabolism; achieve caloric balance; fight water retention; be aware of posture. The kinds of foods in the images are all Western style: sandwiches, coffee, avocados, extra‐­ virgin olive oil, and energy bars. No nutritional facts about these foods are given. It is around this time that such detailed information disappears from Rayli’s coverage of food. What is notable as regards continuity with earlier accounts of food is the notion of creating a body constitution that does not put on weight easily. We see a holistic notion of the human body, characteristic of Chinese medicine, in that health depends on diet but also on the temperature and rhythms of the body. In Chinese medicine, bodies are categorized into 11 constitution types that face different requirements to stay healthy. The cold body constitution is one such category. However, the advice loosely mixes Chinese medicine tenets with unrelated suggestions ­emphasizing self‐motivation. For example, the model in the blue dress in the upper part of the states: “My goal is Angelina Jolie.” Other pieces of similar advice include: “Examine yourself every day, and weigh yourself to enhance your consciousness of your body”; “Find a poster of a model who has a good body and stick a photo of your face on it to encourage yourself”; and “Stick your idol’s poster on the fridge; look at her and control you diet.” We are also told: “You can deliberately miss the normal meal time.” Another Chinese medical principle is that women’s diet should reflect their menstrual cycle. There are foods that should or should not be eaten before, during, and after one’s period. One of the tips is “Stop drinking coffee before menstruation!” But this information merges with the rest of the advice, such as putting up posters and eating with friends.

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Figure 19.3  March 2010 issue.

As a number of scholars have observed, such lifestyle magazines tend to offer relatively trivial and inconsistent advice (Machin and Van Leeuwen 2007). But here we see a clear combination of the tenets of Chinese medicine, with its categorization of body types, and a more Western idea of an ideal female bodily appearance. By 2017, only Western food products appear in Rayli’s coverage of health and diet. We see this in Figure 19.4, under the title, “Healthy delicious juice, nutrition‐mission accomplished in one cup.” Similar to the 2000 item presented in Figure 19.1, this spread offers several healthy juice recipes, which are implied to have some “health benefits,” and explains what kind of person and lifestyle they are suitable for. For example, the drink we see to the left of the page is described as an “energizer for busy women office workers.” The text elaborates: Sometimes being a super woman office worker can be exhausting. A type of natural fruit and ­vegetable drink that is rich in vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants can boost your energy supply in no time! And it decreases your blood pressure and cholesterol, detoxes you, and fills you with positive energy. (p. 310)

The drink in the middle of the spread is described as an “energy booster for cool girls who love working out.” The explanation states: This is a type of low‐sugar, high‐nutrition coconut smoothie that is rich in healthy protein, healthy fat, Omega‐3, and fiber. It is not only rich in vitamins and minerals, but also in antioxidants, which help release stress and lose fat. So, if you are a cool girl who loves to work out, this smoothie is highly recommended. Pretty and healthy. (p. 311)



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Figure 19.4  March 2017 issue.

This is very different from the 2000 article in that we are offered some “benefits” of the drink. But these could be more accurately be accounted for through O’Neill and Silver’s (2017) analysis of dietary advice in Cosmopolitan magazine as an odd mixture of inconsistent information. In Figure  19.4, we can see that drinks offer multi‐level benefits, few of which are clearly explained. The second drink, for example, boosts energy while also helping release stress and lose fat. It is also hard to work out the relationships between different kinds of energy. We have the “positive energy” for the office worker and the “energy boost” for the “cool girls who work out.” So health here becomes understood through terms like “healthy fat,” “antioxidants,” “detox,” and “healthy protein,” which are typical of the complex array of health claims made by food marketers in Western countries and which have been shown to confuse consumers (Berhaupt‐Glickstein and Hallman 2017). What we are seeing here is that ideas about health are becoming colonized by commercial interests because such items relate to products and services advertised in the magazine through the very same language of health.

How Magazines Talk to Chinese Women While we have seen changes in the kind of content dealing with healthy diet, another level of analysis takes us a step further by revealing the shift in ideas and values that the content communicates. In critical discourse analysis, we take an interest in what is called “forms of address,” referring to how a reader is talked to. Forms of address may emphasize politeness, authority, or equal footing. This is important as it can tell us what kinds of social or power relations exist ­between the text producer and receiver, and what kind of authority the text claims at a more implicit level. A number of language features allow us to assess this. To begin with, the form of address has changed over the years in Rayli, shifting away from traditional, formal forms of Chinese to one that is much more modern. In the 2000 item on

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healthy soups using Chinese medicine, we find a traditional form of Chinese which is concise and compact, using monosyllabic words such as 入脾, 胃, 肝经, 具消食, meaning “comfort spleen, stomach, and liver. It has the function of helping digestion, smoothing bruises.” Such language was mostly used for formal writing in the earlier part of the twentieth century. It reads in this case as though it is from an old herbology book. The form of address is one of formal, knowledge‐based instruction, claiming the authority of tradition and established professional wisdom. The reader is, therefore, tutored by the text. In the later editions of Rayli, this form of address is no longer found. In its place we find a style that uses more syllables, as in modern Chinese, and is much more conversational. There are two key features. The first is the use of auxiliary words. In modern conversational Chinese, sentences often finish with words such as “oh” (噢), ‘ba’ (吧), “yo” (唷), ‘le’ (了), and ‘de’ (的). In the 2010 item, we find the following examples: “Why not try recording your body measurements, so you can see the outcome le.” “If you feel you have overeaten, try to walk more after eating as a form of exercise ba.”

This claim to equal footing is also achieved through the increased use of personal pronouns, especially “you.” In 2000, the reader is rarely addressed as “you,” but is rather offered formal and established information, which can be used for practical and concrete ends. In the 2010 item, we see how this approach has changed through the following examples: “You can deliberately miss the normal meal time or eat appropriate amount.” (p. 391) “Stick your idol’s poster on the fridge.” (p. 391)”

Here, the texts constantly address “you” and “your needs.” This use of pronouns has been observed as being typical of the language of advertising and other forms of persuasive speech (Cook 1978). Machin and Van Leeuwen (2007) point to the way in which such shifts from authoritative styles to ones emphasizing more equal footing are typical of the more synthetic types of personalization used in consumer marketing (Fairclough 1989). Here, texts do not talk down from a position of power or formal authority but instead use trendy language to  ­connote “the latest thing” as well as pronouns that give the appearance of aligning with the interests and concerns of the reader. In this sense, we see that the language of Rayli ­features about healthy diet has changed to embody a more personalized, persuasive form of communication. The final shift in forms of address is the increased use of directives, which are sentences beginning with imperative mood and creating a kind of “demand.” Examples from the 2010 item include the following: “Don’t eat by yourself”; “Visualize your goal”; “Announce your weight loss goal to friends.” Directives are also common in advertising language, as in “Buy one today,” communicating a can‐do‐attitude and a sense of immediacy and activeness (Machin and Van Leeuwen 2005). This form of address suggests a personalized world addressing your own personal needs. It uses trendy language and is on your level, but it is also lively and implies taking control, being empowered. This is the can‐do positive world of consumer capitalism. What runs through these texts is a sense of self‐management that such strategies present so well. The lists of advice points on each page serve as simple can‐do guides to being healthy and looking and feeling good.

The Lifestyle Expert Advising the Individual The kinds of people who populate the Rayli features about diet have changed. In the first place, there has been a shift away from information and facts given by institutionally recognized specialists to advice and tips given by self‐styled experts. In the 2000 text in Figure 19.1, the facts



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about a healthy diet are presented in an informational style by a “Chinese medicine consultant” from a “traditional Chinese medical family,” who is also the founder of a Chinese medicine clinic. This is typical of the pre‐2000 Rayli, where experts tend to have a qualification such as a doctoral degree, an award, or a high position in an organization. In the 2006 item, we see dietary advice coming not from an expert but simply through the voice of the magazine. This advice mixes information about the healthy properties of tomatoes, the availability of tomato products, and the tastiness of the food. The nutritional information resembles the kind of ambiguous language of food marketing noted earlier. What is particularly interesting is that information and facts have become decoupled from clearly defined and established forms of knowledge, such as herbology. We see this again in the 2010 item on healthy diet and body constitution, where advice comes from Erica Angyal, the official nutritionist of Miss Universe Japan. We are told: “As a nutritionist, she stresses that ideal body is not merely about being slim but also about being healthy and feminine” (p. 390). Unlike the facts given by the herbologist about one specific domain, herbs, the information here is less bounded. It expands to include advice about wider issues of “being feminine” and the “ideal body.” All these complex and contested issues become conflated. The new experts tend to lack formal qualifications but rather are linked to celebrity culture, entertainment, or commerce. Clearly, over 20 years the source of knowledge in Rayli as presented to the readers has shifted away from that which is traditional and officially sanctioned, to the lifestyle expert who is on an equal footing with the readers and uses the latest linguistic trends in Chinese. Such lifestyle experts give advice that always blurs the boundaries of different realms and is closely oriented to acts of consumption. There is, however, one element of how these experts address readers that has a lingering Chinese accent. Scholars have observed that in other international women’s magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, women appear to be alone, having few friends and no family (Machin and Van Leeuwen 2007). There is an intense sense of individualism conveyed by such Western magazine brands. However, this is not the case in Rayli, where readers appear to maintain many personal contacts. For example, the text next to the 2000 headline states: “Learn how to make a few beauty drinks. … not only for yourself, but also for dearest mum, and beloved him.” In the 2010 edition, we also find the following examples: Try hard to eat with family, lover, friends. Move toward the ideal goal. … Announce weight loss goal to friends. Let friends supervise your weight loss goal. (p. 391)

These examples point to how traditional Confucian values relating to family and social belonging, including duties and responsibilities, continue to be present in Rayli. While women are called to act strategically, in a go‐getting way, in a consumer‐product‐aligned world, they nevertheless remain linked to what family and friends think.

The Role of Design What we have described so far relates to what is found in the text, but such content, in fact, requires newer forms of design to achieve its goals. Contemporary communication relies less on writing and more on other aspects of communication in design, such as typeface, color, graphics, and images (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2001). It is not so much that communication in design has become more visual, but that elements like these are used much more precisely to carry out the goals required by a title. This is important because the written text itself has shifted away from longer sections, as in the 2000 example, where things are clearly explained, to smaller chunks of text, bullet‐point lists, and text integrated with graphics (Ledin and Machin 2015). In this kind of communication, ideas and values are not so much said but symbolized through design. As the style of the written language has become increasingly trendy, personalized, and can‐do,

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it represents a world where knowledge about healthy diets has merged and blended with fashion and consumer products. Visual design, we show, has played a big role in these shifts. Looking at the pages from the 2000 issue in Figure 19.1, we can see slightly larger sections of running text compared to later designs in Figures 19.2–19.4, where the paragraphs and chunks of texts are reduced. In Figure 19.1, we also see that images and text, while overlapping, are still occupying separate spaces. In Figure 19.2 from 2006 and especially in Figure 19.3 from 2010, we see much more integration, such that text sits over images or they become mixed. The advice about putting up a poster appears as a part of the design, next to the text regarding body constitution and managing eating. Visually, the advice is given by several women who look like models, are smiling, and are seemingly enjoying themselves. Visually, this merging does not appear messy or jarring. This is accomplished, in part, through a deliberate use of fonts and color. If we look at the 2000 design, we find one font used in different sizes to create hierarchies on the page. So, the title “healthy beauty drinks” is the largest, with the next step down being the font used for each drink. The use of color is basic, making the titles match with the names of the drinks and the color of the bullet point headers. Some color from the design is used to link two pictures, of a woman shopping and of another woman, who is sitting and smiling. This use of models to offer implicit evaluation of the contents was much less frequently found in the magazine in the 1990s (Chen and Machin 2014). So, even in the 2000 item using more traditional content and forms of address, we find uses of font and color intended to integrate the article with a promotional style. The brightness of the colors suggests optimism and fun, as do the smiling models. In Figure 19.2, showing the 2006 example, we see slightly more sophisticated uses of color and font sizes to create hierarchies and link the different types of content, such as the advice and the products. We also find other fonts used selectively for English text and Arabic numbers. A light slim font seems more often associated with Western connotations of health, while curvature and flourish suggest creativity. We also find the shift to smaller chunks of text, which are now often presented as listicles to create a sense of breaking content down to its core points and presenting only key information. Such an approach is another way to connote a can‐do attitude as well as the text’s authority to provide tips for getting things done. Bullet‐point lists have also been shown to be useful for presenting elements of information that may connect well (Ledin and Machin 2015). The points of advice found in the 2010 item, for example, would seem odd if presented within running text. But spaced out and presented as core facts, they do not encourage the reader to look for coherence. What may be trivial or ­contradictory, therefore, can be conveyed through such forms of design. Color and font can then create other forms of rhyming (where distinctive elements can become classified as sharing qualities or be of a similar order), linking, distinction, and hierarchies, leading to a sense of cohesion, which would have been naturally accomplished by language in longer sections of running text. This approach is evident in the 2010 example, where colors are used sparingly to create different points of linking within and across the two pages. The color palate is restrained on one level but contains enough minimally used bright and exciting colors to bring forth a sense of fun. Design, therefore, is one way by which the ideas and values presented in the text are integrated into a whole, as knowledge of being healthy merges with fashion, discourses of femininity, and successful self‐management. We see how this approach works in the 2017 text presenting three kinds of energy drinks for different kinds of women. In a running text, explaining how food ingredients create energy and how different types of energy relate to the women’s activities may require use of linking words and some kind of justification (Ledin and Machin 2018). The bullet points help conceal the lack of any evident connection between types of energy and types of activities. In the 2017 design, we also see the use of English words to label each drink. English is used for several reasons. It connotes something modern and provides a link to global fashion ideas, but it can also be used for its ability to carry different kinds of fonts, which may be more difficult



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in Chinese. In this case, we see three different kinds of fonts. All are slim, often used to suggest “lightness” or thinness, but they are also uneven, suggesting playfulness and creativity. Color is used tastefully, with just a few bright optimistic colors creating linking, but not for the purposes of hierarchy or rhyming (for creating connections between elements).2 The information boxes have matching bullet point colors, and cute hand‐drawn arrows – one spiraling playfully – point to the ingredients. The labelling, arrows, and information boxes suggest technical information, but as we saw, this approach represents mostly confusing and contradictory marketing speak merging lifestyle with health.

Conclusion The aim of this chapter was to show how magazines should be seen not only as forms of entertainment or sources of information, but also as vehicles of ideas and values. Since the 1990s, Chinese society has been rapidly changing and opening up to global enterprises at different levels, one of these being the media. The analysis in this chapter shows that such changes affect not only the kinds of products, services, and entertainment that become available for Chinese people, but also the ways in which they are tutored about the workings of the world. In the limited case of Rayli, some elements of Confucianism, such as the importance of family and social ties, remain. But we also find changes in how the world presented in the magazine becomes aligned with acts of consumption and its corresponding identities, which are seen as natural and desirable. While the government regulates explicitly political and sexual content, the ideas and values of the individual, fashionable, and self‐managing go‐getter are found in the deeper parts of the magazine’s text and visual design. On some level, these ideas and values point to individual freedoms, loosening the ties of stifling tradition and authority, and the responses they require. The new world is one that looks great; it is fun, lively, and entertaining. But as regards healthy diet and other aspects of life that marketing seeks to colonize and reformulate in the interests of making profit, it is a world where all realms of experience become fused into the chain of lifestyle consumerism.

Notes 1 https://www.husonmedia.com/index.php/media‐search/print‐item/584‐rayli‐fushi‐meirong‐fashion‐a‐beauty 2 Rhyming is a term used in multimodality. It is used for when different features share some quality, ­creating a link of connection between them. Let’s say in an image, the red of clothing may take the color from a typeface for a heading on the page. This would create rhyming between them. Or, two images could be placed in the same shaped frames, which would create rhyming.

References Aiello, G. and Pauwels, L. (2014). Special issue: difference and globalization. Visual Communication 13: 275–285. Berhaupt‐Glickstein, A. and Hallman, W.K. (2017). Communicating scientific evidence in qualified health claims. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition 57: 13. Chang, Y.‐l. (2007). The role of the nation‐state: evolution of STAR TV in China and India. Global Media Journal 6: 1–16. Chen, A. and Machin, D. (2014). The local and the global in the visual design of a Chinese women’s ­lifestyle magazine: a multimodal critical discourse approach. Visual Communication 13: 287–301. Chung, M.‐k. (2006). Culture, product category and advertising situation: a comparative study of ­advertising appeals in web automobile advertisements between the PRC and USA. Unpublished M.phil dissertation. The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.

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Part IV

Magazines, Culture, and Society

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Magazines as Alternative Sites of Artistic Practice Gwen Allen

Introduction Magazines have long served as important and progressive venues for the expression and circulation of artistic ideas, criticism, and reproductions of works of art. However, during the 1960s and 1970s, artists began to explore the magazine as a new kind of primary medium in its own right, creating works expressly for the mass‐produced page. These original artists’ contributions (sometimes called artists’ projects, artists’ pages, or magazine art) investigated the ­distinct materiality of the magazine as well as its unique properties as a form of communication (Allen 2011; Rorimer 1999; Phillpot 1980). This chapter will survey such practices and explore their implications for changing notions of artistic medium, exhibition practices, and print media. It will also consider the role of magazines in the contemporary global art world as artists and curators continue to explore the potential of the magazine as an important site of artistic practice and exhibition‐making.

To Publish = To Make Public: Art Magazines in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries An important point of reference for thinking about the relationship between magazines and art is the self‐published pamphlets circulated in the wake of the earliest regular public exhibition of art, the Salon, which was first opened to the general public at the Louvre in Paris in 1737. In his classic account of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth‐century Europe, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), Jürgen Habermas stresses the importance of both public exhibition spaces and art criticism to the formation of the public sphere – a newly democratic and participatory arena of debate and discourse, which allowed the bourgeois class to oppose the ruling power’s authority. One of the primary roles of criticism, according to Habermas, was to sharpen the capacity of individuals to think critically and prepare them to engage in j­ uridical and ethical debates in the public sphere: “In the institution of art criticism … the lay judgment of a public that had come of age … became organized. … The art critics could see themselves as spokesmen for the public.” (Habermas 1989, pp. 41–42) Early art criticism was deeply tied to the social experience of the exhibition space of the Salon, a notoriously crowded and noisy place where the people‐watching rivaled the art on view (Crow 1987, pp.  1–22). As Habermas The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

264 Allen describes, “the innumerable pamphlets criticizing or defending the leading theory of art built on the discussions of the salons and reacted back on them – art criticism as conversation.” (Habermas 1962, p. 40) In this sense, these early publications functioned as a kind of discursive “extension” of the exhibition space proper, anticipating the role of later periodicals, which allowed ideas and critical debates to circulate among a larger public. By the nineteenth century, specialized art periodicals arose, ranging from scholarly art historical and antiquarian journals to those addressed to a more general public, containing articles on art history, connoisseurship, aesthetics, and the biographies of artists, as well as exhibition reviews, news, and obituaries. (Burton 1976, pp. 3–10) Among the best‐known early art magazine was the Parisian magazine L’Artiste (1831–1904), one of the most important vehicles for art criticism in nineteenth‐century Paris, which published such critics as Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac. Unlike earlier Salon pamphlets, which were often implicitly or explicitly political in nature, L’Artiste cultivated an approach that was pluralist rather than polemical – a strategy that was especially well‐suited to an emerging, market‐based economy (Roth 1989). The commercialized, pluralist model of the art magazine exemplified by L’Artiste has remained fundamental up to the present day and is visible in publications such as Artforum International, perhaps the best known contemporary art magazine today (Allen 2011, 2016a). However, running alongside this history of the art magazine is another history of noncommercial artists’ periodicals, critical journals, and little magazines (so named for their small circulations), which have served as vital sites of progressive and critical publicity within the art world. These include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Propyläen (1798–1800); the Pre‐Raphaelite magazines The Germ: Thoughts toward Nature in Art and Literature (1850) and The Crayon (1855–1861); and art nouveau magazines such as the London‐based The Studio (1893–1964; later Studio International, 1964‐present time) and the Berlin‐based Pan (1895–1900), according to Burton (1976, pp. 3–10). Such magazines were vital sites of exchange and connection that not only chronicled artistic movements but helped to bring them into being.

Twentieth‐Century Little Magazines and Avant‐Garde Periodicals



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Artists’ journals and little magazines were formative to avant‐garde movements of the twentieth century across the world as vehicles for defining artistic agendas and circulating ideas. Some of  the most important of these include modernist and avant‐garde journals associated with movements such as Futurism, Surrealism, Dadaism, and Constructivism, including: Lacerba (1913–1915); Blast (1914–1915); 291 (1915–1916); Cabaret Voltaire (1916); The Blind Man (1917); Dada (1917–1921); De Stijl, (1917–1932); L’Esprit Nouveau (1920–1925); Zenit (1921–1926); Mécano (1922–1923); Merz (1923–1932); Lef (1923–1925); La Révolution Surréaliste (1924–1929); Tank (1925); Novyi Lef (1927–1929); Internationale Revue i10 (1927–1929); Minotaure (1933–1939); View (1940–1947); and VVV (1942–1944); as well as the postwar abstract expressionist periodicals, including Iconograph (1946); The Tiger’s Eye (1947–1949); Possibilities (1947–1948); Instead (1948); and It Is (1960–1965). Important avant‐garde artists’ magazines, such as the Japanese Gutai (1955–1965) and the Argentine Boa (1958–1960) were also being published outside of Europe and the United States during these years (Bulson 2016; Cole 2018; Gibson 1989; Heller 2002). Experimental in form as well as content, such publications circulated artists’ writings and manifestos and pioneered radical typographical and visual practices, such as photomontage. Such publications are crucial sites of artistic exchange and arguably changed the course of art history. To take one salient example, the original version of Duchamp’s famous Fountain, 1917 (a readymade consisting of a found urinal the artist rotated and signed) survived only in a photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz that was published in the second (and last) issue of The Blind Man, an experimental art magazine published by Duchamp, Henri‐Pierre Roché, and Beatrice Wood (Camfield 1989). Without the magazine, the piece might have been forgotten to history. Also notable in the twentieth century was the increasingly visual character of magazines with the development of new printing technologies. (Allen 2011, pp. 23–25; 2016a) In 1935 Walter Benjamin observed the way in which mass media reproductions altered the reception of art, writing “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. […] And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced” (Benjamin 1986, pp. 220–221). Likewise, in the late 1940s, Andre Malraux (1967) coined the phrase “le musee imaginaire” (“museum without walls”) to suggest the way in which printed publications might serve as a surrogate exhibition space, one that could overcome the geographical and logistical limitations of original works of art.

Conceptual Art and the Magazine as an Artistic Medium and Exhibition Space In the late 1950s and early 1960s, magazines began to function as a medium and exhibition space in a new sense – not as merely a supplementary or secondary form of information but as a primary site of display and distribution (Allen 2011; Pindell 1977). We can see this shift taking place in a number of periodicals from the 1950s and early 1960s, including Spirale, Zero, Gorgona, Revue Nul = 0, Revue Integration, Diagonal Cero, KYW, Revue Ou, material, dé‐coll/ age, V TRE, Fluxus, and Semina. These publications, many of which had exceedingly small print runs of just a few hundred copies per issue, exemplify a new kind of experimentation with the formal and conceptual possibilities of the magazine, as well as a self‐reflexivity about its status as a medium. Artists utilized unbound, die‐cut, and embossed pages. They glued objects onto pages, tore them, and even burned them, foregrounding the tactility and interactivity of the printed page. And they drew attention to the act of reading the magazine, and to its conditions of circulation and distribution. Such investigations of the materiality and temporality of the magazine coincided with new understandings of language and artistic medium in the postwar period seen in movements such as Fluxus, Nouveau Réalisme, and Zero as well as visual and concrete poetry (Allen 2011).

266 Allen In the mid‐to‐late 1960s, magazines became particularly significant in the context of Conceptual art, defined by Sol LeWitt as art in which “the idea or the concept is the most important aspect of the work” (LeWitt 1967, p. 76). Magazines served as a medium and exhibition space for the texts, photographs, and other forms of documentation that were central to these dematerialized practices. Not only was the printed page a necessary and expedient way to distribute Conceptual art, but the mass‐produced, ephemeral format of the magazine was also ideologically in keeping with its critique of the institutions and visual conventions of modernism. Motivating many of these practices was the utopian hope that art might escape its status as commodity and circumvent the gallery to become a truly accessible form of expression. By providing an alternative form of distribution for art, magazines allowed artists to circumvent the museum or gallery and bring about a more direct, democratic relationship with their viewers (Alberro 2003; Allen 2011; Siegelaub 1969).

This new significance of the magazine in relationship to Conceptual art can be seen in the American magazine Aspen (1964–1971), which was a multimedia magazine in a box that was guest‐edited by a number of different artists. Especially notable was Aspen 5 + 6, a special double issue, edited by the critic Brian O’Doherty, which included films by Hans Richter, László Moholy‐Nagy, Robert Rauschenberg, and footage of Robert Morris and Carolee Schneemann’s performance Site (1964); Flexi‐Disc music and spoken word recordings by Merce Cunningham, John Cage, William S. Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Merce Cunningham, and Marcel Duchamp; and texts and works of art by Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Dan Graham and Roland Barthes. Housed in a small white laminated cardboard box, the issue was conceived as a miniature museum. Not only did artists document their performances and ideas, but they also used the magazine as a primary medium in its own right, creating works expressly for the mass‐produced page. For example, Tony Smith created a cardboard model of his sculpture The Maze (1957), which could be cut out and pasted together by the reader. The magazine’s interactivity and temporality countered the timeless, contemplative visuality of the modern museum (Allen 2011; O’Doherty 1976). Roland Barthes’s important essay “The Death of the Author” was published in Aspen 5 + 6 for the first time, suggesting that Conceptual art resonated with the post‐structuralist models of reception being theorized at the time. By leaving the sequence of the magazine up to the individual reader, who manipulates its various components, determining their arrangement and relationship to one another, Aspen echoed Barthes insistence on the primacy of ­reception  –  “the birth of the reader”  –  over and above the author’s intention. Indeed, the publication’s unbound, participatory format engendered what Barthes called the “birth of



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the reader,” who could l­iterally reshuffle its contents. Meanwhile, its inexpensive format challenged the elitist institutions promised to bring about a radical democratization of culture (Allen 2011, pp. 43–67).

From the Dematerialization of Art to the Materiality of Print Within conceptual art there were different and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward the role of the magazine. Some artists, such as the British Art & Language group, which published the journal Art‐Language, viewed printed matter as a neutral and anti‐retinal means to communicate ideas about art. By rejecting traditional mediums, such as painting and sculpture, and replacing the art object with language, these artists challenged modernist criticism’s claims to specialized knowledge and faculties. Similarly, the American art dealer Seth Siegelaub saw printed publications as a form of “primary information” that was a more effective and efficient way to distribute conceptual art than a traditional gallery space (Siegelaub 1969). Siegelaub explored this idea in “July/August 1970,” an exhibition‐as‐magazine that he curated for the British art magazine Studio International, featuring works made expressly for the printed page. The 48‐page exhibition was published as a special trilingual (English, French, and Italian) issue of the magazine – a decision that epitomized Siegelaub’s faith in the magazine as a transnational communicative space that might overcome geographical limitation and allow art to circulate freely around the globe  –  a concept that echoed Malraux’s “museum without walls” (Allen 2011, pp. 201–207; Malraux 1978). If some Conceptual artists seized upon the ephemeral, throw‐away nature of the magazine as a way to “dematerialize” art, others were more interested in the materiality of language itself, developing site‐specific approaches to the magazine. For example, Dan Graham explored the visual and tactile dimensions of the printed page in his work Schema (March 1966) (1966–1967), which was first published in Aspen 5 + 6. The piece consisted of a generic list of variables – including “(number of) adjectives,” “(type of) paper stock,” “(name of) typeface” – that self‐referentially indexed its own appearance on the page. Graham stipulated that the work could be published in any magazine and would be altered according to the typography and layout of the particular ­publication in which it appeared. Likewise, Robert Smithson understood magazines as concrete physical objects that were comparable to a kind of sculptural medium. He saw magazines as non‐sites, his term for the rock samples, maps, photographs, and texts through which he documented his large‐scale Earth works such as the Spiral Jetty (1970) (Smithson 1996). Smithson’s magazine articles, such as “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (Artforum, December 1967) and “Incidents of Mirror‐Travel in the Yucatan” (Artforum, November 1969), emphasized their ambiguous status, in between criticism and works of art. The latter chronicles a recent trip to Mexico, where Smithson made a series of nine temporary sculptural installations by arranging a set of square mirrors in various locations. The article included several photographs that Smithson took of these installations (one of which appeared on the magazine’s cover). The square photographs are organized in a gridded layout that echoes the arrangement of the mirrors themselves, a visual rhyming that suggests the blurring between the physical site of the installations and the discursive site of the magazine. Indeed, the article does not merely document these sculptures in the typical sense of that term; rather, it is their sole intended format (Allen 2011, pp. 29–31). The performance artist Vito Acconci, who started his career as a poet, explored the kinetic and performative possibilities of the printed page in 0 To 9 (1967–1969), the mimeographed magazine he published with the poet Bernadette Mayer. Acconci explored the dynamic and three‐dimensional objecthood of the magazine, the turning of its pages, and the conditions of its circulation and distribution in his poetry. This appreciation for the materiality of print is also evident in the magazine’s covers, one of which, for example (issue 5), was a sheet of paper that

268 Allen had been crumpled into a ball and flattened out again so that it retains an abstract textual web of creases, suggesting the tactile, dynamic possibilities of the page. 0 To 9 demonstrates how Conceptual art was influenced by experimental poetry and vice‐versa, and attests to the ­importance of magazines as a vehicle for such exchange (Allen 2011, pp. 69–89).

Media Interventions and Artists’ Advertisements During the 1960s, commercial art magazines such as Artforum began to play a key role in the burgeoning art world and art market, prompting Dan Graham to observe: “If a work of art wasn’t written about and reproduced in a magazine it would have difficulty attaining the status of ‘art’” (Graham 1999, p. 12). Graham, along with a number of other artists, sought to intervene into the publicity mechanisms and markets of the art world by publishing articles and ­taking out advertisements that challenged its institutions and conventions, and not least the art magazine itself. Graham’s piece “Homes for America,” published in the December 1966– January 1967 issue of Arts Magazine, functioned as a tactical appropriation of the critical apparatus of the art magazine. The article appeared to be an ordinary magazine article. However, it did not quite fit with the usual run of criticism and reviews in the art magazine. In it, the artist discussed suburban tract‐housing developments, implicitly invoking comparisons with the serial logic and industrial materials of Minimalist sculpture. The piece enacted and drew attention to the promotional and institutional function of criticism while simultaneously thwarting its function – given that there was no art object, apart from the magazine itself, to accrue value and status (Buchloh 2000). In addition to publishing articles, artists took out paid advertisements as a way to both tap into and critique the promotional function of art magazines. For example, Joseph Kosuth ­published excerpts from Roget’s Thesaurus in the advertising space of various newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times, Artforum, Museum News, and The Nation. The advertisements were part of his art project The Second Investigation (1968) and represented a way to circumvent the market and gallery system. Stephen Kaltenbach placed a series of advertisements in 12 consecutive issues of Artforum from November 1968 to December 1969, consisting of pithy and ironic phrases, such as “Art Works,” “Build a Reputation,” and “Become a Legend,” that foregrounded the role of the art magazine in careerism and promotion (Kaltenbach 2001). In a slightly different vein, the Argentinian artist Eduardo Costa published his “Fashion Fictions” (1966–2005) in fashion magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. These works appeared to advertise fantastical sartorial inventions, including 24‐karat gold jewelry cast from molds of body parts, such as ears and strands of hair, which lampooned the fashion industry (Costa 2016). Among the most powerful of such practices during this time were projects by women artists who appropriated advertising spaces as feminist interventions into the sexist institutions of the art world. For example, Judy Chicago (who was then still known by her married name, Gerowitz) placed a full‐page advertisement in the October 1970 issue of Artforum, in which she announced her name change as a challenge to patriarchal convention. The ad shows an androgynous headshot of the artist, with cropped hair, wearing a Jimi Hendrix‐style headband and John Lennon sunglasses, next to the handwritten text: “Judy Gerowitz hereby divests herself of all names imposed upon her through male social dominance and freely chooses her own name Judy Chicago.” Around the same time, the artists Marjorie Strider, Lil Picard, and Hannah Wilke each took out advertisements in Avalanche (a magazine which will be discussed in more detail below), using sexualized images of their bodies to promote themselves and their work (Allen 2018). The most famous example of this phenomenon is Lynda Benglis’s dildo ad, which appeared in the November 1974 issue of Artforum. In this well‐known image, Benglis appears nude,



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­ efiantly holding a large, double‐ended dildo to her pubis, as if an enormous erect penis – an d image that so shocked and offended the magazine’s own editors that several of them publicly dissociated themselves from the magazine and subsequently resigned. Alternatively read as a feminist statement and as a mockery of the women’s movement, the ad’s impact had as much to do with its detournément of the magazine’s editorial and socioeconomic structure  –  its ­violation of the separation between advertising and editorial content and its disruption of the hierarchy between artist, critic, publisher, and advertiser – as with the image itself (Allen 2011; Meyer 2004). Another important example of artists’ advertisements is Adrian Piper’s work The Mythic Being, 1973–1975  –  a performance and publication project that presciently explores intersectional identity politics. For the piece Piper, who is an African-American woman, performed and took photographs of herself dressed as a black man. She published photographs and texts documenting the piece in the advertising section of the Village Voice as a way to publicize the work while circumventing the museum and gallery system. These ads attest to how women artists seized control of the art magazine to intervene into the art world’s social and economic power ­structures (Smith 2007).

The Artists’ Magazine as an Alternative Space Such interventions into mainstream publications coexisted alongside self‐published artists’ ­magazines, which flourished during the 1960s and 1970s, not only in North America, but also around the world. The significance of artists’ magazines during this time was deeply tied to other kinds of alternative spaces and practices that sought to contest the institutions and economies of the mainstream art world (Allen 2011; Ault 2002). In her 1977 article “Alternative Space: Artists’ Periodicals,” Howardena Pindell claimed that artists’ magazines should be ­considered alternative spaces in their own right (Pindell 1977). The term “alternative space” illustrates how the two‐dimensional printed page functioned as a substitute exhibition space for art – a corollary to the architectural interior of the gallery or museum. However, it also expresses the ways in which magazines paralleled and furthered the ideological and practical objectives of the artist‐run cooperative galleries and collectives known as alternative spaces, which proliferated throughout North America during this period. Artists’ magazines complemented and reinforced the goals of these artist‐run, independent, and nonprofit institutions, providing important discursive spaces within which art and art criticism opposed the values of the mainstream art world and commercial art press. Like other kinds of alternative spaces, magazines supported new experimental forms of art outside the commercial gallery system, and fostered artistic communities and counterpublics by promoting artists’ moral and legal rights, and redressing the ­inequities of gender, race, and class (Allen 2011). In the United States and Canada, a number of magazines were founded to support new experimental art practices, including Conceptual art, Earth Art, performance and video. Avalanche (1970–1976) was founded by Willoughby Sharp and Liza Bear in SoHo to support the artists’ community that was then emerging in lower Manhattan. It published artists’ interviews and projects through which artists were encouraged to present their work directly to the public (Allen 2011, pp. 91–119). Founded a few years later, Art‐Rite (1973–1978) was a zine‐like publication that sought to publish a kind of criticism that would be accessible and unpretentious. With its half‐tabloid newsprint and DIY feel, Art‐Rite signified an egalitarian approach to art and art criticism, and opposed the spectacular visuality of the mainstream commercial press. The magazine served as a rotating exhibition space for a series of artist‐designed covers, many of which emphasized and exploited the publication’s cheap, ephemeral format. For example, Dorothea Rockburne created one of her “folded drawings” for issue 6 by simply folding back the ­otherwise blank cover. In 1976, Art‐Rite inaugurated its Dollar Art Series, in which entire issues

270 Allen of the magazine were given over to an artist to create a mass‐produced work of art available for less than a gallon of milk (Allen 2011, pp. 121–145). Avalanche and Art‐Rite were just two of the hundreds of artists’ magazines founded during this time as alternatives to the mainstream commercial art press. While many of these magazines supported alternative artistic practices, other magazines were devoted to particular political causes, such as The Fox (New York, 1975– 1976), which promoted artists’ moral and legal rights, Heresies (New York, 1977–1993), an important vehicle for feminist art, and Black Phoenix (London, 1978–1979), which introduced postcolonialism into the British art world (Allen 2011). FILE, founded in Toronto by the Canadian collective General Idea (A.A. Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal) was an artists’ magazine that was also conceived as an art work in its own right. FILE served as a vehicle for General Idea’s eclectic, evolving interests and activities, from the Canadian mail art scene to elaborate preparations for a campy “fake” beauty contest known as the 1984 Miss General Idea Pageant. Among the first artists’ magazines to explicitly support gay rights, it sought to denaturalize dominant cultural categories of gender, class, beauty, and artistic production  –  and to question the role of the media in upholding such ­categories (Allen 2011, pp. 147–173). Outside of North America, artists’ publications and magazines proliferated around the world in the late 1960s and 1970s. In Germany, Interfunktionen was founded to protest the conservative curatorial agenda of Documenta 4, 1968 (an important large‐scale global exhibition that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany). The magazine functioned as a kind of salon des refuses for radical art that was marginalized by Germany’s established exhibition spaces and media outlets. It soon evolved into an important site of exchange between American and European artists, featuring documentation of works and artist‐designed pages (Allen 2011). Other significant artists’ magazines included Art Project Bulletin (Amsterdam, 1968– 1989), Robho (Paris, 1967–1971), La Città di Riga (Pollenza, Italy, 1976–1977), Bit (Milan, 1967–1968), Der Löwe (Bern, 1974–1977), Artitudes International (Paris and Saint Jeannet, 1971–1977), Salon (Cologne, 1977–1983), North (Copenhagen, 1976–1995), King Kong International (Milan, 1972), Die Schastrommel (Berlin, 1969–1977), VH 101 (Zurich and Paris, 1970–1972), Lotta Poetica (Milan, 1971–1987), and Fandangos (Maastricht, 1971– 1987). In addition to these Western European examples, important artists’ magazines also sprung up elsewhere, including Souffles (Rabat, Morocco, 1966–1972), Provoke (Tokyo, Japan, 1968–1969), Gallery 68 (Cairo, Egypt, 1968–1971), Other Voices (Sydney, Australia, 1970), and Lip (Carlton, Australia, 1976–1984) (Allen 2011). Publishing practices in other parts of the world responded to distinct social and political conditions. For example, in the Soviet Union and in then‐communist countries such as Hungary, Romania, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, where artists were subject to varying levels of state supervision and censorship, artists’ magazines resonated with the dissident, underground practices of samizdat, literally meaning self‐publishing, as opposed to state publishing (gosizdat) (Parisi 2013). Metki, a handmade journal published in Moscow in 1975, had a circulation of only 5–10 copies. Artpool Letter, an important vehicle for unofficial art, was illegally published in Hungary during the early 1980s. Meanwhile, in the former Yugoslavia, magazines such as bit International, Edition a, Signal, Rok, and Maj 75 were crucial sites through which artists ­participated in international avant‐garde and neo‐avant‐garde practices, which were frequently suppressed or marginalized within local mainstream culture (Allen 2011; Perneczky 1993; Šimičić 2003). Likewise, in Latin America, where a series of repressive dictatorships swept across the region from the 1960s to the 1980s, mail art, rooted in private correspondence and cheap techniques such as xerography and photocopy machines, was a significant site of artistic communication. Magazines such as Malasartes, published in Rio de Janeiro by Cildo Meireles and others, and the mail art magazine Ovum, published by Clemente Padin in Uruguay, witnessed critical and anti‐imperialist approaches to mass media inflected by the specific historical and political conditions (Allen 2011; Padín 2012).



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The Mainstreaming of Alternative Spaces in the 1980s If the use of magazines as an alternative space in the 1960s and 1970s was tied to radical, utopian aspirations to circumvent the mainstream art world, by the 1980s such practices had become an established genre in its own right. In his 1980 Artforum article “Art Magazines and Magazine Art,” Clive Philpott defined a new artistic genre: “magazine art.” Magazine art, he wrote, is “art conceived specifically for a magazine context and, therefore, art which is realized only when the magazine itself has been composed and printed” (Phillpot 1980, pp. 52–53). The February 1980 issue of Artforum, in which Philpott’s article appeared, was itself given over to the phenomenon he described, consisting largely of artists’ projects commissioned by the magazine. The artists included Jenny Holzer, William Wegman, Gilbert and George, Dan Graham, and Ed Ruscha. Magazine art would become a mainstay in Artforum throughout the 1980s. Unlike earlier examples of magazine art, such as Graham’s Homes for America, which functioned as tactical interventions, these pieces were sanctioned and sponsored by the magazine itself. Once an anti‐market, anti‐establishment practice, magazine art was now being repackaged as a high‐end luxury item. This trend was exemplified by Parkett, founded in 1984, which sold editioned artists’ multiples for thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, if artists’ advertisements had once been a way to subvert promotional publicity, the Absolut vodka ­advertising campaign, which featured ads designed by artists such as Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, and Damien Hirst, made it clear that in the postmodern blurring between art and commerce, the culture industry was gaining the upper hand. Furthermore, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the very notion of the alternative space was expanding to include venues outside of the art world altogether as artistic communities developed in the context of bands, parties, bars, and clubs, and other informal social interactions. A  number of important artists’ magazines documented and supported such practices. For example, Real Life magazine (1979–1994) centered on the community of artists in New York known as the Pictures Generation. These artists were concerned with mass media in their work, and many of their projects appropriated magazines, film, television and advertising. Founded by Thomas Lawson and Susan Morgan, Real Life published a diverse range of material, including artists’ writings and projects, criticism, working notes, reproductions, and interviews with artists including Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine and Louise Lawler. The magazine also represented a much broader spectrum of related artistic practices, by collectives such as Colab and Group Material, and fostered the interdisciplinary crossovers between downtown graffiti, poetry, and garage band, punk, and no‐wave music scenes. Like earlier artists’ magazines, Real Life sought to recalibrate the power balance between artists and critics, offering artists an opportunity for recourse against the critic’s authority (Allen 2011, pp. 175–199). Other important artists’ magazines during this period included Just Another Asshole (New York, 1978–1987), X Motion Picture (New York, 1977–1978), Wedge (New York, 1982–1987), ZG (London, 1980–1988), and Eau de Cologne (Cologne, 1985–1993) (Allen 2011).

1990s‐Present: The Expanded Field of Print Since the 1990s, the rise of digital media and online communication has realigned the sociocultural landscape for both artists and magazines. Far from dying out, printed publications have enjoyed a kind of renaissance within the art world, as attested to by the proliferation of art book fairs around the world, showcasing hundreds of new publishing platforms and artists’ zines. In his well‐known 2002 essay Dispersion, the artist Seth Price discussed how new digital and online technologies have altered the possibilities for the distribution of art, and hence its social and political capacity. Price is especially interested in the ways in which artists today might mine the potential of the culture industry’s “distributed media,” which he defines as “social information

272 Allen circulating in theoretically unlimited quantities in the common market, stored or accessed via portable devices, such as books, magazines, records, compact discs, videotapes, DVDs, personal computers, and data diskettes” (Price 2002–). He is optimistic about the potential of such media to escape the art world and infiltrate spaces outside of it. Price maintains that distributed media might expand art’s public, writing: “[W]e should recognize that collective experience is now based on simultaneous private experiences distributed across the field of media culture, knit together by ongoing display, publicity, promotion, and discussion. … Publicness today has as much to do with sites of production and reproduction as it does with any supposed physical commons” (Price 2002–). While Dan Graham and other conceptual artists and writers of his generation insisted on the site‐specificity of the printed page as a material substrate through which language is physically and conceptually framed, contemporary digital and online information does not have a single context but rather exists within perpetually multiplying contexts. Price has explored re‐publication and reproduction as means of creating new meanings and social contexts for archival materials in the publishing platform Continuous Project (which he founded along with Bettina Funcke, Wade Guyton, and Joseph Logan). Different issues of Continuous Project have consisted of photocopied reprints of entire issues of earlier artists’ magazines, such as Avalanche and Eau de Cologne; appropriated material published as pages in extant magazines; live and video‐recorded readings, talks, and lectures; and the URL of the magazine’s website (Allen 2018). For many artists and publishers, digital culture has not replaced traditional print media so much as it has brought about an “expanded field” of publication that traverses printed and digital space as well as “real” public spaces and events. The Serving Library (www.servinglibrary. org), founded in 2011 by a group of artists and designers formerly known as Dexter Sinister, has explored the reciprocity between digital and physically‐sited information while questioning this very distinction. Looking back to the first public circulating library, as well as ahead to the potential of digital online information (hence the name, a play on the computer server), The Serving Library includes a website and digital archive of PDFs, known as Bulletins of the Serving Library, which can be downloaded, and are also compiled and distributed in the form of a printed publication, which can be viewed as a more recent form of an artists’ magazine. The Serving Library is also a brick‐and‐mortar space, located in Liverpool, which exhibits artifacts reproduced in its publication (including drawings, paintings, record sleeves, and an ouija board) and offers free events such as workshops, talks, performances, and screenings organized in ­collaboration with the contributors. E‐flux is another example of the evolving magazine form that can be considered within the online and digital context. It began in 1998 as a DIY attempt to use the internet as an alternative information structure, relying on an electronic mailing list. Later, it began to use “push” marketing technology, charging institutions to publish announcements. It redirects those funds to produce its own journal and to stage projects and exhibitions in its New York storefront, and most recently, it has started e‐flux conversations (https://conversations.e‐flux.com), a social exchange platform to encourage in‐depth discussions within the art world. E‐flux founder Anton Vidokle has characterized it as a self‐sustaining artists’ project and publishing platform that manages to stay autonomous from both the art market and public funding by capitalizing on and rechanneling the art world’s information economy (Vidokle and Aranda 2006).

Artists Magazines as Alternative Spaces Today As the contemporary art world has become an increasingly commercialized global arena composed of biennials, auctions, art fairs, galleries, and museums, art magazines as well as newer online media have played an increasingly important role. While publications can be an important site of transnational dialog and exchange, today a handful of (mainly) English‐language



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commercial art magazines and online platforms dominate the circulation of information in ways that tend to uphold the art world’s geopolitical hierarchies. At the same time, a number of publications have emerged to question the hegemony of Western institutions, to foster international exchange, and to represent marginalized communities, cultures, and identities (Allen 2016b).

While the latter vary widely in their formats, editorial goals, and readership, they share a desire to intervene into dominant structures of information and distribution and/or to create new, alternative ones. Examples range from artist Tania Bruguera’s Memoria de la Posguerra (Postwar Memory) (1993–2003), a self‐published newspaper that provided a vital collective forum for Cuban artists living both inside and outside the country, to LTTR (2002–2006), founded by the New York‐based collective LTTR as a malleable DIY platform for queer and feminist artists and activists to collaborate and share work, to Chto Delat? (2003–), published by the St. Petersburg‐ based eponymous artistic collective as a site of political and artistic engagement within Putinist Russia. In their aspiration to serve as sites of critical publicity in today’s art world, many of these publications look back to earlier models of artists’ publications from the 1960s and 1970s. (Allen 2016b) For example, LTTR cites the 1970s feminist artists’ magazine Heresies as an inspiration. It also looks back to Fluxus (a 1960s–1970s international artists’ collective) publications and the multimedia magazine Aspen in its unusual and changing format, which has included booklets, records, and CDs as well as unbound handcrafted artists’ multiples. The importance of magazines in today’s art world was highlighted by the 2007 Documenta 12 Magazines project (http://www.documenta12.de/en/magazine.html), part of the large‐ scale global exhibition Documenta, staged every five years in Kassel, Germany. The Documenta Magazines project sought to showcase the critical potential of art magazines globally by inviting over 90 periodicals from more than 50 countries to generate essays, features, and artists’ projects that considered the exhibition’s themes from local perspectives. The participating magazines were then exhibited at the exhibition proper and via an online archive, selections from which

274 Allen were anthologized in a printed publication entitled Documenta Magazine. As Georg Schöllhammer, who organized the project, explained, “[o]ur intention was to work in truly decentralized fashion and thus to enable forms different from the canonized ones for the interpretation of the history of contemporary art” (Schöllhammer 2007). Among other things, the project drew attention to the tensions between the homogenizing impulses of the global art world and the many different worlds that constitute the reality of art today (Allen 2016b).

Instead of seeking representation within a single presiding art world, many of the publications included in the exhibition enacted the dilemmas of inhabiting multiple art worlds at once. For example, the magazine Pages (https://www.pagesmagazine.net) was founded in 2004 by artists Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi as a platform for Iranian art that sought to complicate simplistic stereotypes of the Middle East. From 2004 to 2013, Pages existed as a printed magazine, produced in both Tehran and Rotterdam, and published bilingually in Farsi and English, with contributions by Iranian and non‐Iranian artists and writers. The magazine was distributed in bookstores in Europe and more unofficially in Iran, where the editors gave it to people they knew or met, resulting in the magazine being then passed from hand to hand. It was also ­distributed online, where articles could be downloaded and where online forums provided opportunities for readers to post and interact. As of 2018, Pages continues to exist as an online platform, which archives back issues of the magazine and publishes new contributions. Pages also includes various supplemental activities and curatorial projects, such as film screenings and ­workshops. These supplementary projects help to situate the magazine in relationship to real spaces and live events, while further undermining the notion of a singular site for Iranian art and its public (Allen 2016b). In a different context, the Cape Town‐based Chimurenga bills itself as a “pan African ­publication of writing, art and politics,” produced in Cape Town, South Africa, but distributed



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globally. (www.chimurenga.co.za/about‐us). Founded by Ntone Edjabe in 2002, originally as a printed magazine, Chimurenga has grown to encompass a number of different editorial and curatorial activities that traverse digital, printed, and “real” spaces, including themed performances called Chimurenga Sessions; an online music radio station and live studio known as the Pan African Space Station (PASS); and the Chimurenga Library, an ongoing project that interrogates the public and informational space of the library, supplementing it with a compendium of historical and current African periodicals. Chimurenga has intervened into the material and informational structure of the media with projects such as The Chimurenga Chronic (2011), originally published as an issue of Chimurenga Magazine and conceived as a “one‐off edition of an imaginary newspaper” attempting to challenge the newspaper’s history as an instrument of nationalism and destabilize its claims to historical truth. Set in the past, during the week of May 18–24, 2008, when a series of violent xenophobic riots and attacks swept South Africa, The Chimurenga Chronic problematizes simplistic historical narratives and mainstream reporting about the events of that week, while seeking to reactivate that history as a critical force in the present. The project has since evolved into a quarterly publication, which fosters an international, progressive, and critical discourse on Africa (Edjabe 2004, 2013). These examples attest to some of the ways in which the magazine form, broadly conceived, operates critically to foster publics, both within the contemporary art world and beyond it. Artists’ publications today span and traverse multiple places, contexts, audiences, languages, distribution forms, and media platforms. Yet, even as they de‐essentialize and de‐territorialize conventional definitions of place and audience around which publics have traditionally been mobilized, they seek to create new contexts for information and communication, and to acknowledge the historicity and politics of distribution forms and media. In this sense, they can be understood in relationship to a larger history of the magazine form and art publishing ­practices. This history may itself function as an important source of criticality, by offering precedents and frameworks for current publishing practices, which may in turn reactivate this past, and make it newly meaningful in the present (Allen 2016b).

References Alberro, A. (2003). Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity. Cambridge: MIT Press. Allen, G. (2011). Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art. Cambridge: MIT Press. Allen, G. (2016a). Art periodicals and contemporary art worlds, Part 1: an historical exploration. ArtMargins 5 (3): 35–61. Allen, G. (2016b). Art periodicals and contemporary art worlds, Part 2: critical publicity in a global context. ArtMargins Online (22 October). http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/featured‐articles‐sp‐ 829273831/784‐art‐periodicals‐and‐contemporary‐art‐worlds‐part‐2 (accessed 25 February 2019). Allen, G. (2018). From materiality to dematerialization and back: conceptual writing in a digital age. In:  Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art (ed. A. Andersson), 233–242. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ault, J. (ed.) (2002). Alternative Art New York, 1965–1985. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, W. (1986). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.” (1936). In: Illuminations (ed. H. Arendt), 217–254. New York: Schocken Books. Buchloh, B. (2000). Moments of history in the work of Dan Graham” (1978). In: Neo Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, 179–202. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bulson, E. (2016). Little Magazine, World Form. New York: Columbia University Press. Burton, A. (1976). Nineteenth century periodicals. In: The Art Press: Two Centuries of Art Magazines (eds. T. Fawcett and C. Phillpot), 3–10. London: Art Book Company. Camfield, W.A. (1989). Marcel Duchamp: Fountain. Houston: Fine Art Press, The Menil Collection. Cole, L. (2018). Surveying the Avant‐Garde: Questions on Modernism, Art, and the Americas in Transatlantic Magazines. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press.

276 Allen Costa, E. (2016). How magazines reacted to some art penetrations, 1967–84 and onward.” (2015). In: The Magazine (ed. G. Allen), 95–96. Cambridge: MIT Press; London: The Whitechapel Gallery. Crow, T. (1987). Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth‐Century Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press. Edjabe, N. (2004). “Chimurenga: who no know go know.” Interviewed by Dídac P. Lagarriga, An ­interview with Ntone Edjabe. Oozebap. http://www.oozebap.org/text/chimurenga.htm (accessed 25 February 2019). Edjabe, N. (2013). Letter to readers and collaborators of Chimurenga, January 2013. In: The Magazine (ed. G. Allen), 224–225. Cambridge: MIT Press; London: the Whitechapel Gallery, 2016. Gibson, A.E. (1989). Issues in Abstract Expressionism: The Artist‐Run Periodicals. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press. Graham, D. (1999). My works for magazine pages: ‘a history of conceptual art’. In: Two‐Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on his Art (ed. A. Alberro), 10–17. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence). Cambridge: MIT Press. Heller, S. (2002). Merz to Émigré and Beyond: Avant‐Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century. New York: Phaidon Press. Kaltenbach, S. (2001). Interview by Patricia Norvell. In: Recording Conceptual Art (eds. A. Alberro and P. Norvell), 70–85. Berkeley: University of California Press. LeWitt, S. (1967). Paragraphs on conceptual art. Artforum 5: 79–83. Malraux, A. (1967). Museum Without Walls, 1947) (trans. S. Gilbert and F. Price). London: Secker and Warburg. Malraux, A. (1978). The Voices of Silence (1953) (trans. S. Gilbert). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Meyer, R. (2004). Bone of contention. Artforum 73–74: 249–250. O’Doherty, B. (1976). Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press. Padín, C. (2012). Mail art: a bridge to freedom. ARTMargins 1 (2–3): 36–44. Parisi, V. (2013). Writing about apparently nonexistent art: the Tamizdat journal A‐Ja and Russian unofficial art in the 1970s and 1980s. In: Samizdat, Tamizdat and Beyond: Transnational Media during and after Socialism (eds. F. Kind‐Kovacs and J. Labov), 190–205. New York: Bergham Books. Perneczky, G. (1993). The Magazine Network: The Trends of Alternative Art in the Light of their Periodicals, 1968–1988 (trans. from Hungarian by T. Szendrei). Cologne: Edition Soft Geometry. Phillpot, C. (1980). Art magazines and magazine art. Artforum 18 (6): 52–54. Pindell, H. (1977). Alternative space: artists’ periodicals. Print Collector’s Newsletter 8 (4): 96–121. Price, S. (2002). Dispersion. http://www.distributedhistory.com/Disperzone.html (accessed 20 September 2019). Rorimer, A. (1999). Siting the page: exhibiting works in publications – some examples of conceptual art in the USA. In: Rewriting Conceptual Art (eds. M. Newman and J. Bird), 11–26. London: Reaktion Books. Roth, N.A. (1989). L’Artiste and ‘L’Art pour L’Art’: the new cultural journalism in the July Monarchy. Art Journal 48 (1 (Spring)): 35–39. Schöllhammer, G. (2007). “Interview by Elena Zanichelli.” Documenta 12 website. http://www. documenta12.de/index.php?id=1389&L=1 (accessed 25 February 2019). Siegelaub, S. (1969). On Exhibitions and the World at Large, interview by Charles Harrison. Studio International (December); reprinted in Gregory Battcock, ed., Idea Art: A Critical Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973. Šimičić, D. (2003). From Zenit to mental space: Avant‐Garde, neo‐avant‐Garde, and post‐avant‐garde magazines and books in Yugoslavia, 1921–1987. In: Impossible Histories: Historical Avant‐Gardes, Neo‐Avant‐Gardes, and Post‐Avant‐Gardes in Yugoslavia, 1918–1991 (eds. D. Djurić and M. Šuvaković), 294–331. Cambridge: MIT Press. Smith, C. (2007). Re‐member the audience: Adrian Piper’s mythic being advertisements. Art Journal 66 (1 (Spring)): 46–58. Smithson, R. (1996). The spiral Jetty (1972). In: The Complete Writings of Robert Smithson (ed. J. Flam), 143–153. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Vidokle, A. and Aranda, J. (2006). Ever. Ever. Ever. In conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist. In: The Best Surprise Is no Surprise (ed. A. Vidokle), 16–24. Zurich: e‐flux/JPR/Ringier.



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Further reading Aarons, P. and Roth, A. (eds.) (2009). Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists. Zurich: JRP‐Ringier; New York: PPP Editions. Allen, G. (ed.) (2016). The Magazine. Cambridge: MIT Press; London: The Whitechapel Gallery. Allen, G. (2018). Making things public: art magazines, art worlds, and the # MeToo movement. Portable Gray 1 (1): 5–14. Anne, R. (1999). Siting the page: exhibiting works in publications – some examples of conceptual art in the USA. In: Rewriting Conceptual Art (eds. M. Newman and J. Bird), 11–26. London: Reaktion Books. Blacksell, R. (2013). From looking to Reading: text‐based conceptual art and typographic discourse. Design Issues 29 (2(Spring)): 60–81. Boivent, M. (ed.) (2008). Revues d’artistes, une selection. Paris: Éditions Provisoires/Rennes: Lendroit éditions. Boivent, M. (2015). La revue d’artiste – Enjeux et spécificités d’une pratique artistique. Dijon: Les Presses du reel. Bryan‐Wilson, J. (2006). Repetition and difference: LTTR. Artforum 44 (10(Summer)): 109–110. Buchloh, B. (1990). Conceptual art 1962–1969: from the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions. October 55 ((Winter)): 105–143. Fawcett, T. and Phillpot, C. (eds.) (1976). The Art Press: Two Centuries of Art Magazines. London: Art Book Company. Gilbert, A. (2016). Publishing as Artistic Practice. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Kotz, L. (2010). Words to be Looked at: Language in 1960s Art. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lippard, L.R. (1997). Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ludovico, A. (2012). Post‐Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894. Eindhoven: Onomatopee. Perkins, S. (ed.) (1996). Assembling Magazines: International Networking Collaborations. Iowa City: Plagiarist Press. Perneczky, G. (2007). Assembling Magazines 1969–2000. Budapest: Arnyekkotok Foundation. Saper, C. (2001). Networked Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Magazines as Sites of Didacticism, Edutainment, and (Sometimes) Pedagogy Miglena Sternadori

Introduction One of the main ways in which magazines appeal to audiences is by guiding them “to a better version of themselves” (Forster 2015, p. 1). This guidance is accomplished through aspirational how‐to articles, which encourage audiences to learn a new skill, improve an already existing one, or simply contemplate humanity’s achievements in science, art, and technology. One’s improved future self exists only within magazines’ “wider world of leisure and consumption” (Lackey 2005, p. 329). In addition to imagining self‐improvement, magazine audiences can also assess and compare their own lives to those of others by reading letters to the editor and advice from so‐called agony aunts, who “dictate the moral parameters of personal dilemmas or choices” (Forster, p. 169). Intertwined with the utility of such social and moral instruction are the pleasant sensations of the mind that magazine narratives can arouse: curiosity, excitement, titillation, validation, voyeurism, and schadenfreude, to name just a few. Although research on the effects of magazine instruction is limited, Luke (1996) argues these “public texts of popular culture are probably a more powerful pedagogy than the generally decontextualized knowledge and skills taught in formal institutions of learning” (p. 184). Indeed, the significance of magazines’ role depends on the subjective parameters of teaching and learning. “A tendency to equate ‘education’ with schooling means that we may not automatically think of magazines as pedagogical sites”  –  but they most certainly are, even if learning from them is self‐paced and does not require sustained attention, contends Lackey (2005, p. 324). Similarly, in an argument positioning mass magazines as sites of popular instruction, Bashford and Strange (2004) suggest that education must be considered not “in its narrow institutional sense but more broadly – as advice, as instruction, as communication” (p. 73). Numerous studies by historians of education and knowledge (e.g. Wrigley 1989; Bashford and Strange 2004; Proctor and Weaver 2017) have analyzed instructional articles in magazines. Wrigley (1989) viewed magazine content as a more accurate reflection of contemporary social norms than the instruction in self‐help books because “books reflect the idiosyncrasies of individual authors, while magazine articles have to pass editorial muster and … [are] less likely to reflect strikingly original or deviant thinking” (p. 45). However, the instructive and pedagogical functions of magazines have rarely attracted the interest of magazine scholars. This chapter aims to fill this gap in magazine studies by considering the didactic and pedagogical approaches The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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employed by various magazines and the ways in which they emulate, challenge, or complement institutionalized face‐to‐face instruction in various educational settings. The chapter is structured in seven sections. The first defines concepts such “education” and “pedagogy,” and explains how these concepts are applicable to magazines. The second enumerates the types of magazines (from lifestyle periodicals to explicitly instructional publications) that have different kinds of educational purposes. The third section is a brief historical overview that illustrate the deep historical roots of the phenomenon of magazine education. The fourth assesses the value of instructional magazine contents through the lens of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives (1956). The fifth section discusses the empirically observed and the theoretically plausible effects of magazine pedagogy. The sixth section catalogs variations in the symbolic power distance between text producers and audiences. The final section outlines how contemporary magazines offer forms of instruction through multiple modalities (in addition to print, these include video, audio, apps, and physical or downloadable “gifts”) and use interactive tools to assess and (re)direct learning.

Conceptual Definitions and Framework The argument that magazines are popular educational sites (e.g. Lackey 2005) presumes a common‐sense understanding of education. But what is, in fact, education? One of the most commonly cited definitions is by Peters (1966/2015), who views education as the intentional transmission of “worthwhile” knowledge or skills in a “morally acceptable manner” (p. 25). Peters argues that “no specific type of activity is required” for learning and, therefore, education to occur (p. 24). People can learn without being a part of a formal educational environment and without engaging in formal studying. The term “pedagogy,” on the other hand, broadly refers to the science, art, and practice of teaching. Murphy (2003) defines it as the “interactions between teachers, students and the learning environment and learning tasks” (p. 35). Although the definition reflects institutional‐setting thinking, it can be extrapolated to so‐called “pedagogical journalism” (Bashford and Strange 2004, p. 91). In the context of this phenomenon, the producers of mediated texts serve as “teachers,” audience members are the “students,” the sociocultural context in which media texts are produced is “the learning environment,” and the skills and knowledge that are valued in this sociocultural context are the “learning tasks.” Some research on magazines and other media texts automatically equates “instruction” to “pedagogy.” For example, White (2008) argues that “the media is a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy” (p. 2). She adds that “one is often not aware that one is being educated and constructed by media culture; thus, its pedagogy is often invisible and subliminal, requiring critical approaches that make us aware of how media construct meaning, influence and educate audiences, and impose messages and values” (p. 19). However, when evidence of interaction between text producers and media consumers is lacking, the mediated instruction of audiences would be more accurately defined as didacticism – one‐way instruction, commonly illustrated by the practice of lecturing (e.g. Barraket 2005) – and not as pedagogy. In literary studies, the term didacticism denotes the idea that fiction can have instructional value, especially when it aims to convey a moral lesson (e.g. Raff 2006). Didacticism of some form can be discerned in the texts of newspapers, documentaries, and other mass media whose primary goal is to deliver information and instruction, resulting in knowledge and learning. Because magazines enjoy an especially close connection with reader communities, their mediated didactic practices may sometimes rise to the level of pedagogies. Magazines’ periodical nature also (imperfectly) emulates the nature of educational settings, where lessons are delivered in intervals, allowing for some time to process and absorb what has been learned.

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Types of Magazines Serving Didactic or Pedagogical Purposes Some notable carriers of magazine instruction include lifestyle periodicals that promise audiences self‐improvement and self‐actualization by providing them with practical tips about vocations and hobbies: parenting, fitness, home decor, cooking, hunting, bird‐watching, and so on. Most lifestyle magazine “lessons” are both tacit and overt, straddling the ideological and the practical realms, as well as ambivalent, polyvocal, polysemic, and apt to elicit both criticism and praise from different audiences, at different times. For example, women’s magazines tell girls and women “how to fashion themselves into an object of the male gaze, as good wives, mothers, and daughters,” while simultaneously providing “a series of devices, instructions, and techniques in transgressing and transforming their pedagogical formation as feminine subjects” (Carrington and Bennett 1996, p. 149). Parenting magazines offer “implicit public pedagogies” of gendered socialization (Luke 1996, p. 173), but they also provide useful information about children’s stages of development and teach parents how to become “informed consumers” of children’s products (p. 183). Magazine sex advice columns trigger guilt and inadequacy in women expected to get and keep a man “through skilled sexual practice” (Laumann and Gagnon 1995, p. 203), but they also serve as “the vehicle for mass sex education” (Bashford and Strange 2004, p. 74). Less frequently in the public eye are magazines that claim education as central to their mission. These can be divided into five categories. The first includes periodicals that feature accessibly written articles about specialized subjects for wide audiences. Examples discussed in the literature include popular history magazines (Thorp 2015), wildlife conservation magazines (Chipman and Brody 1993), and popular science and technology magazines (Bowler 2016), among others. Although such magazines are often aimed at adult hobbyists or activists, they also find applications as complementary materials in schools and universities. For example, MAKE Magazine, a periodical “dedicated to showing you how to make technology work for you” is one of many publications used by educators to complement lessons offered in structured learning settings (Brahms and Crowley 2016, p. 14). The second category of explicitly instructional magazines is aimed at the parents of children from preschool to middle‐school age as well as the children themselves. These magazines offer a plethora of at‐home learning tools: “illustrated stories; rhymes and songs; colouring‐in and join‐the‐dots pictures; mazes; counting activities; sorting and matching exercises; ‘make‐and‐ do’ assignments; exercises involving finding or identifying objects; information‐giving features; board games; writing activities; cutout‐and‐collect pictures or posters; activities based on the alphabet and letter‐recognition; competitions; drawings sent in by readers; and, of course, advertisements” (Buckingham and Scanlon 2001, p. 284). Buckingham and Scanlon note that many of these magazines tend to be highly intertextual and linked to contemporary popular culture because they associate themselves with popular TV shows for children, such as Sesame Street, Barney, Bob the Builder, and other popular characters. The third category includes magazines that target teachers and educational administrators or serve as the official organs of educator groups and unions, such as state teachers’ associations and the National Education Association. A survey of US teachers by Kelly and Whitney (1928) indicates that periodicals such as American Childhood and Kindergarten‐Primary Magazine were popular among educators almost a century ago. These periodicals often feature pedagogical advice and articles explaining teaching techniques in order to promote the professional development of the organization’s members (e.g. Khuan 1995). Some teacher magazines are affiliated with large media organizations. For example, The New York Times publishes Upfront, a magazine intended to help high‐school teachers integrate current events into their lesson plans. Others (e.g. New Teacher Advocate) are specifically intended to support student teachers and new teachers by providing personal narratives, question and answer forums, and sample lesson plans. Some pedagogical magazines also serve linguistic or ethnic diasporas and therefore target wider audiences, beyond just educators. This was the case for periodicals such as Russian School,



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Russian School Abroad, and Contemporary Annals, which were read by the Russian emigre community in the USA in the 1920s (Kirzhaeva 2016). The fourth category includes magazines that are aimed at furthering the careers of professionals in specific fields. These publications communicate information about professional development activities, such as conferences and workshops, and offer their audiences ways to earn continuing education credits (CECs) or continuing education units (CEUs). For example, subscribers to A2Zzz, the quarterly magazine of the American Association of Sleep Technologists, automatically earn two CECs per issue, regardless of whether they read it (Asp 2016). Architect magazine, which describes itself as “the journal of the American Institute of Architects,” has a “continuing ed” section on its website, with links to hundreds of free online courses offered in partnership with Hanley Wood University (Architect 2018). And Massage Magazine offers access to a continuing education library as a part of its liability and equipment damage insurance program for massage professionals (Massage Magazine 2018). The last category includes uses of the magazine form itself as a pedagogical tool, often by educators who require their students to create magazines to fulfill an academic assignment. Such assignments are typical not only in journalism schools, but also other in other disciplines centered around the study of text and language. For example, Avci and Adiguzel (2017) report on how creating a class magazine can help students of English as a foreign language “practice English by means of collaborative, authentic language activities based on project‐based learning approach” (p. 45). Creating a virtual class magazine is also an assignment practiced by some Finnish schools, which rely on the free publishing platform Magazine Factory (no longer in existence) to facilitate writing and editorial tasks in a digital environment (Lakkala et al. 2012).

Magazine Instruction in a Historical Context In the current era of mass consumption, the role of magazines as informal teachers is unavoidably obvious. Most everyone has seen how‐to headlines on the covers of checkout‐aisle glossies, on topics ranging from sexercising to orgasm (Frith 2015) to building lean muscle (Parasecoli 2005). But the didactic proclivity of magazines is not unique to the current times. One of the earliest examples of a publication that taught self‐improvement to its readers was the British magazine The Spectator, launched in 1711, which, as Porter (2000) writes, “ridiculed Puritan scrupulosity and cavalier libertinism alike and … promoted smart pursuits – light reading, tea table conversation, the urbane pleasures of the town” (p. 1573). Across the ocean, the American settlers at first embraced more puritanical and academic forms of magazine instruction, as exemplified by the American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle for the British Colonies (1757–1758), published by William Smith, a professor of rhetoric and provost of the College of Philadelphia. Smith’s magazine performed “a pedagogical function” for his students but also for his readers, whom he instructed in matters of rhetoric, politics, and teaching – for example, by outlining a teaching technique to explain conic sections (Mader 2006, p. 4). Popular instruction was also one of the core missions of US religious magazines targeting laity in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century; they published how‐to guides to religious education, sermons, and “short instructive tales” (Haveman 2004, p. 17). This trend of magazine didacticism continued after the Civil War, when new topics emerged. Mass magazines in the last decades of the nineteenth century published formulas for business success “meant to instruct and inspire the next generation of self‐made men” (Clark 2010, p. 29). The Saturday Evening Post ran articles with titles such as “Getting and Keeping a Business Position” (p. 30) and “How Shall a Young Man Educate Himself?” (p. 39). The end of the Victorian era, when many believed that self‐education and training on the job were just as good as if not better than college education, saw the rise of magazine titles such as Self‐Educator and Success Magazine (p. 34). By the early twentieth century, magazines began to tout the potential character‐building

282 Sternadori benefits of college education and, accordingly, started to offer new how‐to guides, such as “Which College for the Boy” (p. 102) and “How to Be Self‐Supporting in College” (p. 123). Magazines’ potential to edify the masses was also evident to magazine publishers in the UK, where instructional periodicals such as Popular Science Siftings (renamed Popular Science: The Chatty Weekly in the 1920s) sprung in the nineteenth century. More science and technology magazines, such as Discovery, Conquest, and Armchair Science, entered the British magazine market during the interwar period with the goal “to arouse or satisfy the ordinary readers’ interest in scientific and technical matters” (Bowler 2016, p. 90). Inevitably, all of these periodicals struggled with meeting “the public’s demand for entertainment as well as information” (p. 91). Bowler notes that some were criticized as condescending by conveying only what the scientific community believed the public ought to know, while others were accused of oversimplifying and sensationalizing science. The target audiences of early magazine instruction were invariably men. When women became objects of magazine instruction, the topics of edification were distinctly different. In the early decades of the twentieth century, popular magazines, such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, began publishing medical advice columns teaching mothers how to care for their infants and young children. Homemaking was another topic in which publishers decided that female audiences needed instruction. Forster (2015) points to the example of the British Housewife magazine in 1939 giving “cross‐class instruction” (p. 29), through detailed advice, illustrations, and lists, to hostesses and maids alike about how to set up the table for a meal, repair electrical fuses, or trim excesses from the household’s food budget. Forster describes such articles as “the epitome of no‐nonsense instruction from a former teacher of domestic economy at a technical college” (p. 30). When less feminine information, such as domestic and international news, began to be conveyed to women, magazines did so somewhat condescendingly. In the interwar period, daytime radio magazine programs were designed to allow women to “go about everyday domestic chores while simultaneously being educated in issues of political and social importance” (p. 183). During World War II, “governmental instruction and advice was interpreted by magazine editors and writers, and subsequently passed on” to primarily female readers (p. 34). Instructional children’s periodicals also existed long before the contemporary edutainment periodicals, most of which began as outgrowths of popular TV children’s shows in the 1970s (Buckingham and Scanlon 2001; Henderson 2006). Two magazines, Joy and Ivy, targeted African-American children in the late nineteenth century in the USA. In India, children’s monthly magazines began to be sold by subscription in the 1920s and 1930s, and “would seem to have emerged as a means to provide alternate schooling” (Chandra 2007, p. 294).

Magazine Instruction in the Context of Bloom’s Taxonomy Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives (Bloom 1956), although challenged and revised by education scholars, remains commonly referenced as the standard for a hierarchy of learning. Motivation and inspiration, central to many magazines’ instructional content, do not figure anywhere in Bloom’s taxonomy, which is therefore limited in describing such mediated educational texts. Nonetheless, the taxonomy is useful in characterizing the complexity of outcomes intended through magazine instruction. The following subsections match the Bloom’s levels of cognitive learning with relevant examples of magazine instructional content.

Knowledge This level refers to memorizing facts, labels, categories, etc. Outcomes matching the lowest rung of Bloom’s taxonomy are most frequently found in children’s educational periodicals, which teach the alphabet, shapes, colors, and so on. This rung is also evident, at least historically



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speaking, in sex advice columns, which have presented audiences with basic medical categories and facts: labeling male and female genitalia, enumerating methods of birth control, and explaining puberty. Often, magazine instruction presents such facts to create a foundation for higher‐ order learning outcomes. For example, Forster (2015) suggests that feminist magazines feature historical articles about feminist figures of the past to “emphasis the importance of reading and education in order to build knowledge and further the cause” (p. 230). Forster notes that these periodicals “historicise, record and recall in order to educate, encourage, inspire and amuse their readerships” (p. 237), with the ultimate goal of encouraging learners to apply such knowledge by becoming activists themselves.

Comprehension This rung describes learners’ ability to interpret and compare facts and ideas. Often, the goal is understanding oneself, which is evident in content from self‐help and lifestyle magazines. Forster (2015) argues that women’s magazines, for example, “are contradictory forms: they recall women’s history and a sense of women’s past occupation and lifestyle while also offering opportunities for growth and development in understanding, in general knowledge, and in self‐awareness” (p. 240). By informing audiences about how others live and think, these magazines “promote interpretation of the self” (p. 240).

Application This level of learning deals with the ability to solve problems in various situations based on previously learned facts, rules, or techniques. Application is the most commonly and explicitly stated desired outcome of magazine instruction, which tends to be pragmatic and focused on the applied. For example, audiences are expected to take “practical advice … such as cooking and cleaning instructions and film and music reviews” (Airaskorpi 2014, p. 20). Fashion magazines offer “do‐it‐yourself instructions … showing the readers how they can modify or re‐use a garment or an accessory according to the latest trends” (pp. 42–43). Airascorpi further notes that “the pleasure of practical knowledge is of fictional quality” because it encourages readers to imagine their ideal selves but few of them will act on magazine instructions (p. 21). Application‐focused instruction in magazines extends beyond simple recipe‐like directives. It may also include pragmatic guidance on entire identities, roles, and occupations. Countless magazines “have framed parenting as a set of practical tasks” (Proctor and Weaver 2017, p. 63). Other intensely complex activities (romance, dating, healthy living, etc.) have also been reduced to sets of “easy” rules and tips encouraging audiences to solve problems in their individual circumstances. For example, a now‐defunct South African magazine for Christian men provided “men with practical tips on dealing with their remorse” (Viljoen 2011, p. 323) and “practical ways … to rectify mistakes they made in the past” (p. 325). The unfortunate consequence of this focus on individual‐level, practical problem solving is to encourage a lack of awareness of major sociocultural forces, eroding the possibility of higher‐order learning outcomes, such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. For example, in an article about domestic violence discourses in magazines, titled “My Problem and How I Solved It,” Berns (1999) argues that “the dominant individual perspective that places responsibility on the victim normalizes the idea that victims should be held responsible for solving the problem” (p. 85). Magazine articles may contain narratives from women who have left abusive men, offer practical tips for safely leaving an abusive relationship, or list the warning signs that a man is abusive. All these frames, while of practical use to individual victims, leave out the role of the batterer and society, therefore preventing magazine audiences from analyzing, synthesizing, and critically evaluating the problem of domestic violence as a product of the patriarchal status quo.

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Analysis A learner’s ability to analyze entails identifying relationships between variables, establishing causality, and generalizing based on evidence. An example is evident in British interwar magazine‐ style programs broadcast on the radio, whose producers intended not only to teach concrete skills to the female listeners, but also to expand their horizons and encourage them to develop new interests – for example, “to realise that what they dismiss as politics affects their personal lives” (Forster 2015, p. 200). In other words, the educational objective was to highlight the ways in which domestic and international events affected one’s home life.

Synthesis This element of the learning hierarchy deals with the ability to see the big picture, discern patterns, and construct a whole from individual parts. An example of a potential synthesis outcome for magazine audiences is offered by Thorp (2015). He notes that articles in three popular history magazines (the British BBC History Magazine, the Swedish Populär Historia, and the Spanish La Aventura de la Historia) typically “contain no traces of historiographical or disciplinary aspects of the historian’s trade,” even though they may be written by academic historians (p. 108). Each of these articles, therefore, offers simplified knowledge that does not result from the subjective assessments of historians and is free from “the interpretive and representative mess that a disciplinary approach to history yields” (p. 109). However, when history students are presented not with a single article but a set of articles on the same topic (i.e. the causes of World War I), the magazine form fosters learning how history is developed through “a discussion of voice and perspective in historiography” (p. 110).

Evaluation The highest rung in Bloom’s taxonomy refers to the ability to critically judge knowledge and ideas. This learning outcome is encouraged primarily by high‐brow periodicals, such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The London Review of Books. Although the articles in these magazines already offer the writers’ critical judgment on a wide range of topics, readers are expected to follow along while simultaneously forming their own evaluations. This level of learning is also evident in some science and technology magazines, which assume that a culture of skepticism and curiosity leads to invention and innovation. For example, in a content analysis of 162 articles from MAKE Magazine, which espouses the philosophy of learning by doing, Brahms and Crowley (2016) identify “seven core learning practices associated with recognizable participation in the maker community: explore and question; tinker, test, and iterate; seek out resources; hack and repurpose; combine and complexify; customize; and share” (pp. 15–16).

Effects of Magazine Instruction on Audiences The effects of overt and tacit magazine instruction occur both at the individual and the social level. In an example of the latter, Scanlon and Buckingham (2004) contend that the flourishing market for education periodicals aimed at children and out‐of‐school learning materials exacerbates inequalities between middle‐class and working‐class children. Another example of social‐ level effects can be found in the advice columns in teen’s magazines (as well as other lifestyle periodicals), which arguably have helped to preserve and recreate gendered ideologies over time (e.g. Ostermann and Keller‐Cohen 1998).1 While these social‐level effects are of great importance, this section highlights the two most immediate and easily documented effects of magazine instruction at the individual level: learning and reactance.



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Learning Much research on magazine instruction has emphasized the positive effects on readers in terms of learning. This is especially the case when a magazine is the only available source of certain types of information. Bashford and Strange (2004), writing about a magazine sex advice column in Australia, report that multiple readers expressed appreciation because they could not access sex education from anywhere else. One reader responded, “I was one who knew nothing of such matters … till after my marriage, the first year of which was unhappy on that account” (pp. 80–82). The veil of anonymity inherent in self‐educating through magazine content has benefitted audiences seeking information on issues considered too embarrassing to ask about in face‐to‐face communication. Bashford and Strange point to the example of a 17‐year‐old Australian girl who used the medium of the magazine advice column to ask about controlling genital odor – information that was likely found useful by countless other readers as well. Magazine advice columns may have at various times fulfilled a crucial need for information, especially among women. Hillman’s (1954) analysis of 6422 letters received from female correspondents by an advice columnist at a popular US monthly magazine over one year showed that 87% indicated needing sex information, 73% asked about birth control, 52% needed help from a government agency, 30% sought legal advice, and 23% asked about “venereal diseases” (p. 53). Hillman concludes that many American women at the time were learning a great deal from the magazine: Why did these women write to an advice columnist? There appears to be one basic reason. It is because somewhere along the way someone has failed. That failure may lie in the home, the school, the church, the community, or in society itself. … Nevertheless, in a country like this, which prides itself upon its social consciousness and enlightened interest in youth, the study can suggest only one thing, namely: someone, somewhere, is not on the job (p. 54).

When used to supplement formal curricula, magazines have been seen as effective in helping students learn complex content. In a survey of high school biology teachers in Maine, Chipman and Brody (1993) found almost a third had used articles from the state’s wildlife conservation magazine to supplement their teaching. The authors suggested that conservation magazines can serve as “an important tool in helping biology teachers encourage students to make connections and help biology seem relevant to students’ lives” (p. 11). In a similar vein, Lackey (2005) argued that home decorating magazines can be useful in art education classes as “foci for discussion and artistic production” (p. 335).

Psychological Reactance The other potential effect of magazine instruction is audience revolt. This may happen when magazines’ advice creates a psychological burden. For example, busy working women may experience such reactions when reading about picture‐perfect but labor‐ and time‐intensive fitness, cooking, or craft activities. If the magazine audiences feel that they are being told what to do (psychologists refer to this feeling as perceived threat to one’s freedom), the effect may be psychological reactance: a rejection of the message and derogation of the source (Miller et al. 2007). For example, journalist Elisheva Blumberg writes on the Jewish parenting blog Kveller, “… despite American women’s love affair with monthly publications that tell them what to wear, how to take care of their kids, and how to lose their saddlebags in just 10 minutes a day, I would guess that even the most Vogue‐voracious of females hate women’s magazines just a little bit” (2013). Such sentiments are still relatively rarely expressed by magazine audiences, but scholars have noted that magazine instruction can indeed result in feelings of guilt and inadequacy. Bartky (1996) refers to such instructional approaches as “pedagogies of shame” (p. 226). “I hate being lectured at,” remarked one viewer of the 1970s British TV

286 Sternadori magazine Houseparty, which offered craft demonstrations and fashion advice, among other things (Forster 2015, p. 68). The reactance effect is particularly evident in the case of parenting instruction, especially when the messages fail to reflect the various constraints that most mothers face in their lives. Buckingham and Scanlon (2001), who critique early‐learning magazines’ treatment of education “as a kind of commodity” (p. 287), note that the success of such edutainment periodicals hinges on exploiting and promoting parents’ anxieties about their children’s school preparedness. Similarly, Ball (2004) argues that as parenting magazines “play an increasingly important role in defining good parenting” (p. 8), they frequently “create new desires and fuel fears” (p. 7). Readers recognize these effects as well. For example, Jennifer Gish, a columnist for Times Union, the main newspaper in Albany, New York, writes about parenting magazines: “I don’t get alarmed by them as much as I end up feeling inferior after flipping through the pages. … I wonder if there’d be an audience for Average Mom Monthly?” (2010, n.p.). And blogger Samantha Rodman spares no words to express her distaste for parenting instruction: “I really hate when magazines make parents feel like crap…” (n.d., n.p.). A reactance to the impossible expectations of parenting is also evident in the titles of two popular US parenting blogs (arguably, also online magazines) started by mothers seeking to express their frustrations and connect to like‐minded women: Scary Mommy and Renegade Mothering.

Magazines and Instructional Power Distance Magazines walk a fine line in acting as pedagogical tools. On the one hand, they speak with “expansive authority, dealing in the detail of lives” (Forster 2015, p. 1). On the other hand, they seek to establish a sense of intimacy as though they are “the reader’s friend” (p. 70). Forster notes that the balance is often achieved because, “despite the authoritative even instructional tone of many print magazines which might lead to a sense of one‐sided communication, the personal nature of the content can give a sense of intimate exchange rather than pronouncement” (p. 183). If this does not work, sometimes the editor acknowledges her authority and apologizes for it, an approach that Ostermann and Keller‐Cohen (1997) note is common in teen magazines. “Hate to sound so school‐marmish,” one editor wrote, “but putting guys at the top of your life‐goal list keeps you from getting to know anyone else” (p. 546). Another way to decrease the instructional power distance between the magazine and the reader is to rely on expert advice, which “detaches the editor – who aims at the equalization of her relationship with the reader – from the authoritativeness of the evaluations” (p. 548). Letters to the editor and other types of audience participation, including the interactions between readers and editors that nowadays take place on social media, contribute to the role that most lifestyle magazines want to project: an older sibling or a friend who knows more than you on a certain topic but is still at your emotional and intellectual wavelength. Instructional headlines in contemporary magazines routinely pose “the text producer as leader and the reader as follower” (Lackey 2005, p. 331). Bashford and Strange (2004) argue the magazine “advice column as a vehicle for education was epistemologically close to the face‐to‐face exchange,” yet “not identical” because the print medium blurred instructor and pupils identities (p. 90). Even explicitly instructional periodicals have privileged the elements that are at the core of magazine media – creating and maintaining a strong connection to readers – over didacticism. This prioritization appears to hold true across cultures and across time. For example, in a content analysis of British interwar popular science magazines, Bowler (2016) notes that largest content category consisted of topics of connectedness with “no direct relevance to science or technology” (p. 95), such as societies’ meetings, “readers’ letters and responses, and competitions” (p. 96). Another example of prioritizing elements specific to the magazine form, such as building reader communities, over didacticism is evident in India’s children’s periodicals of the first half of the twentieth century. These periodicals presented themselves as joyful sites of informal and



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interactive education, which contrasted the rote learning and memorization approach to education prevalent in schools. Chandra (2007) writes: As far as possible, the children’s periodicals tried to eschew an “in‐your‐face” didacticism and to view children as sentient beings. Unlike textbooks, they carried feedback. Their pages were filled with animated exchanges between the child readers and the editors, forums for cultivating hobby houses and clubs, and advertisements for nationalist reformist causes such as literacy campaigns and campaigns against purda2 and child marriage. (p. 310)

Editors’ effort to balance authority with a friendly and respectful connection to readers is, however, a fairly modern phenomenon. Some of the earliest examples of magazine advice columns were intended to be like public lectures, “the classic pedagogical encounter between an authority and those seeking or deemed in need of education or moral uplift” (Bashford and Strange 2004, p. 89). This formula was evident in mothering advice offered by popular magazines in the early 1900s. Wrigley (1989) notes that doctors, who wrote the majority of medical advice columns in magazines at the time, “heaped scorn on women’s customary practices in caring for their babies, portraying mothers as foolish and ignorant …Maternal instinct could not serve; rather, mothers had to be instructed by doctors, who backed up their commandments with threats about the consequences of ignoring them” (p. 50). One popular magazine at the time, Woman’s Home Companion, used humiliating baby‐judging contests, where infants and toddlers were publicly evaluated for “conformity with physical norms” (p. 72) to educate parents. By the 1960s, Wrigley writes, “the tone of the advice changed … with many experts reminding parents that they should consult their own good sense to find solutions that would work for them” (p. 66). However, acknowledging the readers’ practical expertise has also been used to wield authority. For example, Proctor and Weaver (2017), in an analysis of the 1940–1963 content of Australian Women’s Weekly, note that “care was taken to point out how capable mothers already were, but … there was information, often described as ‘scientific’, that mothers did not know” (p. 58). The magazine balanced expert advice with readers’ contributions by paying the authors whose letters and stories were selected for publication. The result was “a genre of expertise that deliberately drew its authority from common sense and lived experience” (p. 64). Similarly, in sex advice columns, “publicizing correspondence and providing advice was an authorizing move on the part of the expert: she or he was a sympathetic listener, she or he cared enough to respond, she or he understood, and, most important, she or he had the answers” (Bashford and Strange 2004, p. 87). Some magazines also wield authority by censoring letters on topics that editors perceive as inappropriate for public instruction. Ostermann and Keller‐Cohen (1998) note the example of a Brazilian teen magazine, Capricho, which answers “letters regarding controversial or sensitive topics, such as abortion and AIDS” only “in personal replies to the reader” (p. 536).

Contemporary Adaptations of Magazine Pedagogies Magazines increasingly employ multimodal pedagogical approaches that go well beyond simple instructions on their pages. Digital supplements (apps, videos, podcasts, webinars), tangible objects sent to subscribers, and online quizzes to boost both revenues and the effectiveness of their instruction. Such approaches harness the interactive powers of the internet to simultaneous engage, teach, assess, and redirect readers.

Digital Instructional Tools Instructional videos and smartphone apps are now routine elements of magazine instruction. Architectural Digest posts free instructional videos on topics ranging from “4 Ways to Update Your Sad, Old Couch” to “5 Clever Ways to Modernize a Dated Home with Pattern”

288 Sternadori (Architectural Digest 2018). Yoga Journal’s website features short yoga‐workout videos and yoga‐pose tutorials (Yoga Journal 2018). The websites of Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Seventeen, and other fashion and lifestyle magazines targeting women and adolescent girls contain countless video tutorials on skincare, makeup, and hairstyles. Many such tutorials give visibility to specific products (i.e. a certain brand of makeup) and therefore are akin to instructional advertorials. The publishers likely generate more substantial revenues from product placement than from potentially charging individual users. But when the instruction does not involve a “recommended” product, the user is likely to be asked to be pay, directly or indirectly, for the opportunity to learn practical skills. Some magazines provide instructional supplements as a thank‐you gift that comes with the purchase subscription. Bon Appetit offers access to downloadable recipe books (Bon Appetit 2018), and Watercolor Artist provides a free digital watercolor painting guide to new subscribers (Artists Network 2018). In other cases, a digital supplement is a subscription perk rather than a thank‐you gift. For example, Breathe magazine has a subscriber app promising you can take this “body‐and‐soul guide to a happier, healthier life wherever you go” (Pocketmags.com 2018, n.p.). In other cases, digital instructional tools are additional sources of revenue for niche publishers, in addition to subscriptions and advertising. For example, Writer’s Digest offers on‐ demand instructional webinars through its website, ranging in price from $19.99 to $99.00 on topics ranging from crafting query letters to writing sci‐fi narratives (Writer’s Digest 2018). Outdoor Photographer’s website has a “tips and techniques” section that requires one to pay a separate monthly fee to become a “member” – a perk not included in the magazine subscription (Outdoor Photographer 2018). Family Handyman offers a separate subscription to its “DIY University,” which is chock full of video tutorials (Family Handyman 2018). Creative Knitting, which features knitting patterns in its pages, also sells them online (Creative Knitting 2018).

Tangible Handouts Like the French children’s magazine Pif Gadget, which used to arrive with a novelty toy attached to each issue, some contemporary self‐help magazines surprise their subscribers with gifts intended to further their self‐improvement. Breathe magazine has sent its subscribers inspirational posters and mindfulness puzzles that “have the potential to deliver big highs on the personal achievement front” (Breathe 2018, n.p.). Flow magazine, which highlights positive psychology and mindfulness, promises to send with each issue “a gift made of our much‐loved paper”; examples have included mini‐posters and a mini course workbook (Flow 2018, n.p.). In other cases, the handout is a branded freebie attached to the print issue (a so‐called “covermount gift,” often worth more than the magazine) as part of an outside advertiser’s marketing strategy (Parker 2007). Most magazine covermount gifts, such as a cosmetic product or a toy, serve no direct instructional purpose but may boost the circulation of magazines claiming to provide instruction. Such is the case in the UK preschool magazine market, where “it’s becoming commonplace to see a magazine’s entire front cover and logo completely covered up by a gift” (Riley 2017, n.p.). Other branded gifts, such as a sterilizer set sold with the December 2018 issue of Mother and Baby magazine in the UK (Magic Freebies 2018), arguably may have some instructional value by providing, in this case, a tool to follow hygienic feeding practices.

Assessment and Redirection of Learning A uniquely recent element of magazine (and other mass communicated) pedagogies is the use of quizzes intended to reveal to audience members something that they purportedly do not know about themselves. A tool used by educators to assess and promote learning, the quiz in magazine contexts has appropriated a new meaning associated with frivolity. Examples abound. Googling “Which Sex and the City Character Are You?” returns different versions of the quiz (with different answers) from the websites of Cosmopolitan, Entertainment Weekly, and Hello.



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Other magazine quizzes go beyond entertainment value by claiming to identify one’s alleged shortcomings in appearance, character, or a specific skill, and to provide advice for improvement. For example, Ostermann and Keller‐Cohen (1998) have argued that quizzes in girls’ magazines teach self‐scrutiny and conformity with heterosexual norms of femininity. Some magazine quizzes have true pedagogical value in that they encourage understanding of complex concepts and can be used in classroom settings. Reader’s Digest vocabulary‐building quiz‐style feature, “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,” was a well‐known example of such magazine instruction (Funk 1971). Contemporary examples are web‐based, such as Time magazine’s 2016 grammar “interactive challenge,” which asked readers to insert nine missing apostrophes in a short paragraph and offered explanations of the correct answers as immediate feedback to quiz‐takers (Wilson 2016). In the same vein, a publication for public relations professionals features online Associated Press style quizzes (Platform Magazine 2018), and a magazine for pony enthusiasts has quizzes on winter hoofcare and worming (Pony Magazine 2018). Other professional magazines, such as Fitness Journal and Internal Auditor, recognize the instructional value of quizzes by granting CECs to readers who complete them (American Council on Exercise 2018; Internal Auditor 2018).

Conclusion Magazines are known for binding reader communities and catering to niche interests. But they are also tools of instruction, often in ways more explicit and direct than the mass communication literature has recognized. Unlike newspapers, which [claim to!] write the first draft of history, and television, which prioritizes visual appeal over content, magazines have a long history of offering on‐demand instruction on countless topics through a variety of didactic and pedagogical methods. It would be challenging to find any magazine that does not offer its audience opportunities to acquire some potentially useful skill or piece of knowledge. Even a celebrity magazine like People contains advice sections, such as Health Explainers and People Pet Vet, for ordinary readers. Even a high‐brow magazine like The New Yorker dishes out distilled expertise, in articles such as “How to Ferment Blueberries Like René Redzepi” (Rosner 2018) and sections like “The New Yorker Recommends.” And even a newsmagazine like Newsweek poses and answers practical queries like “What Day is Winter Solstice 2018?” (Georgiu 2018) or “How to Lose Weight: Mindfulness Linked to Shedding Fat” (Gander 2018). In sum, teaching and learning are inherent to the magazine form. Though “magazine” originally meant “storehouse,” magazines are more akin to elective virtual classrooms – sometimes austere, and sometimes full of (metaphorical) posters, storybooks, puzzles, and toys. Any collection of content that does not offer to guide us to a better version of ourselves – socially, intellectually, cognitively, emotionally, financially, professionally, or physically – is unlikely to be recognized as a magazine.

Notes 1 The majority of print magazines aimed at teenage girls in the UK have ceased publishing. 2 The practice of making women wear clothing that fully conceals their bodies and live in a secluded part of the household dwelling.

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22

Magazines and Interpretive Communities Approaching the Commercial Media Fan Magazine Matt Hills

Introduction Writing in Magazine Journalism, Tim Holmes and Liz Nice note that there “can be no pretence that this survey of theory associated with the study of magazines is exhaustive. Recognized omissions include the literature of fan culture, some of which is contiguous with and applicable to magazines” (Holmes and Nice 2012, p. 142). This relative lack of engagement with fandom as a topic is, I would argue, something that has characterized magazine studies more broadly, and one of my aims is to bring fan studies and magazine studies into greater dialog. Media fandom offers one area where audiences have been theorized as “interpretive communities” (Fish 1980; Jenkins 1992), with unofficial fanzines forming part of this analysis. Perhaps surprisingly, though, commercially published and fan‐oriented magazines have been underexplored in fan studies. From Henry Jenkins’ Textual Poachers (1992) onwards, work has tended to focus on fanfiction rather than analyzing commercially published media fan magazines. At the same time, magazine studies have devoted less attention to these kinds of fan‐targeted titles than might be expected, focusing instead on wider issues such as gender identity and gendered magazine publishing/content (Duffy 2013; Forster 2015; Hill 2016; Jackson et al. 2001). Rather than viewing commercial media fan magazines as passive reflections of pre‐established fandoms, in this chapter I will consider how such magazines have acted as community‐building paratexts. This provides a way of addressing “how interpretive communities form” (Gray 2010, p. 33), rather than seeing such communities simply as containers for meaning making. Previous work on commercial media fan magazines has tackled US and UK titles dealing with science fiction, e.g. Starlog/SFX (Jancovich and Hunt 2004; Pierson 2002), or specialist horror titles, such as Famous Monsters of Filmland/The Dark Side (Egan 2007; Rehak 2013; Ritsma 2013). Related work has addressed how “gamer” identities were shaped by UK video game magazines across the 1980s and 1990s (Kirkpatrick 2013, 2015). Following on from this material, I will examine how specialist magazines have inspired and mediated interpretive communities. It should be noted that by focusing on commercial media fan magazines, I am deliberately excluding related types of magazine, such as fanzines and small press titles, which have often flourished around genre‐based communities of fans, sometimes operating via more restricted distribution and a more ‘underground,” semi‐pro remit when compared to wholly commercial titles. Mike Ashley, for instance, has produced an excellent multi‐volume history of science

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

294 Hills fiction magazines (Ashley, 2000, 2016), paying close attention to small press titles, as well as prioritizing pulp/literary SF magazines. By contrast, my focus is on commercially produced magazines targeted at media fandom – a grouping based around a cluster of film/TV genres (horror, fantasy, and science fiction) and franchises such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. Such ­magazines have tended to focus on cult film or “telefantasy” (Johnson 2005), and as such they can be distinguished from previous generations of “fan magazines” that tended instead to cater for fans of Hollywood celebrities (Higashi 2014). In the second part of this chapter, I will build on my own prior work (Hills 2010) by ­examining Doctor Who Magazine (DWM) as a case study, having offered some examples of its operation in earlier parts of my analysis. Publishing continuously since 11 October 1979, when it began life as Doctor Who Weekly, DWM has, in fact, inspired its own fanzine, Vworp Vworp!, which celebrated its 500th issue with a one‐day fan event in May 2016, and has been the subject of DVD documentaries, e.g. Myth Makers: Doctor Who Magazine (Briggs 2016). It was also recognized with a Guinness world record in 2010 as the “world’s longest‐running magazine based on a television series” (Doctor Who News 2010). Rather than merely serving an interpretive community formed elsewhere, DWM has mediated “fan club” (or Appreciation Society) approaches to the show for a wider readership. In addition, it has periodically conducted major polls (in 1998, 2009, and 2014), inviting readers to vote on extant Who stories, with these collated fan scores then producing an all‐time “league table” of Doctor Who on TV (see McKee 2001; Hills 2015, p. 53). DWM has thus played an active role in shaping how fans respond to the TV series and its spin‐offs (Booy 2012), alongside influencing how Who fandom understands itself. I will begin by returning to foundational definitions of “interpretive community” (Fish 1980). How can we theorize these sorts of magazine titles as simultaneously reacting to pre‐existent fan communities and giving rise to their own interpretive community of readers? How might magazine journalists (and especially journalist‐fans) themselves be analyzed as an interpretive community? And given that my focus is on commercial fan magazines, what does this mean for the way in which fandom is addressed as an “insider” group or subculture?

Journalist‐Fans’ “Double‐Time” and the Role of Subcultural Capital The concept of interpretive community was introduced in literary theory by Stanley Fish. For Fish, the concept does away with debates over the objectivity of textual attributes versus the subjectivity of interpretation, since it is interpretive communities… that produce meanings and are responsible for the emergence of formal features. Interpretive communities are made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading but for writing texts, for constituting their properties. In other words, these strategies exist prior to the act of reading and therefore determine the shape of what is read. (Fish 1980, p. 14)

However, Fish clarifies that “those who share interpretive strategies” suggests… individuals can stand apart from the ­communities to which they now and then belong. […But] since the thoughts an individual can think and the mental operations he can perform have their source in some or other interpretive community, he is as much a product of that community… as the meanings it enables him to ­produce. (Fish 1980, p. 14)

An interpretive community thus cannot simply be chosen at will and is instead embedded in the very ways in which people “make” or produce texts as intelligible. It is not merely a matter



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of how texts are “read” – in this case, how we might read a specialist magazine – but rather ­concerns the ways in which texts are constituted as possessing, or seeming to possess, specific “properties.” In terms of commercial media fan magazines, these are recognized by an interpretive community of producers and consumers as part of the “paratextual industries” (Consalvo 2007, p. 84) – that is, as part of the array of bits of meaning, promotion, and (p)reviewing that orbit around media franchises (Johnson 2013). The notion of paratexts, initially offering a way of thinking about book covers, prefaces, and the like (Genette 1997), has become central to theorizing the contemporary operations of media hype (Gray 2010). Paratexts can be defined as all the materials that work to frame texts, whether at their boundaries (such as the aforementioned book covers and prefaces), or at a distance (for instance, publicity interviews with authors/stars). When they are operating normatively, official or sanctioned paratexts tend to reinforce brand values and producers’ preferred textual readings. Commercial media fan magazines have been interpreted as displaying these brand‐reinforcing properties, with some scholars expressing concern about their lack of independence from the productions and producers they cover, and the extent to which they may act as naturalized, paratextual PR for brands rather than as sources of critically detached coverage (Sanjek 2008). Interpretive community has been an influential concept, used to understand the labor of both journalists and fans. Barbie Zelizer (1993, 2017) has argued that approaching journalism only as a profession fails to perceive how its “communities arise less through rigid indicators of training or education… and more through the informal associations that build up around shared interpretations” (Zelizer 2017, p. 179). She suggests that “viewing journalism as an interpretive community accommodates double‐time positioning as a necessary given” (2017, p. 181), arguing that journalistic practice combines a “local mode of interpretation… [where] journalists’ authority is assumed to derive from their presence at events and the ideology of eyewitness authenticity” (2017) with a “durational mode of interpretation… [where] they position the critical incident in collective memory” (2017, p. 182). Yet, this appears to conflate the concept of the journalistic interpretive community with the work of “hard” news reporting alone. Do magazine journalists, working on specialist titles such as commercial media fan magazines, also display such “double‐time positioning”? Up to a point, perhaps: despite being unable to compete with blogs and immediate online responses to breaking franchise news (McWhirter 2016), specialist magazines retain a focus on exclusivity and timing  –  seeking to break news stories that other outlets have not had access to (and which can be provided by brand managers) (Lynge‐Jorlén 2017, p. 116). In the same vein, commercial media fan magazines are often granted behind‐the‐scenes access, which is valued by their fan readers (Hunt 2003). In addition, they often look back at past film installments and TV series, seeking to place franchise events in the fan‐cultural memory, or what myself and Joanne Garde‐Hansen have recently analyzed as “paratextual memory” (Hills and Garde‐Hansen 2017). However, it may be problematic to assume that journalism – whether of the “hard” investigative type or a supposedly “softer” consumerist kind – can be equated with any singular interpretive community, as Zelizer seems to imply. Instead, it remains more plausibly the case that journalism can be viewed as a field marked by center and periphery; inherent to it is a miasma of competing approaches towards journalistic ends. … the journalistic field is shaped by contestations over what it is to belong to the field, and according to whose judgements… Contests over what it means to be a ‘journalist” and do “journalism,” and how such determinations are made, are not straightforward. (Eldridge 2018, pp. 180–181)

Thus combining fan identity with “doing” journalism, as writers for commercial media fan magazines tend to (Jancovich and Hunt 2004, pp. 29–30), can call into question one’s journalistic credentials and belonging. This challenge is present in David Rowe’s work, which curtly poses

296 Hills the question of professional journalism: “Fourth estate or fan club?” (Rowe 2005, p. 125). In Rowe’s argument, the “construction of the journalist‐as‐fan makes critical, reflective commentary difficult … the rationality associated with journalism and modernity is in conflict with the subjectivist… tribalism of fan discourse” (Rowe 2005, p. 133). This attempts to banish the journalist‐fan, as “interloper,” to the periphery of the journalistic field, distanced from the core values of “hard” news journalism at the field’s center (Eldridge 2018, p. 180). As such, it reveals journalists’ interpretive community to be stratified rather than monolithic, separated into (­allegedly authentic) “core” and (relatively devalued) “fringe” components. However, Rowe’s argument hinges on aligning fandom with “subjectivist… tribalism” versus the supposedly objectivist, rational accounts of proper journalistic enquiry – a binary that the interpretive community concept itself has undermined and exposed as a false debate (Fish 1980, p. 14). Far from being subjectivist, fandom can – akin to journalism – also be theorized as an interpretive community, a move made by Henry Jenkins in Textual Poachers: A certain common ground, a set of shared assumptions, interpretive and rhetorical strategies, ­inferential moves… must exist as preconditions for meaningful debate over specific interpretations [in academia]. The same may be said for fandom where interpretive conventions are less rigidly defined or precisely followed than within the academy, yet are accepted nevertheless as a necessary basis for fan discussion. (Jenkins 1992, p. 89)

As a result, there can be a communally endorsed and naturalized “right way” (Jenkins 1992, p. 88) of interpreting as a fan. Jenkins takes a positive view of this scenario, stressing that Such an interpretive community does not foreclose idiosyncratic differences in interpretation and evaluation… Fans thrive on debate and differences in opinion must be perpetuated so that the ­process of interpreting an otherwise completed narrative (a canceled series, an individual film) may be prolonged. (1992, p. 88)

While such a stance emphasizes the value of fan debate, it can be counter‐argued that fandom’s conventional norms of interpretation lead to sections of fandom being othered, policed, and symbolically attacked. Interpretive community’s norms need to be constantly re‐produced and shored up, resulting in “fractured fandoms” (Reinhard 2018), where kinds of fan reading are marginalized and excluded, just as notions of “good” journalism hinge on marginalizing “soft” or non‐critical, non‐independent consumerist/fan variants. Mark Jancovich and Nathan Hunt have demonstrated how “one of Britain’s biggest‐selling science fiction fan magazines” (Jancovich and Hunt 2004, p. 29), SFX, was launched in 1995 via a discourse equating its ­journalists with (projected) fan readers (Jancovich and Hunt 2004, pp. 29–30). However, it then went on to police putatively “bad” fandom in a variety of (often gendered) ways. For example, SFX used its letters page not to avoid foreclosing “idiosyncratic differences in interpretation,” in Jenkins’ optimistic formulation, but rather to marginalize fans for “fancying” cast members, despite the fact that magazines like SFX clearly use the pinup potential of stars such as Sarah Michelle Gellar as a means of increasing sales. The derision of those who “fancy” cast members suggests that sexual attraction should not be the primary terms of [textual] evaluation. (Jancovich and Hunt 2004, p. 33)

SFX’s magazine journalists – whether freelancers or salaried staff – were positioned as “true” fans whose performed fan identity was presumed to mirror that of the desired, “authentic” fan readership: “the editors present themselves as fans talking to fans and simultaneously police the authenticity of their readership. …These magazines address the ‘genuine’ insider” (Jancovich and Hunt 2004, pp. 29–30). One marker of fan authenticity was that the magazine’s producers and consumers needed to not be “seen as taking things too seriously,” with one letter arguing



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that all too “often fans of the science fiction oeuvre come across as anoraks of the highest order… And this, I feel, is what keeps the genre so ghettoized in the eyes of the masses – Trekkers and Whovians will always be treated as cretins because they take it all too seriously!” (in Jancovich and Hunt 2004, p. 32). At the same time as seeking to rule out the “wrong” way of doing fandom, this statement also displays a concern with how “the masses” perceive science fiction fans – i.e. that rather than being “ghettoised,” fans should be appreciated, welcomed even, by the cultural mainstream. This perspective is intriguing because it has commonly been argued that fans seek to construct a subcultural difference from the mainstream – indeed, this is a position adopted by Jancovich and Hunt (2004, p. 32), who suggest that SFX journalists and readers are both mirrored and simultaneously contrasted to a shifting variety of “mainstream” identities. And yet, an aspect of SFX’s foundational discourse is that fandom should not be antithetical to “the masses.” There is a sense of fandom becoming just as much a discursive “shifter” as “the mainstream,” enabling versions of commercial culture to be othered at the same time as fan identity is rendered valuable and permeable to “the mainstream” rather than being “ghettoised.” It is perhaps not so surprising that “professionalised fans” (Hills 2002, pp. 39–40) working for a commercial media fan magazine would not want to entirely “other” mainstream, commercial culture when their title depends, at least in part, on advertising revenue, and on maintaining positive relations with an array of media companies, distributors and publishers. And, of course, titles like SFX, Starburst, or Sci‐Fi Now also need to keep an eye on the possibility of bringing in new readers via coverage of the most popular and mainstream(ed) SF texts/franchises of the day. As Holmes and Nice rightly note, “specialised publications may both feed and feed off the targeted subculture; they may help to build a community and also to bring in what might be called ‘fringers’ who will dilute, or at least change, that community” (Holmes and Nice 2012, p. 142). Hence, there is a distinctive “double‐time” to the interpretive community of commercially minded journalist‐fans: they need to respect the temporality of long‐term fans, who are ­committed readers and even collectors of a magazine title, as well as welcome new fans and readers – those so‐called “fringers” or newbies who can prevent a specialist magazine from stagnating. Rather than scaring off “outsiders,” I would argue that the emphasis on “authentic” fandom in magazines such as SFX and DWM can also be read as an effort to tutor “fringers” into the established interpretive community, thereby preventing it from being too radically decentered or reconstituted (something that could threaten the loss of long‐term subscribers and readers). Indeed, just such a moment recently occurred in Doctor Who Magazine, where a new generation of younger fans and readers, represented through a feature known as the ‘Time Team,” in which old episodes are re‐watched and analyzed, attacked an infamous 1970s story, “The Talons of Weng‐Chiang,” for its racism. The Time Team presented a highly critical and social-justice oriented reading of the story; this stance was (re)contextualized by DWM’s editor Marcus Hearn in his Editorial (Hearn 2018), not so as to undermine or undercut the Time Team (which he had, in fact, championed), but rather to potentially placate the magazine’s established interpretive community of (older) long‐term readers. Hearn’s editorship is thus necessarily marked by a professional journalistic “double‐time” here: he needs to genuinely welcome and support a new generation of readers, while also sustaining the magazine’s established interpretive community. As a professional journalist‐fan, Hearn’s commercial duty lies not to one constituency of readers or another (defending/undermining the youthful Time Team), but instead to DWM’s established interpretive community and simultaneously to new generational “differences in interpretation and evaluation” (Jenkins 1992, p. 88) entering its pages. Rather than a kind of “purified” reading community (Pittard 2007, p. 2), where fan “insiders” and “outsiders” must be vigorously separated out, there is a sense here of fandom being accepted, and even promoted, as multiple and diverse – not necessarily just as a matter of inclusive fan‐cultural politics, but also as

298 Hills a part of the professional journalistic imperative to maximize sales and readership. As DWM ­columnist Jacqueline Rayner has observed, the paradoxical result is “like the friendliest exclusive club in the world… [walking] the tightrope between the most obscure trivia and… overviews and explanations” (Rayner 2016, p. 55). More so than “generic” magazine titles, presumably of the kind used to fill time within routines of everyday life (Hermes 1995), specialist magazines have been argued to give rise to “brand communities” of loyal readers: “research shows that the concept of imagined community is prevalent among readers of specialty magazines. It is common for readers of specialty magazines to perceive of themselves as belonging to a community of readers who share a connection through their shared appreciation for the brand and for the hobby or interest” (Davidson et al. 2007, p. 215). Such magazine “brand fans” (Linden and Linden 2017, p. 12) and communities can be demarcated both by “physical attachment” to titles, with readers collecting and keeping physical copies for many years, and “emotional attachment” (Davidson et al. 2007, p. 213) to the extent that committed fan readers will still buy a magazine issue even if they know they’ll actually have no time to read any of it. However, specialist magazines’ brand communities have been distinguished from the ­subcultures that such titles serve and seek to mirror (de Burgh‐Woodman and Brace‐Govan 2007, p. 205). Subcultures can involve focused consumption without being reducible to ­consumerism, forming instead through “socially and historically embedded values” (de Burgh‐ Woodman and Brace‐Govan 2007, p. 193). It is, therefore, important to distinguish not only a “double‐time” of professional magazine journalism‐fandom, but also a doubling of these magazines’ interpretive community, which can operate at the level of reader loyalty and “brand community” as well as at the broader level of “subcultural fandom” (Lothian 2013, p. 545). Although these levels can be closely related in the case of commercial media fan magazines, it remains important to separate them out – being a “brand fan” of Doctor Who Magazine involves distinct knowledges when compared with being a Doctor Who fan per se, for instance. Of course, the two can overlap in certain ways, e.g. through the importance of Doctor Who Magazine – or Doctor Who Monthly as it then was – printing a list of episodes missing from the BBC Archive in its 1981 Winter Special, a paratext which reverberated through fandom as a whole (Hills and Garde‐Hansen 2017, p. 161). Specialist magazines such as commercial media fan titles tend to mediate what has been termed, following the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, “subcultural capital,” or capital conferring “status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder” (Thornton 1995, p. 11). Video ­gaming magazines have been analyzed as a form of circulating “gaming capital” (Consalvo 2007, p. 20), for example, just as high‐end fashion magazines have been said to promulgate “fashion capital” (Lynge‐Jorlén 2017, p. 107). But such magazines’ mediation of subcultural capital is not always straightforward, especially given that this capital can itself take varied forms, whether “­mundane” or “transgressive”  –  reinforcing or challenging subcultural norms (Kahn‐Harris 2007, p. 127) – or “concave” as opposed to “convex,” that is, positioning a “mainstream” element within the subcultural domain (i.e. “mainstream fan practice”) or as purely external to it (fandom versus “the mainstream”) (Hannerz 2015, p. 35). As Nathan Hunt has pointed out, “these media are often immersed in the subcultures to which they sell themselves. Readers often aspire to be journalists, just as the journalists … profess their allegiances to various fan factions” (Hunt 2003, p. 189). But as subcultural capital can splinter across fan factions, this fragmentation calls into question which versions are consecrated by magazines as fan‐cultural intermediaries. Mia Consalvo notes that although “possessing ­gaming capital is supposed to be about game players’ superior playing abilities and knowledge…, it is often through the consumption of paratexts… [that] this knowledge can be gained” (Consalvo 2007, p. 38). Fan cultural capital, as a kind of subcultural capital, is similar; though some degree can be accumulated purely by consuming the franchise/text concerned, it is also  to a ­ considerable degree paratextual, again lending magazines a significant role.



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Commercial media fan magazines thus face the challenge of “keeping the paratext cool enough to convey… essential… capital, without making it seem too didactic” (Consalvo 2007, p. 39). This risks making the display of subcultural capital too overt, positioning readers as lacking in capital and in need of tutoring, rather than as initiates who can always‐already recognize subcultural capital. The “double‐time” of magazine journalist‐fandom also plays out in relation to subcultural capital, then, as didactic and naturalized forms of subcultural capital both need to be incorporated into the magazine’s content. There is an element of didactic subcultural capital, for instance, in Marcus Hearn’s DWM editorial when he suggests that you can’t judge the past by the standards of the present… while we can watch episodes of vintage television at the touch of a button, what we can’t do is recreate the era in which they were broadcast… Many… films have been locked in a section of the archive marked “problematic”, making it harder for a young, modern audience to appreciate what [scriptwriter Robert] Holmes’ pastiche was attempting to subvert [in 1976’s “Talons of Weng‐Chiang”]… If you haven’t seen… [the story] I urge you to watch it.(Hearn 2018, p. 3)

But this highly visible and didactic subcultural cultural capital is unusual, occasioned by the youthful Time Team’s reading of “Talons,” which is felt to be out of line with the naturalized subcultural capital typically mediated by DWM. Having begun to utilize examples from Doctor Who Magazine, I will now move on to focus more explicitly on this commercial media fan magazine. How has this title, running since 1979, when it was conceptualized as a children’s weekly title, helped to form interpretive communities at the level of magazine “brand fans” and in relation to the Who fandom more generally? I will argue that DWM tutored fans in how to read Doctor Who aesthetically, thus helping to solidify fans’ interpretive community. Yet, the magazine has also benefited from the very interpretive community it helped to popularize, as editors and post‐2005 TV showrunners have latterly shared a fan interpretive community even while working in very different sections of the media franchise and different (para)textual “production communities” (Johnson 2013, p. 123). Unusually, the fannish interpretive community has smoothed over tensions between the magazine as a licensed paratext and the centralized practices of BBC brand management. Alongside magazine producers mirroring their title’s fan consumers, magazine, and TV producers have also mirrored one another’s fan identities.

The Case of Doctor Who Magazine: Teaching Interpretive Community and the Role of Intra‐Franchise Fandom Between 1979 and today, DWM has gone through several different incarnations, much like the TV show it elaborates upon. In its initial phase as Doctor Who Weekly (1979–1980), the Marvel UK magazine was ostensibly aimed at children but actually found an older readership. Miles Booy’s analysis (2012, pp. 27–29) argues that it explicitly targeted 10‐year‐olds (or thereabouts) while implicitly addressing older Doctor Who fans and “UK comics’ fandom” at the same time via features and a comic strip written and drawn by the likes of Pat Mills, Alan Moore, and Dave Gibbons. After its sales figures fell from 153 747 for the launch editor Dez Skinn’s Issue 1 to “fewer than 60,000 by Issue 34,” then‐editor Paul Neary came under pressure to reduce running costs: “The only way I could see to keep the magazine going was by making it monthly, but not making a proportionate increase in the number of comic strip pages. This saved us about £1000 per issue, and gave us a stay of execution” (Uncredited 2016a, p. 9). From 1980 to 1984, the title became Doctor Who Monthly, but it changed again at the behest of Managing Director Robert Sutherland, who “felt that if we were paying ‘all this money to the BBC’, we should milk  that for all it was worth. …So we added ‘The Official’ […Magazine] to the masthead” (Alan McKenzie in Uncredited 2016c, p. 17).

300 Hills It should be noted that the history of the magazine has very much been narrated in fan media (e.g. the fanzine Vworp Vworp!, published irregularly in 2009, 2011, and 2017), according to editorial eras, with Marvel and then Panini executives occasionally being named, as Sutherland is here, but typically without managing directors, or other execs, being interviewed, photographed, or discussed in any detail. Editors are the personalized “faces” of Doctor Who Magazine’s fan history, posited as sites of (usually positive) agency, while managers (and BBC Publicity) remain shadowy, othered figures who provide a depersonalized backdrop of industry constraint (Uncredited 2016h, p. 90; 2016i, p. 93). This discursive framing is shared with the way telefantasy has been understood by fans as a matter of personalized producer‐creators versus impersonal TV networks/corporations (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995, p. 189). In Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience from 1979 to the Present, Miles Booy offers a convincing reading of elements of DWM’s formation and development. He focuses on the work of Jeremy Bentham of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS). Bentham was brought onboard by the first editor, Dez Skinn, as a source of detailed Who expertise and ­photographic materials, given that the BBC in 1979 was an expensive source of images and not really geared up to respond to a weekly title’s demands (Skinn in Uncredited 2016a, p. 9). From the very beginning of Doctor Who Weekly, then, although the magazine was led by a ­magazine‐journalist “layman” in terms of knowledge about the TV series, it was already significantly ­articulated with organized fandom and high‐level “executive” fans (Tulloch and Jenkins 1995, p. 149). Bentham’s role became more visible over time as he contributed features and interviews: Bentham’s analysis of the programme’s aesthetic was rooted in authorship, with every effect and nuance understood to be rooted in the work of a BBC employee somewhere off‐screen. The reviews were complemented by interviews with every technician, performer, designer or title‐sequence ­creator Bentham could find… Through DWM, Jeremy Bentham was teaching fans the arts of ­analysis. (Booy 2012, pp. 53 and 58)

Bentham’s articles and interviews were a key part in the formation of an interpretive community around DWM, and, indeed, this prototypical “brand community” expanded out into more generalized norms of fan interpretation. Bentham was connecting fan cultural capital with another kind of cultural capital that was linked to auteurism – the notion that a movie should reflect a director’s vision. This modus operandi was popularizing an interpretive mode that, pre‐1979, would have been somewhat more restricted to DWAS publications. A “fan club” approach was being integrated into successful commercial magazine journalism, with fans of DWM later ­narrating their passion in terms of being taught how to read as a fan: I first fell in love with Doctor Who …not via the programme on the telly… but with the printed word. The Target novelisations, the Making of Doctor Who, and… the… Programme Guide. So it’s wholly appropriate that I saved my real passion for the show for the magazine. …It wasn’t your typical comic. Most of it was text, for a start… I honestly believe that it was not in my English classes that I  learned how to approach studying literature, but via Jeremy Bentham’s thoughtful appraisals. (Shearman 2009, p. 12)

The magazine, for such devotees, was a source of learning – not just accumulating facts and trivia about Doctor Who, through which to assert a sense of fan ownership over the show (Hunt 2003)  –  but more than that, learning “the right way” to interpret Who. As Graham Kibble‐ White observes in Vworp Vworp!’s celebration of DWM’s 30th anniversary: “DWM rapidly schooled me in… TV journalism (and that’s what I do for a living now). It was within its pages I learnt about producers, directors, script editors. To be honest, by issue… 105, the comic‐strip was less important to me. Gimme the facts” (Kibble‐White 2009, p. 14).



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Lincoln Geraghty has argued that fan letters (he is discussing Star Trek fan magazines) can offer a “network of support” for fans, particularly tackling emotional issues such as bereavement, which may otherwise fall outside the parameters of fan appreciation and consumption (2007, p. 89). But the “network of support” offered to Doctor Who fandom by DWM was predominantly interpretive and (para)textual rather than emotional. Whereas we now “take it for granted that a new Doctor Who producer will explain his aesthetic preferences in glossy magazines which can be found in [the UK’s high street newsagent chain] WH Smiths” (Booy 2012, p. 56), in the early 1980s such weekly or monthly paratexts “consolidating the BBC’s ‘programme brand’” (Jowett 2017, p. 117) remained an interpretive innovation. Booy goes so far as to describe Doctor Who fans tout court, growing up in the 1970s and 1980s with novelizations, making‐of books and DWM, as “children of the Word” (2012, p. 189), ­ ­suggesting it was no accident that when “Doctor Who returned [in 2005], the writers of its opening season… were drawn from Who fandom and spin‐off novels. Its directors were not” (2012). The subfandom of DWM is thus assumed to be literary in outlook, with DWM offering up a lit‐crit and TV‐journo “training” for its fan interpretive community. With this, magazine s­ ubfandom subsequently blurs out into a wider fan circulation of “literary” cultural capital. Jonathan Morris puts it bluntly: the “­magazine taught its readers how to be fans” (Morris 2016, p. 22). However, this by‐now ossified fan‐cultural account – where the televisual is subsumed into a traditional, conservative bid for “wordy” (and middle‐class) cultural status – overlooks the significance of design and images within DWM, as well as for its emergent interpretive community. Such a historical narrative reduces the magazine to “text” alone, as if its images and comic strips were somehow not serious enough, threatening to taint fandom with childish frivolity. Graham Kibble‐White, for example, argues that the comic‐strip became “less important” (Kibble‐White 2009, p.  14) as he began to learn to focus on production “facts” and aesthetics/authorship instead. By contrast, some of Doctor Who Weekly’s early fans were undoubtedly part of “UK comics’ fandom,” as Booy has posited (2012, p. 29), and the comic strips, far from being filler getting in the way of “the Word” of fannish analysis, were actually the primary content for some readers, sometimes being viewed as superior to the TV show of the time (Sutherland 2009, p. 17). Jonathan Morris, who would go on to write strips for DWM, has recounted: I absolutely… adore the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip. …After all, when I became a fan, the TV series was something that was only available to me for twenty‐six nights a year; the comic strip was something that could be revisited – and re‐absorbed – again and again and again. …For years the comic strip was the only reason I bought the magazine. (Morris 2009, p. 18)

Doctor Who’s showrunner from 2005 to 2009, Russell T. Davies, himself an accomplished visual artist, has also lionized the early Doctor Who Weekly strips: “as for those first four Mills and Wagner comic strips… well, sometimes I think, dare I say… best Doctor Who ever?” (Davies 2016, p. 3). Likewise, TV screenwriter and comics writer Paul Cornell, named by Miles Booy as one of the supposed fan “children of the Word,” celebrates the “Tides of Time” comic strip in Issue 2 of Vworp Vworp!: “[Steve] Parkhouse leaves Dave Gibbons an amazing amount of room to tell the story in design… No careful placing of reference and in‐joke here, it’s a plunge into the cosmic deep end” (Cornell 2011, p. 19). Indeed, Vworp Vworp! derives its name from the onomatopoeia characteristically used in the DWM comic strip to approximate the (de)materialization sound effect used on television for the Doctor’s time‐traveling vessel, the TARDIS. Like the visual appearance of Gallifrey’s Capitol city, first featured as an illustration for DWM’s “Gallifrey Guardian” news page before being incorporated into the BBC Wales’ TV series (Morris 2016, p. 22), “vworp vworp” has become established among fans as a marker of DWM’s place within fan‐cultural history. It is a

302 Hills part of subcultural “tradition” along with the “X… is the Doctor” cover splash (Spilsbury in Uncredited 2016i, p. 93), and hence it is also a part of fandom’s “sustained cultural heritage” (de Burgh‐Woodman and Brace‐Govan 2007, p. 194) rather than just being a matter of brand community. DWM thus cannot be reduced to the crafting of a “literary” or “printed Word”‐based fan interpretive community. Its combination of imaginative comic strip storytelling (Parkin 2009, p. 16) and production analysis/archiving (Kirkley 2017, p. 11; Pixley 2009, p. 65) means that it has a sustained visual or “design‐oriented fandom” (Rehak 2018, p. 54) as well as an analytical/trivia‐collecting fan interpretive community. Indeed, this should not be viewed as a rigid binary, given that many fans can and do move seamlessly across these word–image terrains. Yet, it is striking that some commentary has tended to stress “the Word” over comic strip visuality (Booy 2012, p. 189). Emphasizing DWM as a training ground for literary‐style criticism of the TV series has seemingly offered an historically clearer route to (fan‐)cultural validation in comparison to emphasizing the magazine’s design visuals or comic strip art. This is so despite the reality that the magazine stimulated “creativity in people [more generally]. They may go off and become writers, or actors, or artists – and the magazine is part of that. …You have very clever, very detailed articles for those who are of a scholarly bent… But also Doctor Who Magazine has a great artistic flavour to it. It’s about endeavour” (Peter Capaldi in Cook 2016, p. 18). I noted earlier how DWM editors have been discursively pitted against usually shadowy forces of brand/magazine management. But what one of DWM’s editors, Clayton Hickman, refers to as the “Doctor Who mafia” (cited in Hills 2010, p. 54) has provided a counter‐narrative to this conflict with regards to the “new” (BBC Wales’) Who. Here, fan interpretive community (and communal fan identity/history) cuts across TV production and magazine production, with journalist‐fans and showrunner‐fans sharing fan cultural capital. Hickman notes that he already knew Russell T. Davies before Davies became showrunner; Davies was thus a source of help when it came time for Hickman to feature the new (ninth) Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston, on the magazine’s cover, and again when Hickman needed to arrange an interview with Eccleston (Hickman in Uncredited 2016e, p. 58). Likewise, DWM’s editor through the latter Davies and Steven Moffat eras, Tom Spilsbury, has discussed how Davies warded off possible tensions with BBC Worldwide over a fannishly and playfully reworked DWM logo which may well have infringed on branding guidelines (Uncredited 2016f, p. 71). Meanwhile, Moffat helped to defuse a dispute over the use of supposedly unapproved cast photos with BBC Picture Publicity (Spilsbury in Uncredited 2016g, p. 82). In these cases, fan interpretive community has operated between representatives of different sectors of the creative industries (magazine/TV ­production) and different franchise “production communities” (Johnson 2013, p. 123), rather than merely being mirrored between DWM’s producers and consumers, as the more conventional argument would state (Lynge‐Jorlén 2017, p. 140). This intra‐franchise fan interpretive community can be linked to earlier moments in DWM’s history. When Doctor Who returned as a (Fox‐BBC) TV movie in 1996, there was no such “intermediary relationship” (Lynge‐Jorlén 2017) between key BBC personnel and DWM’s editorial team. Despite being an “official” publication and licensee, DWM found itself out in the cold, only securing set access to filming in Vancouver, when the TV movie’s producer Philip Segal (himself a Who fan) noted DWM’s support for the project and smoothed things over with the BBC just as Davies and Moffat would later go on to do (Gary Gillatt in Uncredited 2016d, p. 39). TV industry norms of brand management have developed greatly across DWM’s history, from a scenario in 1979, when the BBC seemingly had little sense of how to support a commercial magazine operation, let alone capitalize on its presence (Uncredited 2016a, p. 9), through a phase when DWM became far more about fans’ “social experience” and a “lifestyle” representation of fandom linked to other forms of (sports/pop) media consumption (Kilburn 2017, p. 167), to a contemporary situation in which brand control has become a highly significant factor. Indeed,



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Russell T. Davies recounted in 2016 celebrations of DWM’s 500th issue that when the show came back in 2005, the BBC had considered bringing the magazine under in‐house control: BBC Drama and BBC Publicity had never worked with an official magazine. Nowadays, it’s their heart’s desire, but back then, it would have been easier to sweep DWM away and reduce it to a poster magazine, except… I can say this now… DWM survived because of me. I fought tooth and nail to keep this magazine intact, important and independent. (Davies 2016, p. 3)

By “poster magazine,” Davies seems to allude to a title stripped of in‐depth content and reduced to PR gloss – though the word/image binary plays a role here again, curiously, in legitimating DWM as a “critical” commercial fan magazine versus the devalued alternative of image‐based superficiality. This struggle between centralized (BBC Worldwide) brand management and the “independent” DWM criticism of Doctor Who flared up again in 2017 when Private Eye reported in its “Media News” section that Irked by the increasing independence of the title and its willingness to allow contributors to criticize Worldwide’s hunger to cash in on the series…, the corporation’s commercial arm seized on anti‐ Brexit and Trump comments by interviewees as evidence of political bias in the magazine. This is a strict no‐no for BBC magazines, and Worldwide instigated a full inquiry. (Private Eye 2017, p. 15)

The story was occasioned by the fact that a column in DWM (The Watcher 2017, p. 82) had been “crafted… as an acrostic, with the first letters of each sentence forming the words: ‘PANINI AND BBC WORLDWIDE ARE CUNTS’” (Private Eye 2017, p. 15), something that had been missed by the editorial team. Such tensions between BBC brand management and the magazine (whose ownership had shifted from Marvel to Panini in 1995) have never spilled so radically into the open before, despite 1980s producer John Nathan‐Turner demanding that an issue be pulped when it misspelled the name of incoming lead actor Peter Davison as “Peter Davidson” in a cover splash (Alan McKenzie in Uncredited 2016b, p. 15). Yet, such increased efforts at exerting brand control leave DWM’s established interpretive community, and subfandom, at odds with such practices. As then‐editor Tom Spilsbury remarked in 2016, prior to The Watcher’s dismissal under Marcus Hearn’s editorship: we’re in the completely unique position of being a licensed magazine that is allowed to have its own voice. So when our reviewer is critical of modern TV episodes – with apologies to… The Rings of Akhaten or In the Forest of the Night – you know that we’ve never been censored by anyone at the BBC. That’s vital. (Tom Spilsbury in Uncredited 2016k, p. 109)

For now, that position appears to have been maintained. The interpretive community that DWM has cultivated over more than 30 years is one that values, even expects, fan critique (Morris 2016, p. 23), and displacing this commentary with remorselessly on‐brand content would greatly weaken DWM as a commercial proposition. Its once again doubled position  –  both “­official” and meaningfully “independent” – is a hangover from its publication history, and from the fact that it has drawn on, and helped to shape, the very fandom that is now enmeshed within intra‐franchise (magazine/TV) production communities. By virtue of the fandom being ­collaboratively shared between DWM editors and showrunners (Spilsbury in Uncredited 2016j, p. 105), tensions surrounding the magazine’s “independence” have been assuaged through its dependence on interpretive community. In this chapter, I have argued that we need to think about how journalists, fans, and ­journalist‐fans can all be theorized as constituting interpretive communities. Like journalists more generally (Zelizer 1993, 2017), journalist‐fans display a “double‐time” oriented around commercially serving both new fans and well‐established subscribers/readers. This results in

304 Hills subcultural capital (Jancovich and Hunt 2004; Thornton 1995) not merely being constructed as a marker of fan authenticity (versus the “mainstream”), but also being didactically conveyed to newcomers. Fandom is not assumed to be wholly constituted by “insider” status, but is instead approached and imagined commercially as very much permeable (to new generations, new entrants, and new ways of reading). At the same time, readers need to be tutored in the norms of a shared interpretive community. By focusing on Doctor Who Magazine (1979–) as an unusually long‐running title, I have shown how fannish interpretive community is not only mirrored between specialist magazine producers and consumers (Lynge‐Jorlén 2017, p. 135), but can also be shared by media professionals placed within a franchise’s different textual and paratextual production communities. Approaching and theorizing commercial media fan magazines can enable us to consider the multiple, diverse ways in which the concept of interpretive community operates when professional and fan identities are interwoven in today’s pervasively mediated culture, and when the “literature of fan culture” becomes not just “contiguous with and applicable to magazines” (Holmes and Nice 2012, p. 142), but a vital part of specialist magazine production and consumption.

References Ashley, M. (2000). The Time Machines: The Story of the Science‐Fiction Pulp Magazines from the Beginning to 1950 – the History of the Science‐Fiction Magazine Volume I. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Ashley, M. (2016). Science Fiction Rebels: The Story of the Science‐Fiction Magazines from 1981 to 1990 – the History of the Science‐Fiction Magazine Volume IV. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Booy, M. (2012). Love and Monsters: The Doctor Who Experience from 1979 to the Present I. London: B. Tauris. de Burgh‐Woodman, H. and Brace‐Govan, J. (2007). We do not live to buy: why subcultures are different from brand communities and the meaning for marketing discourse. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 27 (5/6): 193–207. Briggs, N. (director) (2016). Myth Makers: Doctor Who Magazine – Celebrating 500 Issues, DVD boxset. London: Reeltime Pictures. Consalvo, M. (2007). Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press. Cook, B. (2016). Doctor Who magazine has a great artistic flavour…. Doctor Who Magazine 500: 16–18. Cornell, P. (2011). Long ago in an English summer. Vworp Vworp! 2: 19. Davidson, L., McNeill, L., and Ferguson, S. (2007). Magazine communities: brand community formation in magazine consumption. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 27 (5/6): 208–220. Davies, R.T. (2016). And I would walk 500 miles. In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 3. New York: Marvel Comics. Doctor Who News (2010). Doctor Who magazine wins Guinness world record. Doctor Who News (1 April). http://www.doctorwhonews.net/2010/04/doctor‐who‐magazine‐wins‐guinness‐world.html (accessed 8 September 2018). Duffy, B.E. (2013). Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Egan, K. (2007). Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of the Video Nasties. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Eldridge, S.A. (2018). Online Journalism from the Periphery: Interloper Media and the Journalistic Field. London and New York: Routledge. Fish, S. (1980). Is there a Text in this Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. Forster, L. (2015). Magazine Movements: Women’s Culture, Feminisms and Media Form. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Genette, G. (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geraghty, L. (2007). Living with Star Trek: American Culture and the Star Trek Universe. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.



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Gray, J. (2010). Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York and London: New York University Press. Hannerz, E. (2015). Performing Punk. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hearn, M. (2018). Welcome. Doctor Who Magazine 529: 3. Hermes, J. (1995). Reading Women’s Magazines. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Higashi, S. (2014). Stars, Fans, and Consumption in the 1950s: Reading Photoplay. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hill, R.L. (2016). Gender, Media and Metal: Women Fans and the Gendered Experience of Music. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hills, M. (2002). Fan Cultures. London and New York: Routledge. Hills, M. (2010). Triumph of a Time Lord: Regenerating Doctor Who in the Twenty‐First Century. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Hills, M. (2015). Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event – Marketing, Merchandising and Mediatizing a Brand Anniversary. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hills, M. and Garde‐Hansen, J. (2017). Fandom’s paratextual memory: remembering, reconstructing, and repatriating “lost” Doctor Who. Critical Studies in Media Communication 34 (2): 158–167. Holmes, T. and Nice, L. (2012). Magazine Journalism. London: Sage. Hunt, N. (2003). The importance of trivia: ownership, exclusion and authority in science fiction fandom. In: Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (eds. M. Jancovich, A.L. Reboll, J. Stringer and A. Willis), 185–201. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jackson, P., Stevenson, N., and Brooks, K. (2001). Making Sense of Men’s Magazines. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Jancovich, M. and Hunt, N. (2004). The mainstream, distinction, and cult TV. In: Cult Television (eds. S. Gwenllian‐Jones and R.E. Pearson), 27–44. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jenkins, H. (1992). Textual Poachers. New York and London: Routledge. Johnson, C. (2005). Telefantasy. London: BFI. Johnson, D. (2013). Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries. New York and London: New York University Press. Jowett, L. (2017). Dancing with the Doctor: Dimensions of Gender in the Doctor Who Universe. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Kahn‐Harris, K. (2007). Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford and New York: Berg. Kibble‐White, G. (2009). Who cares. Vworp Vworp! 1: 14. Kilburn, M. (2017). Happy as Gary. Vworp Vworp! 3: 164–169. Kirkley, P. (2017). Through the magic door. In: Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition: Referencing the Doctor (ed. T. Spilsbury), 6–11. New York: Marvel Comics. Kirkpatrick, G. (2013). Computer Games and the Social Imaginary. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Kirkpatrick, G. (2015). The Formation of Gaming Culture: UK Gaming Magazines, 1981–1995. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Linden, H. and Linden, S. (2017). Fans and Fan Cultures: Tourism, Consumerism and Social Media. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lothian, A. (2013). Archival anarchies: online fandom, subcultural conservation, and the transformative work of digital ephemera. International Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (6): 541–556. Lynge‐Jorlén, A. (2017). Niche Fashion Magazines: Changing the Shape of Fashion. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. McKee, A. (2001). Which is the best Doctor Who story? A case study in value judgements outside the academy. Intensities: The Journal of Cult Media 1: 1–41. https://intensitiescultmedia.com/2014/ 08/27/which‐is‐the‐best‐doctor‐who‐story (accessed 25 April 2018). McWhirter, A. (2016). Film Criticism and Digital Cultures: Journalism, Social Media and the Democratisation of Opinion. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. Morris, J. (2009). Who cares. Vworp Vworp! 1: 18. Morris, J. (2016). The TARDIS log! Doctor Who Magazine 500: 22–31. Parkin, L. (2009). Who cares. Vworp Vworp! 1: 16. Pierson, M. (2002). Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder. New York: Columbia University Press. Pittard, C. (2007). 2006 VanArsdel prize essay “cheap, healthful literature”: The Strand Magazine, fictions of crime, and purified reading communities. Victorian Periodicals Review 40 (1): 1–23. Pixley, A. (2009). Thirty years of happiness. Vworp Vworp! 1: 65.

306 Hills Private Eye (2017). Media news. Private Eye 1456 (3–16 November): 14–15. Rayner, J. (2016). Relative dimensions: we are family. Doctor Who Magazine 500: 55. Rehak, B. (2013). Materializing monsters: aurora models, garage kits and the object practices of horror fandom. Journal of Fandom Studies 1 (1): 27–45. Rehak, B. (2018). More than Meets the Eye: Special Effects and the Fantastic Transmedia Franchise. New York: New York University Press. Reinhard, C.L.D. (2018). Fractured Fandoms: Contentious Communication in Fan Communities. Lanham: Lexington Books. Ritsma, N. (2013). Lurking in the shadows: famous monsters of Filmland and its female fans. Journal of Fandom Studies 1 (1): 47–64. Rowe, D. (2005). Fourth estate or fan club? Sports journalism engages the popular. In: Journalism: Critical Issues (ed. S. Allan), 125–136. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press. Sanjek, D. (2008). ‘Fans’ notes: the horror film fanzine. In: The Cult Film Reader (eds. E. Mathijs and X. Mendik), 419–428. Maidenhead and New York: Open University Press. Shearman, R. (2009). Who cares. Vworp Vworp! 1: 12. Sutherland, K.F. (2009). Who cares. Vworp Vworp! 1: 17. The Watcher (2017). A history of Doctor Who in 100 objects #87: the Doctor’s pufferfish. Doctor Who Magazine 518: 82. Thornton, S. (1995). Club Cultures. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tulloch, J. and Jenkins, H. (1995). Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. London and New York: Routledge. Uncredited (2016a). Doctor Who weekly issues 1–43: happy times and places! In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 5–9. New York: Marvel Comics. Uncredited (2016b). Monthly marvels. In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 11–15. New York: Marvel Comics. Uncredited (2016c). More colour pages! In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 16–19. New York: Marvel Comics. Uncredited (2016d). He’s back… and it’s about time! In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 39–47. New York: Marvel Comics. Uncredited (2016e). The second coming. In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 57–59. New York: Marvel Comics. Uncredited (2016f). Kylie v A Dalek. In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 69–72. New York: Marvel Comics. Uncredited (2016g). Meet Matt Smith! In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 75–83. New York: Marvel Comics. Uncredited (2016h). Movie‐sized! In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 89–92. New York: Marvel Comics. Uncredited (2016i). Dimensions in time and space. In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues, 93–97. Uncredited (2016j). Celebrating the trip of a lifetime. In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 100–107. New York: Marvel Comics. Uncredited (2016k). We’ve come full circle. In: Doctor Who Magazine Souvenir Special: A Pictorial History of the First 500 Issues (ed. T. Spilsbury), 109. New York: Marvel Comics. Zelizer, B. (1993). Journalists as interpretive communities. Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10 (September): 219–237. Zelizer, B. (2017). What Journalism Could Be. Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press.

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City and Regional Magazines Consumer Guides or Social Binders? Miglena Sternadori and Susan Currie Sivek

Introduction City and regional magazines have always fitted uncomfortably into traditional imaginings of magazine journalism. Perceived as ubiquitous periodicals with toponymic titles, their function often is to promote a positive image of their areas and construct a cheerful local identity  – ­comfortable environs for both readers and advertisers. “Thanks to these magazines, I can consume a city like any other packaged product,” wrote self‐described “nomadic member of the meritocratic class” Keith White in 1995 (p. 15). The reality is more complex. With a coverage mix including profiles, long‐form narratives, fashion, food, and public affairs, many contemporary city and regional magazines around the world are hybrid purveyors of both journalism and infotainment. And although they often speak to tourists and area influencers, some also have a history of serving as catalysts for local activism and philanthropy. This chapter considers area magazines in a historical and a global context, accounting for the fact that their typical reader is “a hybrid social subject comprising aspects of the citizen, consumer and client” who is also “mobile and ambivalent” (Eide and Knight 1999, p. 544). We examine how city and regional magazines manage the multiplicity of their stakeholders’ needs globally and in the current context of media digitization. In the market‐driven media model of the USA (Hallin and Mancini 2004), the stakeholders have traditionally been readers and advertisers – a relative simplicity that contributed to two centuries of successful publishing. Globally, city and regional magazines aspire to the American market‐driven model, but continue to be constrained by the political parallelism and clientelism that define most media systems around the world (Hallin and Mancini 2004, 2011).

What Makes a Publication a City or Regional Magazine? A global phenomenon, city and regional magazines are “geographically specialized periodicals,” some of which also specialize by subject (Riley 1982, p. 447). A case in point is Manchester’s City, published by the Manchester City Football Club, which offers a section of community news but is mostly focused on soccer (Manchester City 2017). Other local magazines have focused almost exclusively on sexuality and sexual identities, such as SHOUT Texas in the USA, Bombay Dost in India, or GayCalgary and Edmonton Magazine in Canada. The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Like most other magazines, city and regional periodicals feature content with a long shelf life. They are usually named after their geographical locales, but a few  –  such as [030] in Berlin, Germany, 417 in Southern Missouri, and 605 in South Dakota – have defied tradition by using area dialing codes. Like other magazines, many city and regional periodicals also fact‐check and may use freelancers to write more than half their content, as noted by Porter (1993) in her study of Baltimore’s work culture. Some freelancers have full‐time jobs with local media but moonlight for additional income, as Gillispie (1984) observed at The Washingtonian. Last but not least, city and regional magazines often target upscale audiences, especially in North America and the UK. For example, Kansas City, relaunched in 1994 as a controlled‐circulation magazine, was sent only to “baby boomers with minimum incomes of $55 000 to $75 000” (Zuber 1994, p. 69).

Distinctions from Other Local Media Besides these general characteristics, the best way to define city and regional magazines is by what they are not. In the USA, most are distinct from so‐called alternative weeklies (e.g., Village Voice), traditionally published on newspaper stock and emphasizing hard‐hitting journalism over slick visual appeal. City and regional magazines also differ from local business journals, which look more like magazines, but tend to be less creative in design, and focus on area business news (Bergh et al. 1984). Closest to the city and regional genre were the 1980s yuppie publications, such as the now‐gone Manhattan, Inc., edited by New York’s founding editor Clay Felker: The two schools do have a good deal in common—a fascination with wealth, a preoccupation with status, a hunger to be on the cutting edge in cuisine and couture. What distinguishes yuppie journalism is its overriding, almost obsessive concern with power—who has it, how to get it, what to do with it. (Massing 1985, p. 54)

City and regional magazines are also tangentially similar to the now‐rare Sunday magazines (newspaper supplements, among which the respected The New York Times Magazine is the ­oldest surviving). In nineteenth‐century USA, Sunday magazines bolstered subscriptions with “sex, sensation and pseudoscience” (Hachten 1963, p. 24), and later became known for mostly second‐grade “newspaper features masquerading as magazine stories” on slick paper, aimed at baiting advertisers (Shields 1986, p. 38). Overlaps exist, but have been short‐lived. For example, New York magazine started as a supplement of the now‐defunct New York Herald‐Tribune (Fletcher 1977). Houston Life (previously Houston Metropolitan) magazine was reborn as a joint venture between its owner Gulf Breeze Associates and the now‐defunct Houston Post, and ­distributed as a monthly supplement until the Post’s closure (Lawrence 1993). Consumer city and regional magazines also differ from the publications of mayoral city associations, which have toponymic titles, but whose main target audience is usually local government employees (for example, the Kentucky League of Cities publishes Kentucky City). Yet local governments do sometimes produce quality city magazines for the general public. For example, Mori (2008) reports that in the 1950s, the Japanese city of Yokkaichi published an annual magazine that “reflected people’s cognition of the specific local landscape and the epistemology in which the cognition was situated” (p. 1469). Sometimes local governments underwrite city magazines produced by others. In Germany, city web portals such as Berlin.de and Munchen.de are partially subsidized (Isene and Johannessen 2007). In the USA, sometimes the producing entity is a journalism school. For example, in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1980s, the local chamber of commerce partnered with Drake University to have journalism students produce a city magazine offering “an intelligent, thoughtful view of greater Des Moines” without being a “puff piece for the Chamber” (Kucera 1987, pp. 44–45). Some area magazines are or have been produced entirely by journalism schools, such as Vox at



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the Missouri School of Journalism, which serves the city of Columbia (Feeney 2014), as well as Appalachia and the self‐supporting quarterly Athens Magazine, both projects of Ohio University magazine students (Burd 1980).

Origins and Business Models The origins of city and regional magazines are also diverse. In the USA, some, such as Philadelphia (Bartlett and Fallon 1989), started as “give away house organs of local chambers of commerce” (White 1995, p. 16), and later transitioned to commercial publishers. Seasoned journalists launched others, such as San Diego and New York (Bartlett and Fallon). Yet others started as the “offshoots of television guides, dining guides and other publications” (Fletcher 1977, p. 740). Some were born from national magazines’ regional editions, which proliferated in the 1960s to cover news of cities’ inability to “efficiently absorb the huge inflows of population”; by the end of that decade, Life had 133 regional editions and Look had 75 (Felker 1969, p. 9). And some even started as social‐justice initiatives. For example, the freely distributed City Family, launched by a former New York food stamps administrator, was aimed at low‐income and immigrant audiences (Pogrebin 1996); though the magazine had a circulation of 210 000 in the mid‐1990s, its lack of any digital presence in 2017 suggests it ultimately closed. No single business model applies to city and regional magazines. Some, like Chicago (once Chicago Guide), started as free‐circulation publications (Fletcher 1977), but now cost as much as national magazines. Chamber‐of‐commerce publications also were often freely distributed. The most authoritative city and regional magazines, however, typically have been sold at newsstands and/or by subscription, thanks to “affluent readers willing to pay a stiff cover price” (White 1995, p. 19). Some distribute a small portion of each issue’s print run for free, but only to non‐subscribing upscale households (e.g. Kordic 2007). Regardless of what readers pay, most area magazines depend on the health of local markets and struggle to attract national advertisers (Fletcher and VandenBergh 1982; Heinrich 1999). They typically feature local retail and service advertisements, especially for area cosmetic surgeons (Hennink‐Kaminski et al. 2010).

Critiques and Successes Characterized by an editorial style of “jaunty, open informality” (Fletcher 1977, p. 741), city and regional magazines have long been criticized for “press‐release journalism” (White 1995, p. 15), sleazy mixing of editorial and advertising content, inadequate public affairs coverage, and disregard for diversity. “Serious” quarters have judged the genre harshly: Bill Broyles, founding editor of the respected Texas Monthly, was suspected of “soft” news judgment when he became Newsweek’s editor‐in‐chief (Johnson 1984). Yet, Texas Monthly has won numerous magazine journalism awards. Another prominent example of editorial quality is The New Yorker, founded in 1925 and the first city magazine to become a national elite periodical (Campbell et al. 2011). Over the years, it has won dozens of reporting and public‐interest journalism awards from the Association for Magazine Media (2018). Other city and regional magazines have the potential to fill “the gap between national and local media” (Fletcher 1977, p. 740), but are held back by ownership changes, digital transitions, hard‐to‐predict reader demographics and preferences, and competition from free crowd‐sourced sites and apps (such as Yelp) that offer local information.

American City Magazines as Inadvertent Global Trendsetters Many contemporary area magazines around the world have been modeled on American ­examples – for instance, a Tokyo publisher visited Clay Felker, the editor of New York in the 1970s, to “learn the secret of starting a successful city magazine” (MacDougall 1974, p. 37).

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Though this statement may sound like arrogant American exceptionalism, it reflects the peculiarities of US history. Although magazines have a long and storied past in Europe, the rise of local American periodicals was especially important in binding and strengthening new communities of settlers. For example, Benjamin Franklin’s nephew and protégé Benjamin Mecom started the short‐lived New‐England Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure in 1758 under the motto E Pluribus Unum, Latin for “one from many” (Gardner 2012). A radically inclusive literary “coffeehouse” of sorts, the publication was publicly minded and served as a “model for the social contract required by the new nation” (Gardner 2012, p. 90).

Builders of Citizenship From their earliest incarnations, US city and regional magazines blended content that appealed to their readers as both citizens and consumers. In 1775, Robert Aitken, based in Philadelphia, founded Pennsylvania Magazine, one of the earliest geographically defined US publications to call itself a magazine. He soon hired political activist and philosopher Thomas Paine as editor (Larkin 1998). Under Paine, the magazine reached the largest circulation of any contemporaneous US magazine. Paine thought of the magazine as a means of influencing citizenship habits, but also advocated for consumption as a way to maintain ideological purity. Specifically, he ­critiqued the consumption of Indian tea imported via Britain and suggested “teas of our own American medicinal plants” instead (quoted in Larkin 1998, p. 263). Local citizens’ tea choices advocated symbolically against British norms and practices, thereby positioning early American readers as both citizens and consumers – encouraging “every action or thought [to] be interpreted as either pro‐American or pro‐British” (p. 269). Pennsylvania Magazine was soon joined by many more. Only 23 magazines were founded in  the US prior to 1783, the end of the Revolutionary War, but between 1794 and 1825, ­publishers launched another 847; by 1860, 1059 magazines were in print (Haveman 2015). Although a few strove to reach national audiences, most reached strictly local readers. Haveman suggests that about half of eighteenth‐century American magazines focused on either a state or a region, reflecting population dispersion and the postal system’s growth.

Nineteenth‐Century Local Styles As the American nation developed, magazines focused on more local identities. Haveman argues that “localistic magazines rooted in and serving specific geographically bounded communities” supported the growth of “distinctive local communities” (Haveman 2015, p. 74). Some agricultural periodicals  –  such as the Genesee Farmer, founded in 1831, and the Iowa Cultivator, founded in 1845 – also focused on regions, aiding in the formation of communities of both practice and place for rural families (Haveman 2015, p. 268). These magazines could inform farmers of local providers of useful goods and services, ensuring that farmers could patronize area suppliers and support growing local economies, while also learning what it meant to be ­citizens of their communities. When the Civil War brought economic uncertainty and destabilized “American” identity, city and regional magazines bolstered local economies and re‐interpreted local identities. This was especially the case in the South. One example was the Commercial Review of the South and West, founded in 1846 and later renamed as DeBow’s Review after its founder, James Dunwoody Bronson DeBow (Nixon 1931). The Review, published until 1880, offered historical articles, book reviews, trade and agriculture news, and even a section titled “Commerce and Fine Arts” (p. 57). After the war, DeBow sought to contribute to the South’s revitalization, using his ­magazine for the “building up of its fields of industry and enterprise, rendered necessary under the new and altered conditions” (p. 58). The magazine called upon Southerners to engage both



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as citizens of the region and as consumers supporting local businesses. By December 1866, it carried 67 pages of ads for goods and services ranging from washing machines to guano to insurance (Nixon 1931). The century’s second half saw an explosion of city magazines. Burd (1973) writes: “In Chicago alone, between 1845 to 1906, there were 306 urban magazines launched, but 270 ceased publication by 1906, mostly because of poor financing” (p. 78). By the 1890s, urban muckraking had flourished, “as magazines discussed slums, unemployment, immigrant minorities, corrupt urban government and the utopias to resolve such problems” (p. 78).

From “Boosters” to “Barkers” – And Back Again After the muckraking years, US city and regional magazines refocused on attracting advertising and boosting local economies, though some, like the literary Southwest Review, were also said to be “the conscience of the region” and fulfill “a major social obligation to the Southwest by virtue of its scrutinizing gaze” (Tinkle 1955, p. 282). The first half of the century saw more regional “little” magazines, such as Midland, launched in Iowa in 1915, which published essays and fiction by local authors (Allen 1945). Though these periodicals did not employ chamber‐of‐ commerce‐style boosterism, they displayed “a pedantic and self‐conscious preoccupation with the region” (p. 14) and a “tone of quiet optimism” (p. 11) about their rural areas. City and regional magazines became more active in the middle of the twentieth century, reflecting postwar growth and social and economic change. San Diego, started by former newspaper editor Edwin Self in 1948, “became the prototype of a string of regionals blossoming after World War II” (Muecke 1967, p. 560). About 920 city magazines operated between 1950 and 1988, but, reflecting the decline of print at the end of the twentieth century, only 470 existed in 1991 (Riley and Selnow 1991). Many of those still publishing have undergone ownership changes. One long‐lived publication, Baltimore, was founded by the city’s chamber of commerce in 1907 and sold to a media company in 1977; it has since operated independently and changed hands several times (Jay 1992). Others followed a similar path: Atlanta and Cincinnati, founded by their chambers of commerce in 1961 and 1967, respectively, were later bought by Emmis Communications. Greater Philadelphia, founded in 1908 by the Trades League of Philadelphia, operates as Philadelphia and, alongside Boston, is owned by Metrocorp (Metrocorp 2003). The explicit goal of these magazines was originally to increase consumer activity in their areas while presenting useful information for readers. Some also sought out‐of‐region business. For example, one of the oldest surviving US city magazines, Honolulu, founded in 1888 as Paradise of the Pacific, has continuously promoted tourism and business in Hawaii, seeking to demonstrate the “civilized” nature of the islands and people (Chapman 2001). But by the 1960s, many city and regional magazines embraced investigative, explanatory, and advocacy journalism, scooping local papers on political and social issues, and identifying local weaknesses and challenges: “my city right and wrong” (Kaniss 1991, p. 134). “Little” and “underground” magazines proliferated, serving “blacks and youth and others alienated in urban neighborhoods” (Burd 1973, p. 79). Risking the erosion of the sense of positive local identity, even chamber‐of‐commerce magazines moved toward “broad, far‐sighted community service, toward being a voice directed at the concerned citizens of the community, and toward being a critic of the city’s ills as well as a champion of its virtues” (Moon 1970, p. 718). Addressing both the good and the bad required a balancing act. Launched in 1963, New York magazine has modeled such a blend, though it has also been known for “vulgar, superficial and trendy stories” (MacDougall 1974, p. 39). It began as a Sunday supplement for the New York Herald Tribune, whose editor Jim Bellows imagined “a local, lifestyle‐oriented break” from the week’s coverage of hard news (Greenberg 2008, p. 73). Experienced magazine editor Clay Felker ran the supplement, eventually buying and re‐launching it independently in 1968 (Greenberg).

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Within a month of the first issue, a scandal erupted; subscribers and advertisers left, appalled by the magazine’s publication of “tasteless nude photographs of Viva, Andy Warhol’s superstar” (MacDougall, p. 36). The magazine managed to recover by blending “high and low discourses” for both sophisticated citizens and aspirational consumers (Greenberg, p. 78). Many articles, though “designed to be read in haste” (MacDougall, p. 37), covered social issues and even foreign affairs  –  along with investigative pieces and longform “racy reading,” such as “An Evening in the Nude with Gay Talese” (p. 38). Yet, the magazine also suggested – sometimes explicitly, sometimes less so – that shopping could be a means for “mending the rifts of a race‐ and class‐divided city” (Greenberg 2008, pp. 82–83). In New York’s pages, as in Thomas Paine’s exhortations about tea, consumer decisions were portrayed as political expressions. In the 1970s, the magazine covered luxurious fundraisers for radical political causes, organized by those whom Tom Wolfe, a standard‐setter of literary journalism, called “limousine liberals” (Greenberg 2008, p. 84). Even though Wolfe revealed the hypocrisy underlying such “radical chic” events (MacDougall 1974, p. 37), readers may have still perceived them as desirable for social climbers. Citizenship was represented as a consumer decision executed via philanthropy. Readers aspiring to greater status could donate to charity and attend galas, thereby buying access to elite circles and reinforcing their elevation through New York coverage. Over 60 other city magazines were launched in the 1960s, forging national advertising deals through the newly formed Metropolitan Magazine Association (Tebbel and Zuckerman 1991). Following the success of New York – which, ironically, in outreach to advertisers referred to itself as a news magazine rather than a city magazine (MacDougall 1974) – within a decade scholars were talking about a “metropolitan magazine boom” (Fletcher and VandenBergh 1982, p. 313). Not only did new publications enter local markets, but by 1980 the combined circulation of existing ones was a third greater than in 1976 – with numbers tripling for Baltimore and more than doubling for Houston Home and Garden, Boston, San Diego, and Nashville! (Fletcher and VandenBergh). Local periodicals were also winning National Magazine Awards and generating significant advertising revenues, as population shifts to urban areas and the West Coast s­ upported their growth (Tebbel and Zuckerman). By the late 1980s, large metropolitan magazines further followed in New York’s footsteps, publishing national‐interest features on topics such as HIV‐infected babies and the war on drugs (Bartlett and Fallon 1989). But the emphasis on critical reporting did not survive. Two main factors were at play. First, media ownership became increasingly concentrated. For example, Reckard (1990) mentions at least one case in which a Gannett newspaper bought a city magazine that was its competitor in order to, in the words of a corporate official, “increase our already strong information and ad picture” (n.p.), thus depriving readers of an alternative source of information. Second, the value placed upon individual fulfillment and leisure activities was rising (Abrahamson 1996). Advertisers wanted to speak directly to readers, prioritizing individual consumption over shared communal identity. Greenberg (2000) traces the shift in three US city and regional magazines’ content as these parallel trends emerged. The publications began to address readers’ desire for “self‐indulgence, social climbing, and the perpetual transformation of image – both one’s own and that of the city” (p. 247). Generic representations of beauty and status, such as anonymous models and luxurious buildings, replaced identifiably local photography and content. The formula called for “toned down and reduced editorial content, increased pages of advertising and lifestyle reporting, new special sections filled with consumer reports, and encyclopedia high‐end listings ­sections at the back” (Greenberg 2000, p. 251). This homogenization accelerated when international conglomerates purchased city magazines, forming local media “stables” to attract national advertisers (p. 251). Coverage of significant local issues diminished, with urban problems framed mostly in terms of impact on white, middle‐class residents. Corporate pressures affected even New York’s critical reporting (Greenberg 2008).



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(Not) Catching up to the Future In the twenty‐first century, the vision of readers as consumers rather than citizens of their communities has continued, leading city magazines down a treacherous path. They face challenges posed by technology, shifting audience preferences, and the growing proportion of non‐white, non‐middle‐class urban residents. For the moment, North American local periodicals are ­surviving. The US‐based City and Regional Magazine Association (2017) directory lists about 70 members. The International Regional Magazine Association (2017), which includes US and Canadian magazines, has 33. The count is a likely underestimation because smaller periodicals might not purchase membership. Growth is limited: only eight new metro or regional magazines were founded in 2015 (MPA: The Association of Magazine Media 2016). Recent research offers insights into US city magazines’ content, responses to changing technology and audiences, and editors’ vision. A content analysis of 19 award‐winning American city magazines found that though covers featured primarily “service” topics (such as health, relationships, personal finance, and self‐improvement), the periodicals dedicated about 15% of their stories to “hard news” – more than might be expected from their cover images (Sivek 2015). True to Greenberg’s (2000) findings, the covers often portrayed “geographically indistinguishable food, models, or interior locations” (Sivek, p. 13), and if people were pictured, they were usually white. An analysis of five prominent city magazines also found an emphasis on lifestyle content that “assumed that readers desired new ways to experience their cities through ­consumption, including restaurants, fashion, and entertainment” (Jenkins 2016b, p. 10). City issues, when addressed, were sources of humor or shown from elite sources’ perspectives (politicians and developers). The magazines sought to “avoid disrupting affluent readers’ perceptions of city life and please advertisers seeking editorial environments presenting a favorable view of the city” (Jenkins, pp. 13–14). Both studies demonstrate how much today’s city magazines cater to readers seeking to eat, shop, and recreate, and do not address community‐minded residents seeking to discuss and resolve local concerns. Other twenty‐first‐century trends include the boundless web and social media. Many city magazines reach younger, urban, and less affluent audiences through their websites by strategically rolling out print content to avoid cannibalizing newsstand sales (Smith 2016). To feed the demands of digital platforms, many city magazines also cover local breaking news, produce innovative audio and visual content, distribute email newsletters, and even discuss “quirky weather patterns” (p. 17). Complicating these new functions is the need for area periodicals’ online presence to take “that extra magazine step” by bringing something new or deeper to previous local coverage (p. 20). Most have also attempted, somewhat clumsily, to garner social media engagement. Sivek’s (2013) analysis of 20 city magazines’ tweets showed a focus on food and entertainment, with little usage of Twitter’s conversational and linking capabilities. Black (2015) offers similar findings, suggesting the city and regional magazines in his analysis should use Twitter to share multimedia content, as they do on Facebook. Yet another consumer‐oriented trend is the effort by many US city magazines to create exclusive events and festivals under their brand names as new revenue sources (Hu 2016). This survival strategy was employed by some city magazines as early as the 1990s (Johnson 1993). Maine magazine publisher Kevin Thomas told Publishing Executive that such events connect advertisers with business‐to‐business buyers and consumers, while also generating revenue. Tickets to Maine Live – a TED‐style conference sponsored by the magazine – cost $100 each (Maine Live 2017). Palm Beach Media Group’s “Illustrated Events” produces similarly pricey events, including fashion shows, polo, art, and charity galas (Matejko 2015; Palm Beach Illustrated 2017). The events often allow attendees to earn tickets through sizable charitable donations, showing how city magazines have extended their brands to activities that invite elite participation rather than broad public involvement. This trend highlights the tension between city magazines’ stated desire to serve their communities and the need to appeal to a certain

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demographic to attract advertisers. The events prioritize philanthropy as a form of citizenship – as opposed to hands‐on urban street litter cleanups or inner‐city playground repair projects. Earlier research has also demonstrated that editors are torn between chamber‐of‐commerce‐ style “boosterism” and “interest in pointing out local problems and needs … about half see themselves as possible alternative voices to local newspapers” (Hayes 1981; Hynds 1979, p.  622). Surprisingly little has changed, as editors now struggle with even more conflicting demands: to offer in‐depth print stories while staying current and engaged on social media; to satisfy advertisers’ desire for a positive milieu but also be journalistically responsible; to fulfill their owners’ profit goals through formulaic design, but also reflect distinct local identities. Editors at award‐winning city magazines tend perceive their publications as having unique roles: being the city’s “owner’s manual” (Sivek 2014, pp. 9–10) and influencing area “opinion leaders” (p. 16) but also investigating serious issues without fear of challenging local pride. Jenkins (2016a) found city magazine editors have “a tenuous relationship with service content, which some said they feel obligated to publish, although they might prefer to emphasize more hard‐ hitting content” (p. 629). This focus on lifestyle privileged “the preferred meanings of ­organizational leaders and local power structures” (p. 633). The deepening chasm in the USA between progressive values and forces of isolationism has, however, led to some examples of outstanding local magazine journalism, confirming Burd’s (1973) argument that “urban magazine journalism thrives during city crises” (p. 77). In 2016, Charlotte (North Carolina) magazine covered an incident in which a white police officer shot and killed Keith Scott, a black man, causing extensive local protests. Though the magazine had already planned its next edition, with the generic service theme “The Love Issue,” the staff ­rallied to produce in‐depth coverage of the shooting and its aftermath – an unusual step for a city magazine. Editor Michael Graff acknowledged that most area magazines avoid controversies, but observed that his magazine’s stories emphasized narrative and unique perspectives to complement other local news sources and address painful social issues (Howard 2016). Such exceptions only confirm the rule: as economic imperatives drive most story choices, ­editors may fail to envision perspectives beyond those of the imagined affluent, white reader. An example of exceptionally limited framing was a 2015 Philadelphia cover with the headline “How to get your kid a great education … without moving to the ‘burbs’.” The cover featured all white children, in a city with a majority‐minority school system. The editor said the photo choice was “a stupid, insensitive decision that I deeply regret” (Brown 2015).

City and Regional Magazines as Global Phenomena Research on city and regional magazines around the world suggests they have many similarities with US publications. In part, this may be because some recently established periodicals were modeled on American examples. A more important reason, however, seems to be that these magazines  –  even though representing a variety of sociocultural contexts  –  possess limited options for survival in most local markets in most countries. Survival requires them to focus on people with money, which often results in advertising and editorial content that promote individualism and social inequality. Though most city and regional magazines around the world view their audiences almost exclusively as consumers, some local diaspora and minority magazines display civic‐mindedness, as outlined in the next subsection.

Minority and Diaspora Magazines Notable exceptions to the cultural homogeneity of most city and regional magazines are local periodicals whose explicit goal is to fuse different worlds. Such magazines, read by cultural, ethnic, or linguistic minorities, have opportunities – and perhaps even an obligation – to ­seriously



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investigate the notion of “otherness.” This is indeed the case for the freely distributed Viennese transcultural magazine biber, written in German by “semi‐professional journalists” representing various immigrant communities (Brantner and Herczeg 2013, p. 213). Although the magazine is supported by commercial advertising, about two‐thirds of its content either addresses or indirectly references integration politics and immigrant issues – including in lifestyle stories – and about a quarter emphasizes collectivistic values of “social coexistence,” such as empathy and tolerance (p. 224). Many other local diaspora magazines, however, avoid civic issues in favor of lifestyle coverage emphasizing individualistic values. This is especially the case when the targeted readers are not marginalized – as in the case of Westerners who live or do business in poor countries. An example of an expatriate English‐language city magazine is Baku of Azerbaijan, published by Condé Nast International (Baku 2017; Kelly 2013). Its focus is on high‐end fashion, culture, and arts, with limited editorial content, featuring high‐profile advertisers such as Gucci and Burberry that appeal not only to expatriates, but also to nouveau riche local audiences. Similarly, in Ghana’s city of Takoradi, OILCity Ghana used to serve English‐speaking oil industry professionals, ­featuring leisure opportunities and prominent locals (OILCity Magazine 2017). Some expatriate city magazines explicitly aim to fuse multiple cultures, such as the long‐lived Chinese‐language magazine Haowai (“City Magazine”) in Hong Kong. Founded in 1976 and still published today (City Magazine 2017), Haowai was preceded by the Hong Kong Tatler, an English‐language magazine focused on British expatriates’ social events and culture (Chun 2009). In contrast, Haowai not only serves as a guide to a particular aesthetic and lifestyle – “fine clothes” and an “epicurean attitude, a cool with rumpled edges” (Zha 2011, p. 175), but also offers urban readers a critical intellectual stance on “the ongoing pulse of a uniquely Hong Kong culture…[and] the gradually dominant tastes, attitudes and consumption patterns of locally bred Hong Kong people” (Chun, p. 199). When diaspora magazines do represent marginalized communities, they often target audiences who seek to gain and display status by adopting the dominant culture’s lifestyle but may struggle because of limited language skills. Garrison (1987) suggests this was the case for readers of the Spanish‐language metro magazine Miami Mensual, which targeted acculturation‐bound “young, up‐and‐coming Cuban‐Americans” (p. 1) whose consumption and leisure patterns matched those of upscale city magazine readers. Even so – and possibly as a reflection of their multicultural backgrounds  –  Miami Mensual’s readers preferred by a slight margin local and international politics over lifestyle and business content (Garrison 1986).

National Contexts The following subsections summarize the content patterns and business models of some local periodicals in Canada, the UK, Germany, Russia, and India. The undue emphasis on North America and Europe reflects the difficulty of finding research literature (especially in English) on city and regional magazines in Africa, South America, and much of Asia.

Canada

Canadian local periodicals are typical of the species. They target upscale households, face intense market pressures, and are mostly owned by conglomerates, such as Transcontinental Media. Regional magazines, such as Western Living, which covers Western Canada, and The Block (­targeting suburban areas in the lower mainland) are mellow lifestyle guides, with much of their content written “at a short rhetorical distance from the reader” (Kordic 2007, p. 52). Urban coverage, however, can be more edgy, as illustrated by this cover of Toronto Life: “a night owl with short blond dreads staring through a martini glass,” teasing an article that could be summarized like this: “Writer, like, drops some Ecstasy (fer sure, dude!) and takes readers on a way cool roller‐coaster ride through Clubland” (Heinrich, p. 22).

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UK

British local magazines have historically been even more obviously class‐conscious than North American area periodicals. Speaking to the origins and significance of so‐called “county magazines” in England, Hobbs (2013) examined how Lancashire Life presented “the intersection of place and class” from 1947 to 1973 (p. 399). The magazine sought not only to define a Lancashire social identity – in contrast to London and the South of England – but also to position itself as “the defining ‘other’” (p. 403). It focused on the upper class, portraying “girls in pearls” (p. 409) and emphasizing “a love of tradition or pride in the past” (p. 410), but failed to record most residents’ lives or “describe a coherent culture” (pp. 421–22). This vision of local life set the stage for the magazine’s later emphasis on “social photography,” where wealth display remained “a significant driver fusing content and readership” (Cook and Darby 2013, p. 10). As  of 2013, Lancashire Life and similar county magazines had made no notable efforts to expand into digital publishing because readers and publishers wanted “a glossy, luxuriant [print] product which is geographically targeted and filtered” (p. 19).

Germany

Hundreds of city and regional magazines exist in this country, many of which are online‐only or distributed freely thanks to ad revenue. Unlike in North America, where the focus is on older and affluent audiences, most German city magazines “aim their products at the 18‐ to 40‐year‐ old age group … living urban lives” (Isene and Johannessen 2007, p. 88). German area ­periodicals also seem willing to embrace the digital frontier. For example, Isene and Johannessen outline a city guide mobile app in collaboration with Munichx, a Munich online city‐guide ­magazine, which was envisioned as early as 2007. In a country representative of the Democratic‐Corporatist media model (Hallin and Mancini 2004), many city and regional magazines strive to offer more than entertainment and spending opportunities. For example, the glossy regional Ostfriesland Magazin “provides a vehicle for the regional economy by contributing to tourism marketing and giving local businesses advertising space,” but it also boosts diversity by covering local sustainability initiatives and language activism, reviewing Low German literature and theater, and publishing articles in Low German – which differs from Standard German (Reershemius 2011, p. 390).

Russia

The numbers of local Russian periodicals have exploded since the early 2000s, though summative data are difficult to find and many publications are short‐lived. A case in point is the city of Stary Oskol, 384 miles south of Moscow and with a population of just under 200 000, which recently boasted six local periodicals (Verbkin 2009). These included a literary magazine; a business journal; a freely distributed women’s magazine; a teen magazine; and two general‐ interest periodicals featuring articles about the city’s history, interesting people (read: elites), local writers, family, and education. Another magazine, Kvestor, intended as an advertising vehicle for Stary Oskol’s business elites, folded within months due to a shortage of original content and overuse of recycled Internet articles (Verbkin). Typical for media organizations in post‐communist contexts, Russian local periodicals tend to be part of larger business empires that do not necessarily specialize in media and are owned by elites with political and social clout (Jakubowicz 2007). Based on interviews at eight Russian city and regional magazines, Medvedeva (2015) found these magazines often supported their publishers’ other business enterprises. The personal social capital of publishers and editors drew in fellow businesspeople as advertisers. Unsurprisingly, many Russian city magazines seem more concerned with business than urban citizenship: “successful people” and “gossip” are primary topics, and “prominence” is the main news value applied to story selection (Medvedeva, p. 9).



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Featuring local moneyed individuals simultaneously strengthens their elite positions, transfers significance onto the magazines themselves, and serves “as a replacement for the ‘local pride’ function” of area periodicals (p. 9).

India

Some city magazines take on explicitly directing the course of local citizenship and consumption. For example, the glossy Ludhiana Dispatch in the Indian state of Punjab is said to be one of the country’s few city magazines that contribute to a “performative circuit” of urban identity (Jain 2010, p. 47). The magazine’s involvement in local organizations’ events creates an impression of noteworthiness, enhanced through associations with “imaginaries” and transnational brands, as in the case of the “Miss World Punjabi” pageant (Jain, p. 48). This strategy furthers a cycle that engenders more events based around consumption, glamor, and social status. Jain’s account of Ludhiana Dispatch’s role illustrates how city magazines create an enticing veneer for their areas while enabling residents to participate in new, interesting events.

Has the Elusive Consumer‐Citizen Left the Scene? As social capital diminishes in the USA (Putnam 1995) and worldwide in areas that lack sociolinguistic diversity (Wang and Steiner 2015), city and regional magazines offer an illusionary window into a life of leisure, artfully constructing an idealized version of a city or region. The model of local citizenship and engagement they present emphasizes acts of consumption and distanced philanthropy over civic participation. Should we be alarmed? Some scholars suggest the emergence of an alternative form of “civic consumer culture, rooted in consumerism merged with citizenship” (Dermody et al. 2009, p. 324). Early US city and regional magazines already demonstrated such fusion; for example, Thomas Paine’s promotion of local tea in the pages of Pennsylvania Magazine motivated consumption for political purposes. Farmers’ magazines and Civil War‐era periodicals also promoted regional consumption to support local economic growth and perpetuate local identities. Many contemporary North American city magazines, however, have shifted their emphasis from a civic consumer culture to a consumer culture. When civic concerns emerge, area periodicals struggle to find diverse sources and to suggest meaningful engagement for readers, beyond donations or gala attendance. Annual lists of “top 10 burgers” or “best pizza places” do not encourage democratic participation. Rather, these banal stories, replicated from year to year and place to place, accompany pages of advertisements and address readers only as spenders. In principle, city magazines could cheer for shopping at local retailers instead of national chains, but fear of alienating advertisers precludes even that limited approach. Encouraging citizen‐consumer identities in larger sociopolitical contexts thus remains unlikely in the immediate future, constrained by a profit imperative, the socialization of editors and staffs, and advertisers’ desire to appear within a positive editorial milieu. Some city magazines, such as Alabama’s Birmingham, which in 2011 changed ownership from the local chamber of commerce to a media company, have declared willingness to confront “the city’s past, both the good and the bad” (Feeney 2014, p. 25), but their content shows the usual obsession with lifestyle coverage over socially significant topics. Other recent developments also suggest area periodicals are shifting away from journalism. For example, Emmis Communications, a US media company, sold most of its city and regional magazines, including its most journalistically robust publications, Texas Monthly and Los Angeles. Texas Monthly’s new owner, private equity firm Genesis Park, plans to “drive the brand into digital content, social media, expanded events, merchandising and a broader custom publishing business” (Lenz 2017). The new owner of Los Angeles, Hour Media LLC, claims no plans to stop publishing

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longform stories, but dismissed the magazine’s top brass immediately upon taking control (Romero 2017). Such developments suggest publishers and editors who want to serve the “citizen‐consumer” face an uphill battle. The nature of these challenges is, unfortunately, global. Many major metropolitan magazines are founded or acquired by global publishers, as with Condé Nast International’s ownership of Baku. City magazines become homogenized and less likely to reflect local concerns after being purchased by conglomerates (Greenberg 2000); many are likely to follow or have imposed upon them Western standardized formats, as in the global franchise model of women’s magazines and other magazine brands (Holmes and Nice 2012). These challenges are further compounded by the already clientelist nature of many media systems around the world, especially in emerging economies (Hallin and Mancini 2004, 2011).

Directions for Future Research Future reviews of the literature of city and regional magazines should continue to explore the nature of this genre, its function within communities, and its relative power as a medium for provoking local consumption and citizenship, in all these periodicals’ varied forms and locales. More original and current research is needed especially on city magazines’ digital transitions and outreach, and other production practices in the context of the ever‐shifting balance between serving audiences’ needs and generating revenue for magazines’ owners and advertisers. Content patterns should also continue to be studied, and in greater detail. The main question to consider is the following: Will more city and regional magazines attempt to fill gaps in local news environments – or will they retain their focus on restaurant rankings and area influencers? Last but not least, the degree and ways in which of city magazine content influences local readers also remain of interest. Some research on the effects of the content of local newspapers, TV, social media, and blogs on audiences’ local participation, knowledge, and community attachment already exists, but city magazines have been left out of these studies.

Conclusion Though many city and regional magazines appear to be scraping the bottom of a bland and consumerist era, it is worth remembering that “urban magazine journalism may be cyclical, with a pendulum swinging from mass media society to fragmented social criticism and specialized publications on urban crises to anti‐urbanism” (Burd 1973, p. 82). Change has always been inexorable for the mass, and not‐so‐mass, media – even before the advent of the Internet. But perhaps what is truly new to the twenty‐first century is that the authority of city magazines as edited and fact‐checked guides for local consumers increasingly pales in comparison with user‐generated content’s claim of an alternative authority: the accumulated voices of real people. As crowd‐ sourced review sites offering a wealth of free information for consumers become more relevant and credible to young, diverse, and tech‐savvy audiences, city magazines face diminishing returns. Their best survival strategy is to offer something more provocative, such as a robust journalistic voice and a wide‐ranging vision of civic engagement. Add to this mix effective social media use that fosters audiences’ investment in local identities and – ta‐da! – the time may be ripe for the pendulum of urban magazine journalism to swing yet again.

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Greenberg, M. (2008). Branding New York: How a City in Crisis Was Sold to the World. London, UK: Routledge. Hachten, W. (1963). Sunday magazines: end of an era. Columbia Journalism Review 2 (2): 24–28. Hallin, D. and Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Media and Politics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hallin, D. and Mancini, P. (eds.) (2011). Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Haveman, H. (2015). Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hayes, J. (1981). City/regional magazines: a survey/census. Journalism Quarterly 58 (2): 294–296. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769908105800219. Heinrich, E. (1999). Urban survivors. Marketing Magazine 104 (35): 22–23. Hennink‐Kaminski, H., Reid, L., and King, K. (2010). The content of cosmetic surgery advertisements placed in large city magazines, 1985–2004. Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising 32 (2): 41–57. Hobbs, A. (2013). Lancashire Life magazine, 1947–73: a middle‐class sense of place. Twentieth Century British History 24 (3): 398–423. https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hws028. Holmes, T. and Nice, L. (2012). Magazine Journalism. London, UK: Sage. Howard, K. (2016). 5(ish) questions: Charlotte Magazine and the shooting of Keith Scott. Nieman Lab (12 October).http://nieman.harvard.edu/stories/5ish‐questions‐charlotte‐magazine‐and‐the‐shooting‐of‐ keith‐scott. Hu, C. (2016). Rushing for revenue, magazines are spending millions on their own pop culture festivals. Forbes (19 August). www.forbes.com. Hynds, E. (1979). City magazines, newspapers serve in different ways. Journalism Quarterly 56 (3): 619–622. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769907905600324. International Regional Magazine Association (2017). Member magazines. http://www.irmamagazines. com/member‐magazines. Isene, J.S. and Johannessen, P.H.E. (2007). CityMob: prototype development of a commercial city information portal for mobile phones with city magazine. Unpublished thesis. Institutt for Telematikk. https://brage.bibsys.no/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/2369109/347563_FULLTEXT01.pdf. Jain, K. (2010). Imagined and performed locality: the televisual field in a north Indian industrial town. Contributions to Indian Sociology 44 (1–2): 33–55. Jakubowicz, K. (2007). The Eastern European/post‐communist media model countries. In: European media governance: national and regional dimensions (ed. G. Terzis), 303–314. Bristol, UK: Intellect Ltd. Jay, P. (1992). Prospects for a shaken‐up Baltimore Magazine. Baltimore Sun (24 May). http://articles. baltimoresun.com/1992‐05‐24/news/1992145085_1_baltimore‐magazine‐baltimore‐county‐obrecht. Jenkins, J. (2016a). Public roles and private negotiations: considering city magazines’ public service and market functions. Journalism 17 (5): 619–635. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884915576733. Jenkins, J. (2016b). The good life: the construction of imagined communities in city magazines. Journalism Studies 17 (3): 319–336. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2014.982942. Johnson, A. (1993). By tying its name to a variety of events, Mpls.‐St. Paul is beating the odds in a tough city magazine category. Folio 22: 74. Johnson, H. (1984). Deep in the heart of Newsweek. Columbia Journalism Review 22 (5): 37–41. Kaniss, P. (1991). Making Local News. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kelly, J. (2013). 8 things I learned from reading every last word of Baku. The New York Times (8 February). www.nytimes.com. Kordic, L. (2007). What your magazine is trying to tell you: an analysis of discourse and language in Western Living and The Block. Unpublished thesis. Simon Fraser University. http://summit.sfu.ca/ system/files/iritems1/8239/etd3130.pdf. Kucera, P. (1987). City‐university alliance produces quality magazine. The Journalism Educator 42 (2): 44–46. Larkin, E. (1998). Inventing an American public. Early American Literature 33 (3): 250–276. Lawrence, J. (1993). Houston paper, city magazine join forces. Advertising Age 64 (40): 32. Lenz, L. (2017). New editor in chief takes Texas Monthly in a ‘lifestyle’ direction. Columbia Journalism Review (20 February). www.cjr.org. MacDougall, A.K. (1974). Clay Felker’s New York. Columbia Journalism Review 12 (6): 36–47. Maine Live (2017). Event page. https://mainelivemarch2017.splashthat.com.



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Case Study: The Contested Category of the Photography Magazine Three Case Studies David Brittain

Introduction First in the 1960s, then again in the 1980s, magazines appeared in Britain that showcased the power and glamor of photography. Some belonged to the realm of small‐scale publishing and were devoted to promoting the artistry of photographers. Larger‐scale magazines also educated the public about photography by hiring innovators such as Brian Griffin, Corinne Day, and Wolfgang Tillmans. These photographers were encouraged to challenge editorial conventions to help publishers secure lucrative niches in their respective markets. I hope to shed new light on the identity of the photography magazine by comparing and contrasting the deployment of ­photography by three quite different British magazines of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. They are the specialist magazine, Creative Camera during the 1960s and 1980s, Management Today of the early 1970s, and i‐D in the mid‐1980s. During these periods all three magazines excelled in their deployment of photography in their respective fields of photography and culture, business management, and style/fashion.

Creative Camera (Pre‐ and Post‐1980) In the late 1960s, a small band of elite photographers in Britain saw Creative Camera magazine as an ally in an enduring campaign to win enhanced social and cultural capital. During the early 1960s, there was no public and institutional support for the aesthetic photography they sought to promote, including a market. Before photographs were exhibited in galleries, aspiring photographers consulted picture magazines  –  from the Sunday supplements to Queen and Paris Match – for the latest trends and to identify the newest talents, according to Bill Jay (Brittain and Cahill 2014).The Arts Council of Great Britain (as it then was) would not support sole practitioners and dedicated photographic organizations until the 1970s, and photography was not yet taught as art at degree level. In 1968, when Creative Camera was founded, its sector was ­dominated by “how‐to” titles, such as Amateur Photographer, that thrived on product advertising and enjoyed relatively large circulations. By contrast, Creative Camera was a loss maker, which was financially underwritten by its ­editor’s donated labor and the pro bono resources of the publishing company that belonged to its owner, according to Colin Osman (Brittain 1999). This “little” magazine had counterparts The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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abroad that included Aperture and Contemporary Photographer (US) and Camera (Switzerland).1 These publications were divergent in terms of a business model, reader profile, and editorial approach, but they demonstrated a common commitment to the legitimation of an art of photography. Under its editor Bill Jay, Creative Camera grew to become the predominant gatekeeper and taste‐shaper within British photography. A disproportionately large amount of the budget seems to have been spent on fine reproduction and good paper stock. Design took its cue from the world of the print connoisseur, whose pictures are surrounded by generous white borders and isolated from texts. This design aesthetic encouraged the view that images could become known solely through the contemplation of their forms, without knowledge of their wider context. The journalistic content of Creative Camera invoked the social system of the most educated photographers, with a section devoted to international photography exhibitions and new magazines (including art and literary titles). Most texts, however, celebrated the creativity and lofty morality of elite black‐and‐white photojournalists. Between 1968 and 1969, for example, Creative Camera showcased pictures by such luminaries as Henri Cartier‐Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, George Rodger, Philip Jones Griffiths, and Robert Frank. They came with the endorsement of prestigious titles – from LIFE to Drum to the Sunday Times supplement – which had provided them with access to “high value subjects” (to borrow from Bourdieu) that were off limits to ordinary photographers. Creative Camera took content from magazine culture, but also part of its identity. The stress on documentary may be explained by the fact that both Jay and his publisher, Colin Osman, were in journalism; the former moonlighted as picture editor of the Daily Telegraph and the ­latter, in addition to his publishing activities, collected vintage picture magazines (Osman 1985). Journalistic contributors included Sir Tom Hopkinson, and there was much respect for legendary magazine “creatives,” who helped photographers to realize their best work. This included the art director Willi Fleckhaus of Twen, who was the subject of a glowing profile in the November 1970 issue. A similar pattern of close contacts between photography magazines and picture journalism existed in the USA, where Wilson Hicks of LIFE contributed to Aperture and Lee Lockwood from Contemporary Photographer worked at the Black Star picture agency. During its early years, the magazine became a forum where famous photographers could air grievances with journalist colleagues and suggest constructive solutions to perceived problems. Some, such as Ian Berry, replayed their battles to reclaim control of their images from exploitative editors. Others complained about the increasing “corporatization” of picture magazines, when compared with “golden‐age” pictorials, such as LIFE and Picture Post, which were thought to value the contribution of photographers. This was the theme of an article by John Szarkowski that urged photographers to leave journalism and focus on their own projects (Brittain 1999). Precedents for this included Cartier‐Bresson and Robert Frank, who had both published ground‐breaking books (respectively, The Decisive Moment and The Americans). Under Bill Jay’s editorship (1968–1970), Creative Camera celebrated these “autonomous” producers (typically, freelancers or members of the Magnum agency, co‐founded by Cartier‐Bresson), and attempted to redress the perceived bias in journalism against photographers. Historical documentary photographers were covered, too, such as Paul Strand, Andre Kertesz, Weegee, and August Sander, validating and underpinning notions of a “documentary tradition.” In keeping with its commitment to autonomous production, the magazine aired alternative edits of formerly published picture stories by important photographers. A good example would be the feature “Philip Jones Griffiths: Six Photographs from Vietnam” in December 1969 (Griffiths 1969), in which each landscape‐format image is reproduced with maximum impact  –  without text  –  across its own double‐page spread. Such prestigious photographers were consulted on the selection, sequencing, and layout of their images. Long before the boom in photographers’ books, the magazine found a niche as the outlet for  all sorts of “personal” photographers’ projects. An interesting case is Charles Harbutt’s

324 Brittain s­ ubmission of an eight‐page alternative to the standard “linear” picture story that acknowledges the advent of television and looks forward several years to the impact on photography of ­semiotics. In his accompanying essay, which was first published by Contemporary Photographer magazine in the USA, Harbutt committed himself to the ideal of the mass audience while venting his frustration at the layout men and caption writers who obstructed his “personal vision” (Harbutt 1968). Contributors such as Harbutt normally waived their royalty fees in support of the magazine or/and in anticipation of accruing cultural capital as validated sole producers. Such relatively unseen features make these early issues remarkably valuable primary sites for researchers. Jay’s proscription of “commercial” photography in Creative Camera is surprising given that so many photographers were making reputations in fashion or advertising. They included ­versatile craftsmen, such as Lester Bookbinder, and innovators, such as David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy. One explanation is Jay’s dislike of fuddy‐duddy “club photographers” who aspired to the advanced techniques of such successful commercial photographers. Jay liked to contrast these practitioners with “modern” 35 mm photographers, such as Don McCullin and Roger Mayne, admirers of Cartier‐Bresson’s professionalized intuitive approach. Some suspected that Jay associated the manipulative modes of fashion and advertising with kitsch and “selling out” (Brittain 1999). Comments by contributors such as the photographer Tony Ray‐Jones seem to bear this out (Brittain 1999). There is also the fact that “manipulated” images, such as those taken by fashion and advertising photographers, did not conform to the prescriptive aesthetic criteria of gatekeepers. Photojournalism, along with “street photography,” topographical photography, and so on, met with the approval of experts in museums and ­galleries (Bourdieu and Whiteside 1996). By the late 1970s, there was evidence of change as British institutions and sections of the public demonstrated a willingness to accept aesthetic photography.2 In 1980, the year i‐D and The Face were founded, Creative Camera became an arts organization as a client of the Arts Council of Great Britain.3 Taste, which had once determined the visual content of Creative Camera, lost ground after the editors embraced the latest critical writing by such as Victor Burgin and John Tagg. Photography theory, especially semiotics, seemed to show why it did not make sense to isolate “art” practices from “commercial” practices (Burgin 1982). Once photography was accepted as art, it quickly became co‐opted by the market. i‐D and The Face provided evidence of the capitulation of “aesthetic” photography and the impetus for fresh “critical” photographic approaches that aimed to circumvent market forces. During this time Creative Camera published portraits by Brian Griffin. During the 1970s, Griffin had honed an innovative style while working for a range of magazines  –  notably the Haymarket title, Management Today – under the influential art director Roland Schenk. Traditional portraits aspired to be respectful of a sitter’s rank and to offer a “truthful” representation of an authentic self. Somehow, Griffin managed to persuade his sitters to collude in undermining such ambitions. Griffin’s evocative portrait of Jack Harwell in Nancy Foy’s article, “Software’s Hard Currency,” in Management Today, December 1975, imagines the software entrepreneur as a contemporary nobleman surrounded by the ceremonial trappings of modern business: the brolly, hat, overcoat and briefcase. In another remarkable Griffin picture, the 70‐year‐old designer and businessman Hardy Amies, is unrecognizable in the affected pose and melancholy manner of a social inferior. Under Bill Jay’s editorship, Griffin’s commercial background might have militated against him, but the new editors considered this to be part of Griffin’s cultural capital. In his important essay, “The Author as Producer” (Burgin 1982), Walter Benjamin argued that producers could avoid being appropriated if they found the right orientation within the production system. His exemplar of the author/producer was Brecht, whose epic theater “doesn’t reproduce conditions [of our lives], rather … it uncovers them.” When reproduced and analyzed in the “critical” context of magazines such as Creative Camera or Ten.8, Griffin’s



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self‐referential images yielded to new interpretations – including the notion that they resisted appropriation by “uncovering” the “hidden” ideological processes of photographic representation through their displays of theatricality and allusiveness.4 Meanwhile. Griffin’s habit of ­identifying personally with both his trade and his subjects5 suggested parallels with Benjamin’s author/producer.

Management Today In the 1960s, long before many galleries exhibited photography, young British photographers and their admirers found each other through the medium of consumer magazines. They included the Sunday supplements, which are associated with the talents of photojournalists such as Don McCullin, and titles such as Queen, Town, and Nova that became synonymous with the fashion photography of David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Brian Duffy. The legendary Town (Man About Town as it then was) was launched in 1960 by Haymarket along the lines of Queen magazine. The publisher Clive Labovitch recruited Tom Wolsey to be art director of Town, “to bring world‐class design and photography to British specialist publishing.” Wolsey used bold design and the photography of such innovators as Bailey and Donovan to attract advertising from upcoming agencies (such as Collett Dickenson Pearce), which were on the lookout for appropriate outlets. In 1966, Haymarket used Town (now defunct) as the model for a stylish new business magazine called Management Today (Farish 2007). Its first editor, Bob Heller, hoped that the title would transform the sector that was pejoratively known as “trade and tech.” Heller recalls: “I had all the elements required: ace designers, a young and clever staff, first‐class contributors, superb photographers and a supportive, aggressive, determined management” (Haymarket 50 years; Farish 2007, n.p.). In 1968, the Swiss art director Roland Schenk joined Management Today to follow Wolsey’s example and make a magazine that punched above its weight, both journalistically and in visual impact. Like Alexey Brodovitch6 at Harper’s Bazaar, Schenk had acquired the reputation of a journalist who worked well with photographers. He had worked at the prestigious Swiss magazine Du, commissioning such pioneers of the 35 mm camera as Cartier‐Bresson, and Robert Frank. While at Du, he won praise for his intuitive treatment of the work of the (then‐forgotten) German photographer August Sander (Zwingle 1990). Management Today’s innovative photographic house style encompassed reportage, extended portfolios of “creative” color photography and experimental approaches, which reflected something of Schenk’s broad professional experience and catholic tastes. While most journalists deployed photography to validate eye‐witness texts, Schenk, who had trained as an artist, recognized its potential for fantasy. He stated: “The photograph should transcend the purely ­documentary level” (Zwingle 1990). Some of the photographers he worked with, such as Brian Griffin, John Claridge, and Christian Vogt, would cross over in the late 1970s into art.7 When Schenk began at Management Today, the bowler and brolly and the Rover car were still common tropes in the magazine representation of the business world. While financial journalists speculated about the pros and cons of joining Europe and investing in South Africa, women were portrayed as doting secretaries or air hostesses. Yet, from the start, the visual content of the magazine  –  in which editorial photography and advertising seemed to mirror each other in intriguing ways – contained clues about social changes that were underway. The first computers were beginning to revolutionize management practices, and companies such as IBM and Sperry Rand were spending millions promoting them. The July 1970 issue ran a feature that declared computer users in Britain would invest at least £600 m annually in their data processing and computing. This trend most likely explains the decision by the editor to introduce a “computers” section in each edition. Yet, despite impressive claims by manufacturers

326 Brittain (an advert for Atlas: “The computer is already handling up to 1000 jobs a day of which 70 per cent are completed and ready for collection in four hours”), many businessmen were reticent ­participants in the nascent cyber culture. This is suggested by such skeptical headlines as “The Unhelpful Computer” (July 1970) or “Why Technology Doesn’t Pay” (January 1969). Image makers, meanwhile, struggled to find appropriate and engaging imagery with which to represent the inscrutable boxes of computer technology. Schenk possessed a degree in science, and under his art direction photographers were encouraged to celebrate the potential of various components to yield sublime images. Several of them were skilful at adapting the styles of modern art, which had become accessible to much of the public thanks to what Malraux once called the “museum without walls” of proliferating reproductions and mediations.8 One of Schenk’s regulars, John Ellard, excelled at close‐ups of circuit boards and semi‐conductors that stressed their formal resemblance to abstract paintings (“Motorola’s Moneyless Boom,” June 69; also, “Unitech Does its Thing” by Simon Caulkin, April 1973). Advertisers, including the PYE Group (a major producer of electronics and telecommunications equipment in the UK at the time), came to adopt this imagery, but the ad man’s favorite technological trope, seen again and again in Management Today, was the perforated paper tape that was used to store computer data. This may have been because the beguiling patterns of holes lent themselves to creative lighting, and because people could be photographed interacting with the tape. Schenk’s instinct seems to have been to ask photographers to reproduce this content but with more imaginative flair than the agencies could muster or dared to. One of the main vehicles for the popularization of modern art was advertising, which, as the novelist J.G. Ballard once noted, plundered its shock effects from surrealism (Ballard 1966). Lester Bookbinder brought the polish and big budget specs of his advertising assignments to produce a series of remarkable “avant‐garde” covers for Management Today. He was a master of a range of manipulative techniques, including multiple exposure photography, photo collage, ultra‐close‐up photography, and model photography. A good example of this combination of technique and imagination is Bookbinder’s science‐ fiction cover image for the February 1970 issue. While this couldn’t claim to show the “human face” of computer technology, it invited viewers to ponder its fantastic aspects. Bookbinder incorporates a faint curl of paper tape into a surrealistic photo collage of a sculptural form floating in a dream desert scape made of blurred horizontal planes. This is an unmistakable homage to the avant‐garde strategy of “making strange,” which Schenk would have encountered as an artist. His distinctive design allows this striking image to dominate with relatively no interference from cover lines. Inside, meanwhile (“The Hot World of Honeywell”), an image of an out‐of‐focus red light evoked the sinister eye of the HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Similarly, Bookbinder’s cover for April 1972 features a “defamiliarized” image of vegetables harking back to German “subjective” photography of the 1950s. His cover for June 1970 (an empty bottle against a perfect blue backdrop appears to contain a solitary white cloud) contained unmistakable echoes of the proto‐pop art paintings of Magritte, by this time on the way to becoming the most appropriated artist in commercial art. The magazine ran an extended color section that was used for advertising and in‐depth articles on industry. One such was Christopher Mansell’s report on the oil industry in June 1972, “Long Lag at Laporte.” This was illustrated by photographs by another technically gifted recycler of modern art imagery, Paul Constant. The flow of the article is dramatically interrupted by Constant’s startling image, over a double page spread, of a refinery, which was redolent of an action painting: the aestheticization of industry. Splashes and swirls that resemble spatters of paint float across and enliven a gloomy scene of refinery structures in silhouette. Much of the visual content of Management Today comprised portraits, a genre that was relatively lowly in the hierarchy of subject matter within art photography, perhaps owing to its popularity within “how‐to” magazines. Many of those in the early editions appear to be “mug shots” issued by corporate publicists. Even commissioned portraits were formulaic. Managers



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and union bosses were usually photographed formally in the office or against a cityscape, while workers were “captured” in the workplace in the grainy reportage style (black‐and‐white and color) that was fashionable at the time (see September 1972 feature “British Steel Under Pressure” by Julian Spencer). From the early 1970s, however, Management Today’s portrait photography becomes more assertive and less formulaic, possibly taking its cue from the new “life style” advertising. Formerly, advertisers had contrived to deify managers, but the trend was to make them appear more approachable and younger. An advert in the July 1973 issue for Telephone Rentals features an intimate moment in which a young executive hugs his toddler, while his loving wife looks on (the catch line: “Flexible time gives a better balance between work and private life”). Mindful perhaps of a younger and less deferential reader, Schenk commissioned the satirists Fluck and Law to make their salacious puppets of establishment figures. Bob Cramp took the photographs that were used for reproduction in the December 1975 issue. In the same spirit, the confrontational portraits of Rolph Gobits (“The Japanese Euro‐strategy,” July 1975) and Reg Wilkins’s quirky wide‐angle shots were more of the moment. Other notable innovators included John Claridge, whose photographs portrayed workers as believable characters rather than ciphers (Thomas 1972). Of all the photographers at Management Today, Brian Griffin has had the most to say about the importance of the magazine – and Schenk especially – for his creative development and his eventual acceptance as a “critical” practitioner within the artistic sector. In 1980, he won artistic recognition with his book Power, containing portraits that had been taken under Schenk’s art direction (Goldhill 1981). Griffin joined the title in 1972, soon after graduating from Manchester Polytechnic. Under Schenk he was required to be versatile, tackling both portraits and reportage subjects.9 Griffin has described Schenk as both inspirational and a tyrannical perfectionist, who pressured photographers to re‐shoot any assignment that fell below his standards. Griffin recalls: “He is a strong man and his influence on you can overpower your own feelings for things and your own approach to things but if you can try to get an equilibrium going with him then it can be a very constructive sort of relationship” (Goldhill 1981). Schenk introduced his protégé to German Expressionist cinema, Kafka, and film noir – elements of which Griffin synthesized into a distinctive style that helped fulfill the publisher’s wish to make Management Today more stylish than its rivals, and provided an ironic counterpoint to the futuristic high‐tech fantasies of John Ellard and others. A good example would be a series of black‐and‐white documentary pictures taken for the December 1973 feature “The Big City Roundabout,” written by Tom Lester. It opens with Griffin’s broody photograph, taken through the rear window of a cab, of crowds filing across London Bridge. The second spread contains his blurry image of back‐lit commuters descending into the underground under the mysterious eye of some sort of gauge or technical display. Both images use black and white, shadows, and dehumanized human forms to transform commonplace situations into evocative fantasies. In interiors, similarly, Griffin deployed sophisticated flash photography to achieve defamiliarizing effects (see the May 1975 portrait of Sir Don Ryder). Such images contained echoes of contemporary adverts, which traded in absurd or fanciful scenarios. There was a compelling symmetry, for instance, between the businessman in a Bank of America ad, who has materialized in front of Big Ben, and Eric Varley, Secretary of State for Energy at the time (March 1975) in Griffin’s portrait, who emerges tentatively on the threshold of an empty white room (Lester 1975). The explicitly allusive and implicitly critical perspective that Griffin developed for Management Today chimed with the tastes of the Creative Camera of the 1980s, which validated his images as “art.” Griffin’s insider perspective of management became a large element of the context which gave such images their meaning and impact in Power.10 If, as it seems, Roland Schenk has

328 Brittain been overlooked within the photographic specialism, compared with figures such as Tom Wolsey (Braybon 2008), it may be because Management Today occupied a relatively unglamorous ­sector of magazine culture.

i‐D In 1986, pictures by Brian Griffin were selected by the National Portrait Gallery in London for the exhibition “Twenty for Today: New Portrait Photography.” The exhibition marked a cultural renaissance in London that was said to be manifest in all the arts  –  including, significantly, ­photography (Pepper 1986). The main outlet for this photography was a new breed of picture magazine, from which all 20 exhibitors had been selected. Titles mentioned included Ritz, Blitz, The Face, and i‐D, which published a fashion picture by Griffin in its inaugural edition, in ­recognition of his seniority. When compared with similar, more established visual titles such as Tatler, the “style” magazines were small scale, selling in the thousands and tens of thousands at best.11 What they lacked in commercial capital, however, was made up for in relatively high levels of cultural capital as stylish “bibles” and as trend‐setters and spotters of emerging celebrities. The essayist in the exhibition catalog compared the photographers of the 1980s with those of the 1960s. Unlike Bailey, McCullin, and others of that generation, however, many of these photographers were art‐school graduates. When Nick Knight studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Holly Warburton was at St. Martins School of Art, they were exposed to the latest ideas in their field. They knew how to adapt aesthetic styles, including new ones from the emerging canon of art photography. One of the exhibitors was Robert Farber, whose debt to David Bailey’s celebrity portraits is self‐consciously manifest in the stark lighting and framing of his black‐and‐white portrait of the young Tim Roth. Several others adapted the styles and imagery of avant‐garde photography of the 1920s and 1930s. Mike Owen’s mannered images deploy the “worm’s eye” viewpoint of Constructivism, and the influence of the surrealist affiliate Man Ray is palpable in Chris Garnham’s collage portrait of the choreographer Michael Clark, who appears to be juggling multiple images of himself. With a nod to the work of the “high” fashion photographer Horst, Nick Knight also capitalized on moody lighting and faux classical forms. In earlier times, such photographers could have been accused of being adversely “influenced” by art, but these “postmodern” photographers understood that visual references were common cultural currency and could be invoked for effect. Such raiding and flaunting of image culture had obvious parallels in new romantic pop music of the time, and found an analogy in the bricoleur tastes and nous of the young, well‐educated readers of the style magazines. This sensibility attained its apogee in the layout aesthetic of magazines such as i‐D and The Face. According to Dick Hebdige (referring to Barthes), The Face was not designed to be read so much as “cruised” (Hebdige 1988). i‐D started out in 1980 in a fanzine format, stapled together and hand‐delivered.12 Four years later, it abandoned the A4 landscape format, found an investor, and became a commercial newsstand product.13 Terry Jones founded i‐D as an escape from the constraints of the fashion business and a vehicle for working methods and design modes that he’d developed as an art director at Vogue. The title soon became influential as a progenitor of street style and through the impact of Jones’s so‐called “instant design” strategies of stenciling, “found” fonts, and shaky machine‐manipulated graphics. From the start Jones seems to have conceived of i‐D as a “punk” version of the fashion magazine that would place the assumed opposition between “fashion” and “life” into contention. As i‐D’s former editor Dylan Jones commented, “in a way the magazine made a genius … attempt to return control of the fashion world to those who actually inhabited it” (Jones 2001, p. 10).



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Over the years, this punk ethos has been voiced many times and it was manifest in i‐D’s “knowing” editorial attitude. A subversive intent is conveyed through the attention‐seeking post‐punk design – including the cheeky “winking” i‐D logo – and in making a virtue of doing great things on the cheap (equating creativity to thriftiness, Jones stated: “Lack of budget ­generated countless ideas…” (Jones 2001, p. 26). The attitude was inscribed in the irreverent tone of the journalism  –  spelling mistakes were “celebrated”  –  according to Caryn Franklin (1989) as well as in the photography that was co‐opted to interrogate the fashion system. The mainstay of i‐D’s editorial photography was the full‐length street portrait or “straight up.” Jones discovered the potential of such imagery in 1976, in a portfolio of Steve Johnston’s photographs of punks. He also liked the fact that Johnston had shot them “one‐click‐per‐ person” to cut costs. Early issues printed straight‐ups of “ordinary” people posed against walls and shop fronts or sometimes crudely cut out and pasted onto white; these portraits were ­frequently uncredited.14 Each was published with a “vox‐pop” caption, identifying the subject’s clothes and accessories (Emma. 7 years old. Wearing black plastic “beat cap” and black plastic jet from a charity shop, 20p each…), and claiming to record their attitudes and tastes (Likes punks, Fad Gadget, Adam Ant and pink hair…). With the straight‐ups, i‐D’s editors proposed tendentious analogies between the basic snapshot and the luxurious images in a magazine such as Vogue. To each tasteful photograph in Vogue, or Tatler, i‐D offered an “artless” one in a grimy city street. i‐D matched each perfect image of passive consumption on a glossy page, with one of an empowered creative “individual.” Straight‐ups also functioned to distance the magazine, in the eyes of readers, from the fashion elite, and help perpetuate the title’s street credibility. A half‐page photograph in i‐D’s issue No. 8 shows i‐D photographer Steve Dixon in a faux off‐guard moment. Dixon’s nonchalance, youth, and fashion sense (tipped bookie’s hat, cavalry twill trousers, brogues, sheepskin jacket, and paisley scarf, a “gift from Katie”) mirror those of the readers he photographed. In the mid‐1980s, when the straight‐up was no longer new, i‐D deployed other modes of photography to maintain its niche as a fashion outsider and creative innovator. This included fashion photography without fashion. Nick Knight was one of the most versatile and professional fashion photographers in London at this time. Around 1985, Jones appointed him photography editor at i‐D,15 where he surrounded himself with a group of young photographers that included Marc Lebon and Eamonn McCabe, and their stylists, Simon Foxton, Ray Petri, and Caroline Baker. Others, including Corinne Day, became associated with The Face, where the art director Phil Bicker broke with convention by consulting photographers about their layouts, pre‐­ publication.16 Magazine photographers did not normally enjoy such editorial freedom, except in specialist photographic magazines, such as Creative Camera. Bicker considers i‐D and The Face of the mid‐1980s to have been catalysts for a new kind of photography that blurred lines between “commercial” and “aesthetic” and “public” and “private” modes. To illustrate this blending, he points to the feature “Pose!,” credited to Nick Knight and the stylist Simon Foxton, in i‐D’s issue no. 39 from 1986. Knight’s story on the theme of British youth culture was shot in black and white in the studio. Focus is less on clothes than on the male and female models who pose as mods, teddy boys, and bikers (a final page includes a cast of cavorting punks). The layout capitalizes on variety: bold silhouettes against stark white backdrops, close ups of accessories, and strong portraits. The design maintains pace by alternating between different page formats. and the interest is sustained through a lively ­juxtaposition of different viewpoints. Knight’s use of white backgrounds, strong design, and moody lighting alludes to David Bailey’s photographs of the 1960s. But rather than engage in parody or imitation, Knight quotes Bailey as part of a sophisticated signifying practice, in which the appropriated style attains the importance of a formal element. The i‐D picture story which was “possibly the most radical of them all,” according to P. Bricker (2006, personal communication), was shot a few years later, in 1992, by Wolfgang Tillmans, who would go on to win the prestigious Turner art prize. It consists of two facing full‐bleed

330 Brittain photographs taken in available light (i‐D issue No. 110, “Like Brother, Like Sister”). The left‐ hand page features an enigmatic full‐page black‐and‐white photograph of a man peering into the crotch of a naked standing woman. Arguably, its “radical” nature was rooted not in its risqué content, but in the fact that it could only be identified as a fashion illustration because it was reproduced in a fashion context. Terry Jones has conceded that i‐D’s claim to be the punk of its sector might be a little exaggerated (Jones 2001). Nevertheless, it is significant that the “life‐as‐fashion” stand‐ups and the “anti‐fashion” photography of Knight and Tillmans came out of this magazine – and not Vogue or fashion advertising, for instance (though it was rapidly appropriated). Because i‐D operated on a relatively smaller economic scale than its better resourced counterparts at Vogue or Tatler,17 the title was relatively less exposed to economic pressures and, therefore, much better prepared to take creative risks. The wider significance of such breakthroughs was to demonstrate that ­specialist photography titles, such as Creative Camera, did not possess a monopoly on innovation and risk‐taking, or on validating artistic reputations.

Conclusion The photography magazine is a contested category because of its subject. The appeal of both the great photograph, and the exploits of great photographers, is universal. Those who aimed to confine the discussion of photography to “an art” were always going to be a small minority. In providing discrete (yet complementary) types of knowledge about the subject, networks of “photography magazines” constituted a unique resource for photographers, offering both economic and cultural capital, and ensuring diversity within photography publishing. Groups of diverse magazines also functioned as an unofficial yet influential lobby that helped break down ingrained resistance to the notion of an art of photography, contributing to the high esteem that photography presently enjoys.

Notes 1 It is worth noting that Creative Camera’s network during the 1970s included non‐photography magazines which demonstrated an interest in photography – such as Studio International and Ambit. 2 In November 1976, The Times published an article titled “How the great British photographic revival created its own momentum” – a “pulse‐taking” editorial showing how attitudes toward photography were changing, with news of encouraging developments within major museums, the arts council, and the subsidized arts (Campbell 1976). The article identified a healthy photographic press and a boom in photography book publishing, with more institutions offering “fine‐art‐oriented” degrees in photography. 3 The title remained a client of state subsidy until 2001, when it folded after subsidy was withdrawn. 4 One of Burgin’s themes concerned the deceitfulness of photography. Photographs seem to offer a “neutral” and naturalistic form of representation, he argues. This impression is aided by the fact that most photographs are encountered every day “as if in a waking dream.” Burgin insisted that this neutrality was an illusion that has been knowingly exploited and was relied upon to support the dominant ideology of consumerism. Semiotics, which approached photography from the standpoint of linguistic science, proved that a photograph was not a “pure image” (pure denotation), but rather that it operated on the level of connotation, drawing from “a heterogeneous complex of codes.” Burgin mentions the book Mythologies, in which Barthes reveals how photographs disseminate myths (or bourgeois ideology) while concealing their complicity in this process. He explained: “The characteristics of the photographic apparatus position the subject in such a way that the object photographed serves to conceal the ­textuality of the photography itself.” Photography such as Griffin’s, which stressed the artificiality of the ­photographic process, was considered to demystify this “reality effect” of photography.



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5 Griffin always made his identification with this process explicit. In an interview, he said: “I work the hours of managers and I have their way of life, so, really, I’m looking from the inside.” Ten.8 magazine No. 33, p 10. 6 During the 1960s, Brodovich, a designer and photographer, mentored Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, and Tony Ray‐Jones among other well‐known photographers. 7 Griffin and Vogt were exhibited at the Photographers’ Gallery in London during the 1970s, Claridge was shown there in 1982. 8 Andre Malraux recognized that the art museum, which confines the study of fine art to prescribed objects and strict display formats, was about to be replaced by a non‐hierarchical world of replicas and reproductions. The so‐called imaginary museum became widely discussed after the publication of Malraux’s book Les Voix du Silence, 1953. 9 An image from one of his reportage assignments is reproduced as a full‐bleed color image to accompany the feature, “Managing the Money” in Management Today, July 1973. High on a screen separating two sets of deserted desks, someone has stuck a bizarre doll of a grinning man dressed in a kipper tie and a striped convict’s outfit. 10 At times even Griffin’s distinctive pictures can seem conventional in Management Today. The March 1975 issue, for example, contained the feature “Hopeful Pessimists” by Norris Willatt. This was illustrated by five (self) portraits of secretive Swiss bankers, each one matter‐of‐factly holding the camera’s cable release to indicate his authorship of the image. These striking pictures, enabled and directed by the photographer Christian Vogt, blur the line between editorial portraiture and conceptual art, and demonstrate how far “commercial” photography could be pushed by a ­determined art director. 11 In his introduction to the catalog “Image into Print: The Portrait in the Eighties,” Twenty for Today catalog National Portrait Gallery, London 1986, Terence Pepper claims monthly sales of Ritz at 15 000; Terry Jones recalls printing 2000 copies of the first edition of i‐D, but in 2001 Jones claimed that i‐D “commercially … competes with the mainstream.” (Smile i‐D, Jones 2001). In 1988, Dick Hebdige claimed that the circulation of The Face was 52 000–90 000 ((1988). Hiding in the Light (157). London and New York: Routledge). 12 The first editor Perry Haines “invested 100% of his energy into distributing i–D from the boot of Malcolm Garrett’s Cadillac, not to mention hosting i‐D nights … styling Adam Ant…” (Taschen, p. 24). 13 Elliot bought 51% share and paid off all accumulated debts. Issue 14 changed from landscape to portrait format. (Taschen, p. 25). 14 i‐D’s issue No. 6 listed a whole roster of straight‐up photographers, including Simon Brown, Thomas Degen, Martin Grainger, Mike Owen, Susana Frye, Dave Claridge, Steve Waldren, Mike Muscamp, Robin Ridley, Hugh Johnson, and Ossie Kulfner. 15 Knight may have held more than one role at the picture department. Bicker recalls that Knight was active as photographic editor “for a short period” in the mid‐1980s. The March 1985 issue of i‐D credits him as “photos.” Knight recalls that he assumed the role in April 1990 for “almost nine editions” (Imperfect Beauty). Jones recalls that he asked Knight to be “caretaker Picture Editor” in 1989 (Taschen, p. 26). 16 Bicker was art director of Creative Camera between 1994 and 2001. During this time, the magazine published several of the photographers that Bicker nurtured at The Face, including Corinne Day, Juergen Teller, Nigel Shafran, and Glen Luchford. 17 For example, i‐D issue No. 10 contains a full‐bleed one‐page advert from Katherine Hamnett. It consists of a crude, yet eye‐catching assemblage of three torn photocopies of images of ethnic jewelry. The designer’s name and address are conventionally typeset in black inside a stark white gash or tear and are plainly visible – but otherwise this could be mistaken for part of an editorial feature on jumble sale chic. Much has been made of the fact that Jones and Nick Logan, who owned The Face, both used their homes to finance their publications.

References Ballard, J.G. (1966). The Coming of the Unconscious. Roberts & Vinter. Bourdieu, P. and Whiteside, S. (1996). Photography: A Middle‐Brow Art. Stanford University Press.

332 Brittain Braybon, A. (2008). About Town: a case study from research in progress on photographic networks in Britain, 1952–1969. Photography and Culture 1 (1): 95–106. Brittain, D. (ed.) (1999). Creative Camera: Thirty Years of Writing. Manchester University Press. Brittain, D. and Cahill, C. (2014). Inside Photography: Ten Interviews with Editors. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing. Burgin, V. (ed.) (1982). Thinking Photography. Macmillan International Higher Education. Campbell, B. (1976). How the Great British Photographic Revival created its own momentum. The Times (5 November), p. 13. Farish, S. (2007). Haymarket 50 years: 50 glorious moments. Campaign (26 October). www.campaignlive. co.uk/article/763156/haymarket‐50‐years‐50‐glorious‐moments‐1‐2# (accessed 26 March 2019). Franklin, C. (1989). The i‐D Bible: Every Ultimate Fashion Victim’s Handbook. Goldhill, J. (1981, October). Personal interview. Griffiths, P.J. (1969). Six photographs from Vietnam. Creative Camera 66 (December). Harbutt, C. (1968). The multi level picture story. Contemporary Photographer 5 (3): 10–39. Hebdige, D. (1988). Hiding in the Light: On Images and Things. Psychology Press. Jones, T. (ed.) (2001). Smile iD: Fashion and Style: The Best from 20 Years of iD. Los Angeles, CA: Taschen America Llc. Lester, T. (1975). The UK’s energy lethargy. Management Today (March). Malraux, A. and Gilbert, S. (1953). The Voices of Silence, 30. New York: Doubleday. Osman, C. (1985). The Foundation of Parade. Creative Camera, special issue Information and Propaganda, July–August: 10. Pepper, T. (1986). Image into print: the portrait in the eighties. In: Twenty for Today. London: National Portrait Gallery. Thomas, D. (1972). The meaty produce of scot. Management Today (March): 82–89. Zwingle, E. (1990). Graphis Magazine July: 49 (268).

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Case Study: Language, Little Magazines, and Local Feminisms Nithila Kanagasabai

Introduction The institutionalization of women’s studies as a discipline and the consequent development of women’s studies centers in universities across India have led to arguments that the increasing significance of professional and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to women’s studies have enabled men and women who lack a serious commitment to feminist politics to practice it as a profession (Menon 2004). These occurrences have also fueled fears of loss of academic rigor (Pappu 2002) and weakening of feminist theorization (Anandhi and Swaminathan 2006). It is in this context that this research explores the formulations of feminisms in non‐metropolitan locations in Tamil Nadu, India’s southernmost state, and the role of little magazines and popular culture weeklies in facilitating spaces of feminist engagement within academia and outside of it. The research posits that these magazines enable first‐generation learners to create a new ­language of feminism, one that speaks to their location and against hegemonic knowledge flows. Employing in‐depth interviews and non‐participant observation, this case study explores the ways in which these magazines facilitate bridging the gap between academics and the public sphere within a postcolonial framework.

Questioning the Non/Academic Binary Interviews with students at two government‐funded women’s studies centers in universities in Tier II cities1 in Tamil Nadu2 about works that inspired and strengthened a women’s studies perspective3 elicited very few references of canonical feminist texts4 or academic work by Indian feminists that form a part of any women’s studies syllabus. Instead, the students mentioned examples of contemporary Tamil literature – even fiction and poetry – that they said served as resource material for their research. Following from John, who emphasizes the “fictional narrative’s empowerment as an interrogator and disrupter of different modes of Western theory in order to make such theory interpret postcolonial contexts more fruitfully” (John 1996, p. 53), this section draws the connections between Tamil feminist fiction and academic feminism within these university spaces. The literary works that featured in conversations about engagement with feminist texts in Tamil included Salma’s novel Irandaam Jaamathin Kathai (The Hour Past Midnight), about The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

334 Kanagasabai the life of Tamil Muslim women, and her poetry, which explores themes of domesticity and desire5; Bama’s novels, which focus on the intersection of gender and caste and, more importantly, her autobiography, which is the first Dalit6 Christian autobiography chronicling the ­struggles of the community (Karukku – Singe); Ambai’s (pen name of CS Lakshmi) feminist fiction and non‐fiction (Siragugal Muriyum – Wings Will be Broken; Veetin mulaiyil oru camaiyalarai – A Kitchen in the Corner of the House); and Kutti Revathi’s poetry (Mulaigal – Breasts),7 about the female body, and the Tamil literary quarterly she edits – Panikkudam. While some of these authors now frequently publish their works in literary magazines, most of them owe the beginnings of their careers to popular Tamil magazines that are not particularly feminist in nature. Kumudam, Kungumam, and Ananda Vikatan are the top three Tamil popular weeklies with a readership of over two million each, according to the 2017 Indian Readership Survey. Ananda Vikatan is the oldest, having been launched in 1926. Kumudam was started in 1947 and the entertainment weekly Kungumam in 1977. All three are available both by subscription and by newsstand sales. Each issue costs between 20 and 30, while an annual subscription costs about 1500 (approximately US$25). While the readership of the magazines has gone up in the past few years, their print circulation has fallen. This is because these top weeklies have developed a robust online readership thanks to their pioneering adoption of the freemium model as early as 2005. Rather than subscribe to just one main magazine, online subscriptions also give the readers the option of accessing a­ nywhere between 6 and 11 specialized magazines focusing on various topics, such as health and religion, and targeting specific audiences, such as women and children, by the same publisher for a subsidized rate. However, as of 2017, even for Ananda Vikatan which has the highest readership, digital accounts for only about 8% of the revenue. According to the managing director and head of content, Srinivasan Balasubramaniam, the Ananda Vikatan website has about 6.5 million monthly unique visitors outside of paywall, and ­between 75 and 80% visit via mobile devices. In addition, close to 100 000 monthly users access the magazine via paid apps.8 However, these popular weeklies have long been criticized for being misogynistic,9 objectifying women,10 and more often than not confining them to private, domestic, and sexually oppressive spaces (Wolf 1991). V. Geetha (2005) suggests that while these magazines feature “half‐clad” women and misogynistic jokes, they also allow space for stories of women’s oppressions, if only to construct them as “victims of a system.” These weeklies have a long history of publishing short stories with feminist overtones. For instance, Anuradha Ramanan’s Sirai (Prison), a post‐rape narrative of subversion, which has been analyzed by Rajeswari Sunder Sunder Rajan (1994) as a third‐world feminist text, was first published in Kungumam. Geetha also points out that the little magazine circuit, which has a strong presence in Tamil Nadu, has enabled women from marginalized communities – such as the Muslims and Dalits – to find a space to articulate their anti‐hindutva11 and anti‐caste stands. Little magazines are “small literary journals that chiefly address each other” (Geetha, p. 122), and have a highly localized circulation of less than 10 000. Fiercely anti‐establishment and featuring experimental writing, these magazines usually run without the patronage of ­ ­mainstream advertisers. Little magazines have had a long, if checkered, history in the region. A.R. Venkatachalapathy notes that the earliest Tamil periodicals can be traced back to the 1840s. These had limited print runs and a small readership until the early twentieth century. The Tamil little magazine tradition, born in the 1950s in opposition to the mainstream commercial magazines, traces its beginnings to Manikodi (Bejewelled Flag),12 a weekly‐turned‐ fortnightly founded in 1933 and associated with the Tamil Renaissance (Venkatachalapathy n.d.). Though it was started by Indian nationalists as a political weekly in colonial India, it has come to be remembered mostly for its contributions to modern literature. Although the magazine had a short print run, of about six years, many writers associated with it have gone on to found and edit other literary little magazines. As a movement, the little magazine gained



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ground in Tamil Nadu in the mid‐1960s with the mushrooming of Socialist/Marxist periodicals, such as Vanambadi (Skylark) and Nirapirigai (Discrimination based on color), now out of print, which marked themselves as being more socially conscious and political than the earlier ­magazines that had focused largely on literary criticism. Even in their heyday, during the 1970s and 1980s, these publications would sell only about 500 copies (Sundaram 2011). Many died out in the 1990s, but have in the past decade found a new lease of life in online spaces. Not only are new issues published online, but there are also vast archives of older issues made ­available to readers. Theeranadhi (Endless River), Manaosai (The Sound of the Mind), Sol, Pudhidhu (Words, New) and Kalachuvadu (Footprints of Time), Kaakkai Cirakinile (In the Wings of a Crow),13 Kanayazhi (Signet Ring), and Thadam (Path) are some of the popular little magazines in Tamil. Most of these magazines are monthlies and are available both in print as well as digital platforms such as Magzter. They are usually slightly more expensive than the popular weeklies, with each print issue costing anywhere between 25 and 50. The poet Salma, for instance, started her literary career by publishing in Kalachuvadu. Based out of Nagercoil, a city in southern Tamil Nadu, Kalachuvadu was founded in 1987 by Tamil novelist and poet Sundara Ramaswamy in an attempt to revive the little magazine movement. Despite its popularity, the publication had to shut down after only eight issues. The founder’s son, Kannan Sundaram, revived the magazine in 1994 and since then, the magazine has been instrumental in encouraging early‐career writers. Two years later, he started Kalachuvadu Publications which has over the years published over 800 titles, and debuted award‐winning Tamil‐language authors and poets not only from the state of Tamil Nadu, but also from the Tamil diaspora. Kalachuvadu also publishes Tamil translations of exemplary literature from around the world.14 Because of its dissemination of feminist poetry and short stories on marriage, sex, family, and society by authors such as Salma, Kutti Revathi, and Sukirtharani – some of whose works appear in the bilingual anthology Wild Girls Wicked Words (Maithri et al. 2012), the magazine was under attack in 2003 by certain sections of Tamil literati, who argued that Kalachuvadu was publishing pornographic material written by “depraved women.” But the editors and publishers of the magazine refused to be intimidated and continued to publish feminist writings. In Salma’s case, the publishers stood by her even when she did not get any support from her immediate family. Kalachuvadu and its publisher have over the years faced strong opposition from various quarters. In 2008, the magazine was under attack from the party in power at the state government for publishing editorials and articles criticizing the government, and the publisher legally challenged the government’s decision to withdraw the order for purchasing copies of the magazine for public libraries.15 Kalachuvadu Publications was in the spotlight again in 2014, when Perumal Murugan’s novel Madhorubagan (One Part Woman) sparked a furor among certain Hindu caste groups. The novel, set in his hometown Tiruchengode, was about a childless woman who participated in a sex ritual during a temple festival in order to conceive. The caste group in question claimed that the author had insulted women of their community. Murugan was forced to apologize and withdraw his novel. He quit his teaching job at a university and even wrote an obituary declaring the writer in him dead. However, the publication house stood by the author. In  2016, the court quashed the case against Murugan and reiterated the import of free speech (Gupta 2019). Murugan has since made a comeback with another novel published by Kalachuvadu Publications and even released two sequels to Madhorubagan published by Penguin Random House India. Kumaran Rajagopal (2014) suggests that the little‐magazine circuit contests English‐­ language elitism and Tamil elitism by using regional dialects rather than the denativized, urbanized middle‐class Tamil that is common among most other journals and magazines. The little magazine also successfully positions itself against hegemonic academic culture by rejecting the

336 Kanagasabai notion of objectivity and embracing a subversion of linguistic norms. Rajagopal (2014) advances the idea that the little magazine then becomes the alternative space claimed by non‐institutional academics and even formal academics who refuse to be limited by the agenda of state‐sponsored research. He argues that by being a space where Tamil linguists, more than social scientists, ­theorize the sociocultural, the little magazine genre offers a critique of seemingly universal sociological methods. Rajagopal (2014) goes on to point out an instance in which a little magazine debated the usefulness of an interview schedule in conducting qualitative research of a folk culture that does not encourage the enunciation of an individual as a separate entity. These magazines provide spaces for Dalit writers such as Bama, whose language is a non‐sanitized Dalit Tamil, flaunting its innuendoes and swear words. By fighting Brahmanical feminist16 knowledge hegemonies in language, content, and the authors it provides space to, the little magazine becomes fertile ground for articulation of caste and gender issues, and a platform for theorization of popular culture. Many little magazines are headquartered not in metropolitan locations, but in smaller cities and towns. Kalachuvadu, for instance, is based in Nagercoil, a fact that the publisher feels allows for independence. In a news article published in March 2019, after the magazine won the Publisher of the Year award from Publishing Next and the Romain Rolland Prize for literary translation, Gupta spoke to Sundaram, who pointed out the uniqueness of Kanyakumari district, where Nagercoil is located: (It) broke off from Kerala to join Tamil Nadu after intense linguistic agitations in 1956 — is a distinct subculture and a bilingual space, and is eyed a little suspiciously by the Tamil mainstream. The team running the publishing house has people from linguistic, religious and caste minorities, immigrants, women and Dalits. ‘These are people who have to claim the Tamil identity by contributing to it, and not those who think that it is an entitlement by birth. We strive to enrich Tamil; we don’t live off it,’ says Sundaram. (Gupta 2019)

Graduate students interviewed in similar non‐metropolitan locations, in the cities of Tiruchirapalli (population 1 million) and Coimbatore population over 2 million) in Tamil Nadu often engaged with these little magazines, both in print and online portals. For instance, keetru.com is an extensive online Tamil literary source, which archives a variety of little magazines, including Dalit Murasu (Dalit Herald), Maatru Karuthu (Counter‐argument), Vizhiuppunarvu (Awareness) and Penniyam (Feminism). These sites are not viewed as alternative or non‐academic spaces. Rather, they are mentioned in tandem with repositories of published journal articles and dissertations. For example, Surya,17 a 28‐year‐old PhD candidate who is a first‐generation learner, says: I do a lot of reference work online. I go to sites like JSTOR, Springer, Shodhganga, Economic and Political Weekly, Social Action…. I also visit Tamil websites like keetru.com and kalvisolai.com. Because my PhD is on labor and employment, I visit a lot of UN sites like that of the World Health Organization (WHO), International Labor Organization (ILO), Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WEIGO) and the official website of the National Domestic Workers Movement – NDWM.org.

Engagement with these resources transcends commitment to specific kinds of knowledges and becomes commitment to new epistemologies, new ways of knowing. Research participants working on water governance and domestic labor pointed out that in little magazines they found resources that spoke to the local contexts of their research from a nuanced, intersectional ­location that factors multiple identities of caste, gender, language, and culture. The little magazines, they asserted, allowed for an interrogation of feminist theories from a subaltern, Dalit perspective,



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which enabled a critical view of the women’s studies project in India. They critiqued the ­traditionally sociological formulation of caste as a remnant of the pre‐modern, with its focus on notions of ritual purity and pollution, and instead observed caste as that which structures social lived experiences.

Democratization of Knowledges The interviewed students and scholars also participated in these platforms by writing on topics they were currently researching. Publishing in these spaces was not only perceived as convenient, but was also viewed as a political decision because writing about one’s research in Tamil translated into accessibility for people who had participated in these studies. Rani, a 27‐year‐old research scholar, who has completed her MA in women’s studies and is currently working on a doctoral thesis that examines the ways in which women participate in water governance at the local level, says: I had written an article in Tamil for World Water Day. It was too late to send it for publication then, but I have that piece, and I intend to publish it sometime soon. It was very convenient for me to write because I could express all my views lucidly in Tamil. I can write the same thing in English, but I doubt I’ll be able to express myself that well. Also, I feel that it is unjust if the women I work with cannot read what I write about them or their situation. Even if I write in English, I try to rewrite it in Tamil and take it back to them. We students decided to even bring out a journal in Tamil so the work becomes accessible to a lot more people, including the people who contributed to my research.

This use of the platform provided by little magazines therefore represents an attempt at bridging the gap between academics and the public sphere within a postcolonial framework. Stuart Hall, reflecting on a Gramscian idea, engages with the possibility of institutional practices enabling the production of an organic intellectual who, unlike the traditional intellectual, is rooted in the social structures she engages with. He emphasizes the organic intellectual’s role in both leading theoretical work – as the organic intellectual should know better than the traditional intellectual, “not just to have the facility of knowledge, but to know deeply and profoundly” (Hall 1992)  –  and transmitting the knowledge gained to persons not belonging professionally to academics. He insists that this is not an anti‐theoretical discourse, but one that positions intellectual and theoretical work as political practice – accepting rather than resolving the tension between the two. By not only engaging in theoretical work, but also questioning the definitions of “theoretical” work as conceived within academic spheres, these scholars allow for the creation of a more inclusive academia. In constant engagements with persons from social locations that are similar to their own but positioned outside of institutional academics, women’s studies students and research scholars enable what Gramsci identifies as a vital characteristic of the organic intellectual – the democratization of knowledge.

The Language Question Language is intrinsically intertwined with the idea of academic competency. Rege (2010) uses examples from Dalit literature to show how language enables a questioning of normative ­knowledges. The language question, she posits, is central to the exercise of “reinventing the archive – the very methods of knowledge” (p. 92), for education is also a way of disciplining articulation to make it comprehensible to the powers that be. Scholars engaged in these

338 Kanagasabai l­ocations highlighted both the difficulty they faced in trying to get published in mainstream reputed feminist journals and the pressure to publish in them because of the academic value associated with such publication. A faculty member who has been teaching women’s studies for the past seven years says: It is very difficult for us to get published in English journals. When one sends work to a reputed journal, one is asked to cite the canon. For our work, we draw largely from Tamil texts. So we usually have conferences in the university and publish locally. However, we are advised to publish one “good, well researched paper” in a ‘reputed journal’ instead of publishing five in local journals because the former is valued more.

Most of the students shared an ambivalent relationship with the English language. While they were quick to recognize Anglophone hegemony inside academia and outside of it, they were also well aware of the ways in which using English enabled economically secure futures and the possibility of reaching a larger audience. While one of the universities in this study allowed students to write their dissertations in Tamil, in the other, students and scholars had to present their work in English. While classes were held bilingually at both universities, with teachers switching between English and Tamil in the classroom (given that many students were making the transition from studying in Tamil to studying in English), both centers encouraged students to write their assignments in the English language after the first semester. One of the reasons was to ensure employability. Thenmozhi, who has studied in a government school, where Tamil is the medium of instruction, recounts her experiences grappling with the English language: I struggled with writing in English. Earlier, I was very scared, but now I think with the English‐Tamil dictionary next to me. I form sentences on my own after understanding the concept. When faced with an English text, I first try to figure out the meaning of the reading in Tamil. Then, I study the main ideas put forth. Following this, I try to write my assignment in English. Our mother tongue might be Tamil, but if one knows English, one can get a job anywhere.

Dhanalakshmi, who pursued her master’s in Tiruchirapalli, a city in the Tamil Nadu state, but moved to a metropolitan area to continue with her doctoral studies, however, chose to disagree: It is not just for women’s studies, but education as a whole. It is good for a child to learn in a language s/he is used to. You must allow students to express themselves in whichever language they best can. What is the purpose of education if language becomes a hindrance? It is not that we don’t know language. The problem is systems choosing “the” language. It is one of structural inequality.

Research participants also critiqued the non‐availability of feminist texts in the local language within the institution. Poonkuzhali, a 45‐year old doctoral candidate working on disability and sexuality, says: Most of the reference material is in English. However, feminist texts in the local language are hard to access within academic spaces. It is not just about learning the politics. It is also about developing a vocabulary that allows one to express one’s politics, and this is precisely what engaging with feminist writing in little magazines enables.

Although scholars from non‐metropolitan locations in India have been involved in women’s studies research for almost a decade, their names are absent from the dominant discourse of the discipline, pointing to both hierarchies within the discipline and the continued disregard toward non‐Western epistemic practices.



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In Lieu of a Conclusion Drawing from popular magazines and little magazines, the interviewed students are creating a women’s studies perspective that speaks to their own experiences  –  culturally and linguistically  –  and speaks them into existence within academic frameworks. The little magazines also enable the political project of engaging with subaltern and democratizing knowledges, thereby constructing theoretical work as political practice. Rege, writing about feminist pedagogy, traces its allegiance to Paulo Freire’s “pedagogy of the oppressed.” She posits that feminist pedagogies involve a critical questioning of concepts, building a common vocabulary with “explicit connectedness to the living and concrete not narrowly interpreted as applied knowledge but a historical perspective on knowledge that allows students to bring in life experience” (Rege 1995). By highlighting the exclusions in the curricular engagement and citational practices of institutionalized women’s studies, by questioning the binaries of academic and non‐academic work and thereby deconstructing the hierarchies foundational in the construction of such binaries, these scholars enable the possibility of decentering feminist knowledge through the little and popular magazine platforms. While appreciating the registering of protest from these marginal locations, it is important to not whitewash structural inequities at play. The little magazines are often run on shoe‐string budgets, and because of the content they publish, are vulnerable to public outrage and judicial proceedings, most of which they are forced to handle with the minimal resources at their disposal. The discipline of women’s studies, both by virtue of its politics and its newness, is one that is located in the margins of institutionalized academia in India.18 As first‐generation learners, as students in non‐metropolitan locations, as students of women’s studies in a higher education landscape that is being rapidly privatized, the research participants, too, find themselves in a ­precarious position. What this exposes is the caste‐patriarchal nature of both publishing and academia in particular, and the society at large. Simultaneously, this essay argues that the writing in little magazines and its contribution to the localization of feminist articulations should be read as an attempt to dismantle the material, social, and cultural capital inherited by the privileged. This, then, is not  simply a question of representation of marginalized voices, but that of ideological transformation.

Notes 1 Tier II is a descriptor employed in Indian government documents based on the population of a city. For instance, based on government documents, Tiruchirapalli can be classified as an urban agglomeration coming under urban population category of up to five million. 2 As part of this study, I engaged with master’s students and research scholars at the women’s studies centers in Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirapalli, and Bharathiar University, Coimbatore. Most students in these locations are first‐generation graduates, formally educated in the local language (Tamil), and hailing from what are called Other Backward Classes or Scheduled Castes/Tribes. For more, refer to Kanagasabai (2018). 3 As an alternative to the word “feminist,” which is perceived as “Western” and removed from the ­students in question by virtue of both space and time (Kanagasabai 2018). 4 While the course structure mandated an engagement with the feminist canon – Mary Wollstonecraft, Shulamith Firestone, Adrienne Rich, Kate Millet – in a course called Feminist Theories and Thinkers, for most other courses students are largely required to engage with Indian feminists writing in English – Veena Das, Maithreyi Krishna Raj, Pam Rajput, Veena Poonacha, and others. 5 For an English translation of Salma’s poems, refer to Wild Girls, Wicked Words (2012). 6 Self‐chosen political name of a group of castes once considered untouchable but still most vulnerable to caste violence.

340 Kanagasabai 7 For an English translation of Kutti Revathi’s poems, refer to Wild Girls, Wicked Words (2012). 8 Transformation in India: Vikatan’s plans to grow digital revenues fivefold by 2020: https://www.fipp. com/news/features/transformation‐in‐india‐vikatan (accessed March 20, 2019). 9 For instance, in 2015 Kumudam faced sharp criticism for its acts of moral policing. The magazine printed, without the subjects’ consent, several photos of women wearing leggings and shamed them for their choice of clothes. 10 Ironically, the very same magazines that indulge in moral policing of women also publish images that blatantly objectify women, mostly female film actors. 11 Or Hindu Nationalism – “In its most elementary form, Hindu nationalist social and political p ­ hilosophy is predicated on an idea… that the Indian State, social formation and civil society be reorganized… along exclusively ‘Hindu’ precepts” (Bhatt and Mukta 2000, p. 408). 12 The names of the magazines have been translated by the author for the sake of clarity. 13 A reference to a poem written by Subramania Bharathi, a Tamil writer, poet, journalist and Indian independence activist. 14 http://kalachuvadu.in 15 https://www.kalachuvadu.com/p/aboutus_en 16 Brahmanical feminism, according to Anupama Rao, “is the possibility of occupying a feminist position outside caste: the possibility of denying caste as a problem for gender (emphasis in original) (Rao 2009, p. 55). 17 The names of the research participants have been changed to protect privacy. 18 The discipline has repeatedly faced the threat of funding cuts from the government. After months of uncertainty regarding the funding of women’s studies centers in India, the government put out guidelines in March 2019 that might result in a drastic fund cut ranging between 12.5 lakh (about US $18 200) and 40 lakh (about US$58 300), depending on the type of center.

References Anandhi, S. and Swaminathan, P. (2006). Making it relevant: mapping the meaning of women’s studies in Tamil Nadu. Economic and Political Weekly: 4444–4454. Bhatt, C. and Mukta, P. (2000). Hindutva in the west: mapping the antinomies of diaspora nationalism. Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (3): 407–441. Geetha, V. (2005). Gender identity and the Tamil popular press. In: Practising Journalism: Values, Constraints, Implications (ed. N. Rajan), 115–124. New Delhi: Sage Publications. Gupta, S. (2019). Tamil Nadu’s award‐winning publishing house that refuses to back down. The Indian Express (3 March). https://indianexpress.com/article/express‐sunday‐eye/nagercoil‐tamil‐nadu‐ publisher‐kalachuvadu‐5605338 (accessed 15 March 2019). Hall, S. (1992). Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. In: Cultural Studies (eds. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P.A. Treichler), 277–294. New York: Routledge. John, M.E. (1996). Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Postcolonial Histories. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kanagasbai, N. (2018). Possibilities of transformation: Women’s Studies in Tier II cities in Tamil Nadu, India. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39 (5): 709–722. doi: 10.1080/ 01596306.2018.1448702. Maithri, M., Salma, Kutti Revathi, and Sukirtharani (2012). Wild Girls Wicked Words (ed. L. Holmström). Chennai: Sangam House/Kalachuvadu Publications. Menon, N. (2004). Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law. Delhi: Permanent Black. Pappu, R. (2002). Constituting a field: women’s studies in higher education. Economic and Political Weekly: 221–234. Rajagopal, K. (2014). Alternative intellectual trends in Tamil Nadu. In: Spatial Social Thought: Local Knowledge in Global Science Encounters (eds. M. Kuhn and K. Okamoto), 285–312. Stuttgart: ibidem press. Rao, A. (2009). Understanding Sirasgaon: notes towards conceptualizing the role of law, caste and gender in a case of “atrocity”. In: States of Trauma: Gender and Violence in South Asia (eds. P. Chatterjee, M. Desai and P. Roy), 52–90. New Delhi: Zubaan.



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Rege, S. (1995). Feminist pedagogies and sociology for emancipation in India. Sociological Bulletin 44 (2): 223–237. Rege, S. (2010). Education as “Trutiya Ratna”: towards Phule‐Ambedkarite feminist pedagogical practice. Economic and Political Weekly 45 (44): 88–98. Sundaram, N. (2011). The New Wave. The Times of India (31 May). http://epaper.timesofindia.com/ Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=ArchiveandSource=PageandSkin=TOINEWandBase Href=TOICH/2011/05/31andPageLabel=6andEntityId=Ar00600andViewMode=HTML (accessed 28 January 2018). Sunder Rajan, R. (1994). Life after rape: narrative, theory and feminism. In: Borderwork: Feminist Engagements with Comparitive Literature (ed. M.R. Higonnet), 61–80. London: Cornell University Press. Venkatachalapathy, A.R. (n.d.). Manikodi. Sahapedia (4 September). https://www.sahapedia.org/ manikodi (accessed 28 January 2018). Wolf, G. (1991). Construction of gender identity: women in popular tamil magazines. Economic and Political Weekly: 71–73.

Part V

Magazines, Activism, and Resistance

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Magazines as Sites of Satire, Parody, and Political Resistance Kevin M. Lerner

Introduction On 9 January 2015, CNNMoney reported that #JeSuisCharlie had become one of the most popular hashtags worldwide on the social network Twitter, with more than five million tweets reported by the service in just two days (Goldman and Pagliery 2015). The tweets referred to a French satirical magazine called Charlie Hebdo, the offices of which had been the site of a grisly attack on 7 January. The attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices killed 12 people – including some of the magazine’s most celebrated cartoonists – and injured at least 11 others. “Je suis Charlie” translates to English as “I am Charlie,” and the millions of tweets with that hashtag speak to the solidarity that people felt with the editors, writers, and illustrators of the magazine, a sentiment that would be unexpected, because as a satirical publication, Charlie Hebdo took an acerbic, irreverent tone – irreverent in the truest sense. In fact, it was a lack of reverence for the Muslim prophet Muhammad and the magazine’s insistence on depicting him (a practice outlawed in Islam) that may have been the proximate motives for the attacks. The outpouring of support for Charlie Hebdo speaks, of course, to empathy, to humanity, and to an antipathy toward terrorism. But it also demonstrates that satirical magazines and their ­outsider, critical take on institutions and authority also have a particularly important role in the maintenance of freedom of expression – both in open and in repressive societies. And when that freedom is threatened, people react in defense of the right to exercise that expression and to be free from fear. The magazine’s print run for the issue immediately following the attack reached almost eight million copies, in contrast to its usual 60 000 (BBC News 2015). That is not to say that eight million people supported the ideas of Charlie Hebdo, a magazine that is consistently far‐left‐wing, secular, atheist, and polemical. But they supported the magazine’s right to express them. It was a rare demonstration for what former US Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. called “freedom for the thought that we hate” (United States v. Schwimmer 279 US 644 1975). While satire magazines often exist on the fringes of culture, they have a long tradition and illustrate several central ideas about the magazine form. Magazines as a print form exist outside of the strictures of daily journalism, allowing for formal experimentation and a critique of power that would not be acceptable in the bounds of daily journalism. They have a power to form communities of interest that is far stronger than in daily forms (Haveman 2015). And they are a more visual medium, providing an outlet for visual parody and political cartooning that can become iconic in forming cultural ideas and effecting social change (Hudson and Lance 2015). The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

346 Lerner Satire and parody as literary forms are far older than journalism, in the sense of a daily report on affairs that would be of interest to a public audience. Satire in Western culture dates to at least the ancient Greeks, and likely even to folkloric oral cultures that predate written works (Hodgart 1969). So, it is no wonder that among the many forms that have found their way into magazines as a medium, satire would be an important one. Nevertheless, there are several attributes of magazines that make them particularly fertile for the nurturing of satire. Magazines are often niche media, adept at creating communities, both real and imagined (Kitch 2015). They “serve both as a mirror of and a catalyst for the tenor and tone of the sociocultural realities of their times” (Abrahamson 2015). And importantly, magazines are often a visual medium, which makes them a prime outlet for cartooning, one of the chief tools of satire and parody (Navasky 2013). Carolyn Kitch (2015) has argued that critical scholars have usually studied magazines as instruments of power, using theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault to emphasize magazines’ role in political economy as “serving the economic imperative of profit as well as the political regime in which that economy exists” (Kitch 2015). This is one way in which magazines of satire, parody, and political resistance buck the usual assumptions about the role of magazines: they use the form to ridicule those in power, shaming them into doing better.

The Rise of Satirical Magazines in the Habermasian Public Sphere The philosopher and theorist Jürgen Habermas argued that the rise of literacy and education, concomitant with the invention of the printing press, led to great leaps in the development of what he termed the “public sphere,” a kind of idealized setting in which the commonly shared ideas of a public are formed through rational discussion. For Habermas, one of the critical moments in the development of this public sphere was the rise of a print culture willing to critique the authority of the state. Several of the works that he cites in this crucial moment are works of eighteenth-century British satire, which he saw as precursors of contemporary critical journalists and their quest to hold power to account (Habermas 1991). Literature scholar Christian Thorne (2001) points out a contradiction in Habermas’s veneration of these satirists, including Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, however. The subjects of their satire were the very participants in the Habermasian public sphere – politicians and scholars, for example – and Thorne argues that satire, as a genre, is a kind of critique of critique. Satire, for Thorne, is an argument that publics are not strictly rational in their discourse. The contradiction rests in the fact that Thorne’s argument about rational discourse comes through the exploitation of the very print culture that it critiques. Magazines provided a perfect vehicle for this discourse against discourse in that, unlike books, they were created originally as collections of materials: literary fiction mingling with essays, news reports, poetry, cartoons, and illustrations. Readers of magazines are forced to become critical consumers as they turn from page to page, encountering modes of discourse that are often antithetical to each other, and some, such as cartoons, that are non‐discursive. Volker Langbehn (2010), citing Roland Barthes, argues that images are polysemous, not necessarily conveying the meaning of their artists, and sometimes even arguing against their creator (p. 115). While the early modern satirists were largely publishing books, magazines soon picked up the satirical mode in post‐Enlightenment Europe, with long‐lived examples of the form being founded in France and England in the mid‐nineteenth century. This timing coincided with advances in printing technology by the 1830s, which made the reproduction of images much easier than earlier methods such as lithography, engraving, and woodcuts. The eighteenth‐ century satirical books and poetry of Swift and Pope may have been largely conveyed in words,



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but with the changes in printing technology 100 years later, drawings began to take precedence in satire, especially in magazines. Relief‐printing processes made this possible, marking the entrance of caricature and other cartooning styles such as the single panel gag with a caption into satirical periodicals (Gretton 1997). One of the first and most influential of these illustrated European satirical magazines was Le  Charivari, a Paris‐based satirical magazine launched in 1832, which, because of governmental bans on political satire, focused largely on satires of quotidian French life. Le Charivari published for more than 100 years, and published drawings by such canonical French artists as Honoré Daumier and Gustave Doré (Gretton 1997). A “charivari” is a folk tradition in Europe, a kind of mock parade in which people are ironically celebrated and shamed out of their wrongdoing.

Punch Le Charivari was also a direct influence on the British satirical magazine Punch, which debuted nine years after its French inspiration. Punch actually carried the subtitle “or, the London Charivari” in homage. Originally reaching a middle‐class audience, the magazine quickly rose through the ranks of society to achieve something that would be rare among satirical magazines: respectability. Punch largely avoided offensive jokes, aiming instead for sophistication, and provided an outlet for the humorous writing of more serious English novelists, including Somerset Maugham and William Makepeace Thackeray (Spielmann 1895; Altick 1997). The magazine was much more likely to engage in parody and caricature of the peoples of British colonial possessions, such as India, often simplifying their cultures and demeaning them as humans  –  though this would have served to reinforce English hegemony, not undermine it (Khanduri 2014). Punch, edited from a middle‐class perspective, also engaged in class‐based humor, punching both upward, toward the aristocracy, and down to the working class, mocking their mores and social peculiarities. Like Le Charivari, Punch also made important contributions to visual culture, and even to the language used to describe that culture. Prior to 1843, the word “cartoon” primarily referred to preparatory sketches made for more formal artwork, such as an oil painting, fresco, or tapestry. Punch appropriated the term to describe its own humorous drawings, however, and the usage stuck, defining the form that would become central to satirical magazines for more than a century and a half (Appelbaum and Kelly 1981). The Punch approach to genteel satire, and particularly to cartooning, allowed for its style to cross over into general interest magazines. While humor and satire tend to be very specific to time, place, and culture, looking at the visual style of single‐panel cartoons from Punch reveals a sense of humor that can be seen in contemporary magazines such as The New Yorker – at least in those few that continue to run cartoons as part of their editorial content. One 1981 cartoon depicts an eighteenth‐century pistol dueler, who has just successfully killed his opponent with a shot from his pistol. The referee of the match, a man in knee breeches, a top hat, and a frilly cravat, says to him, “You now go on to meet the Earl of Rutland in the semi‐finals” (Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive n.d.). The cartoons could skew political too, but often the humor was directed away from Britain, which is to say, away from controversy at home. A cartoon from 1919 depicts “The League of Nations Bridge” under construction, with pieces labeled as Belgium, France, England, and Italy. Meanwhile, a character meant to represent the United States leans back, smoking, legs crossed, and his head propped on the keystone of the unfinished bridge, which is clearly labeled “USA.” The implication is clear that while the United States had proposed and designed the League of Nations, it was also holding up its completion (Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive n.d.). The post‐World War I cartoon is stylistically less contemporary than the one of the dueler, but both are still easily intelligible, and it would not be difficult to imagine them appearing in

348 Lerner magazines whose primary purpose was not satire. But it should be noted too that these magazines, particularly in the lighter humor of the Punch dueler cartoon and its genteel drawing room humor, could also just be fun. Part of the appeal of the satirical magazine in any form is that it promises diversion, humor, and a lightness of tone contrasting the heavier content of the newspaper or the volume of political essays. In the USA, cartoons became an integral part of some of the magazines of the mid‐nineteenth century as well. Harper’s Weekly, a magazine of politics and literature, began publication in 1857, and is best remembered for its extensive coverage of the American Civil War. In addition to its nonfiction prose, short fiction, and news illustrations – all standard fare for American magazines of the time – Harper’s published the work of political cartoonist Thomas Nast. Though political cartoons were nothing new in the nineteenth century, Nast is remembered for his campaign against William Tweed, a Democratic Party boss in New York City in the 1860s and 1870s, who was decried for his corruption. While it was really the in‐depth, sober reporting of The New York Times that brought to light Tweed’s wrongdoing, Nast portrayed Tweed in a caricature that showed him as a bloated, immoral criminal, an image that has become the popular memory of Tweed, and which helped to turn public opinion against him (DiFabio 2013; McNamara 2017). In the American context, magazines became a particularly important vehicle for satirical, parodic, and political content, as the late nineteenth century marked the beginning of a move in American newspapers away from the kind of freewheeling political criticism that had characterized them in the first hundred years of the nation’s press. Partisan newspapers began to aim the majority of their material at as broad a reading public as they could reach, which meant relegating the most caustic content to segregated opinion pages, if it were to appear at all. Certainly, newspapers published political cartoons and essays of political criticism, but throughout the twentieth century, newspapers were expected to follow the model set by The  New York Times: sober, small‐c conservative, and outwardly unbiased (Campbell 2013; Daly 2018). That left the more acerbic, critical writing, as well as cartooning, to magazines, which were not bound by the mainstream expectation of objectivity. Outside of the obligation to produce something approaching a complete report of a day’s events for a general audience, American magazines never felt that same professional pressure to conform to the norm of objectivity, making them a perfect site for satire and political resistance, and, of course, the aforementioned fun.

Puck Puck was the first successful American magazine of satire and humor. Named for the troublemaking fairy in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the magazine took Puck’s exclamation “what fools these mortals be!” as its motto, signaling its intention to critique the folly inherent in all human activity. Unlike most of its contemporaries, and despite the assonance of its name, Puck was influenced less by Punch and more by the more freewheeling satirical ­magazines of Germany and Austria. Puck’s founder was an Austrian immigrant to the United States, and the magazine actually published English and German editions for several years before settling into decades of English‐only publication. So rather than following the lead of the polemical Thomas Nast or the sedate, gentlemanly cartoons of Punch, the satirists at Puck took the opportunity to poke fun at just about any available target, either political or social. In its heyday, however, Puck would have sided generally with the idea of reform, and attempting to push corruption out of government, regardless of which political party was in power (Sloane 1987; Dueben 2014; Kahn and West 2014). One area where Puck did particularly focus its satire, however, was against the Catholic Church. Building on its anti‐corruption crusade, Puck argued through its editorials and cartoons that:



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New York’s infamous Irish Tammany Hall, committed to spoils and patronage as the means of ­dominating the body politic, was all the more dangerous to Puck because, beginning in the 1870s, Irish Catholics dominated it. The hall’s Irish Catholic base enabled the magazine to rationalize more completely its conviction that the Catholic Church, ruled by a foreign potentate dressed in the irrational garb of infallibility, was a menace not only to the nation’s body politic but also to its democratic soul. If allowed to proceed unimpeded, the pope and his minions, along with Tammany’s bosses and s­ upporters, would convert the nation into their personal fiefdom. (Thomas 2004)

But generally, despite its anti‐Catholic bent, Puck was quite catholic in its own attacks, until it was eventually purchased by the Hearst corporation, which folded the magazine in 1918, amid waning circulation. At its height, Puck reached a circulation of at least 125 000, publishing out of its own building in what is now New York City’s Soho neighborhood  –  a building that still has a sculpture of Puck, the magazine’s mascot – a cherub, naked except for a top hat and frock coat, and clutching a mirror and a double‐ended dip pen as big as a spear, above its door. The magazine’s influence is perhaps most strongly felt in the use of color printing – three large color cartoons per issue – which set it apart from magazines of its time on the newsstand and helped to prod newspapers toward the publication of comic strips as a regular feature (Dueben 2014).

Mad Almost a half century after Puck ceased publication, another magazine with a mischievous mascot became the defining voice of cartooning and satire in the United States. Mad Magazine launched in 1952 as a comic book. It relaunched in 1955 as a magazine – and relaunched again in 2018, reverting its issue number to “1” to coincide with the editorial headquarters’ move from New York to the west coast of the United States. That first relaunch served a real practical purpose for the magazine, allowing it to evade the restrictions that were put on it by the Comics Code in the USA at the time, a voluntary code of conduct established by the Comics Association of America. The Comics Code required publishers to show good triumphing over evil, banned gore and graphic violence or sex, and, importantly for a publication that intended to function as satire, did not allow depictions of “policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions … in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority” (Nyberg 1994). Disrespect for authority was probably Mad’s overriding theme for most of its existence. Mad is largely known for its cartooning, a mix of regular characters and features, such as the recurring “Spy vs. Spy,” in which two competing secret agents with no discernible ideology routinely obliterate each other in what the journalism historian Michael Socolow points out is a metaphor for the Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction (which, conveniently, has “MAD” as its acronym). Or the magazine’s mascot and most frequent cover image, the idiot boy Alfred E. Neuman, a fictional character conceived in the early twentieth century, who had “What, me worry?” as his catchphrase. The magazine’s second relaunch in 2018 was mostly a publicity stunt, but it was one that underscored a renewed need for satire as a crisis of confidence in the objective reality of mainstream news media flared up in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election. Writing at the time of that relaunch, Socolow argued that at its height, Mad preached subversion and unadulterated truth‐telling when so‐called objective journalism remained deferential to authority. While newscasters regularly parroted questionable government claims, Mad was calling politicians liars when they lied. Long before responsible organs of public opinion like The New York Times and the CBS Evening News discovered it, Mad told its readers all about the credibility gap. The periodical’s skeptical approach to advertisers and authority figures helped raise a less credulous and more critical generation in the 1960s and 1970s. (Socolow 2018)

350 Lerner There is evidence for Socolow’s argument even in the words of some of the most influential social activists of the period. Tom Hayden, the anti‐war civil rights activist and author, contributed a blurb to an illustrated history of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). “My own radical journey began with Mad Magazine,” Hayden wrote, noting how appropriate it was that  the story of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was being told in comics form (Herman 2007). Another notable activist of the 1960s and 1970s cited Mad as a direct influence on his own satirical magazine. “I founded The Realist as Mad for adults,” Paul Krassner said (Hiss and Lewis  1977). In fact, Krassner actually launched the magazine from the offices of Mad and ­borrowed one of Mad’s writers as his first columnist (Krassner 2004). Often vulgar, and unapologetically so, The Realist became one of the seminal magazines of the underground press movement in the USA, a vital force in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (McMillian 2014).

Satirical Magazines and Universities Given the giddily sophomoric sense of humor and anti‐establishment attitude of satirical magazines, it should not be surprising that they have flourished at universities, occasionally even ­blossoming from student exercises into professional publications. In the USA, these include The Harvard Lampoon, which spun off The National Lampoon; Monocle, a magazine begun as a side project by students at Yale University’s law school; and The Onion, probably the most ­successful satirical publication of the twentieth century, which was started by students at The University of Wisconsin.

Publications with Ivy League and Oxbridge Connections Chronologically the first of these three publications, Monocle began publishing in the thick of Cold War tensions. Started by Yale Law student Victor Navasky, the magazine was published as “a leisurely quarterly,” which Navasky explains means that it came out twice a year. The first issues were assembled and mailed by students, and challenged Cold War pieties about enemies, both domestic and foreign, laced with acerbic wit and intentionally crude (though sometimes also sophisticated) line drawings (Navasky 2006; Kercher 2010). Both in Monocle, and later, when he became editor of the political magazine The Nation, Navasky used satire as a tool to “protest injustice on behalf of the dispossessed” (Danky 2015). While always a small‐circulation magazine, Monocle achieved its greatest success with the publication of a book that parodied a government report without admitting in its original publication that it was a parody at all. The Report from Iron Mountain was written primarily by Monocle contributor Leonard Lewin, with help from Monocle’s staff, and collaboration in the hoax by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith and editor E.L. Doctorow, who managed to get Dial Press, the original ­publisher, to publish the report as nonfiction, crediting Lewin as a kind of go‐between who facilitated the book’s publication. The report was supposedly a leaked government document relating the conclusions of a secret blue‐ribbon government panel on how to transition the US economy from wartime to peacetime. The facetious conclusion was that such a transition was impossible, and therefore the government should maintain a state of constant war (Lewin 2008). The satirists of Monocle did such a good job parodying the prose style of a government report that even though they have publicly owned up to having written it, a debate raged for years over its authenticity (Kifner 1999). The nature of Monocle as a periodical enabled the hoax, but would have made it nearly impossible if the magazine had published it as, say, a special issue. The collaborative art of making magazines allowed for the kind of collusion that got The Report from Iron Mountain brainstormed, written, and published as fact. But the satirical nature of the ­magazine itself would have been a giveaway if the “report” had been published under its own



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auspices. Once again, parody and satire flourish as a rejection of discourse while mimicking the discourse they are meant to mock. Yale’s Ivy League rival, Harvard, claims to be the home of the second‐oldest continuously published humor magazine in the world, The Harvard Lampoon, which began in 1876, advertised as “The Cambridge Chari‐Vari,” once again echoing that seminal satirical magazine (The Harvard Lampoon 1926). Almost a century after its founding, The Harvard Lampoon spun off a national magazine called, appropriately, The National Lampoon. Anarchic, surrealistic, and often puerile, the new magazine achieved a rare kind of pop cultural success, partly through its content, which often offered sharp political satire  –  a parody of a Volkswagen ad that commented on US Senator Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick incident, in which he may have caused the death of a young woman, for instance – and famous, shocking covers, such as the one in which the magazine showed a dog with a gun to its head and threatened to kill it if “you” do not buy the magazine. But the greatest pop cultural influence for The National Lampoon came with its move into film production, especially Animal House, a satire of college life, and the Vacation series (Karp 2006; Stein 2013). In her book on The National Lampoon, journalist Ellin Stein noted that the magazine’s influence could be felt throughout American humor, partly because imitators were copying its style, but also because so many of the alumni of both The National Lampoon and The Harvard Lampoon found themselves working in the entertainment and media businesses, including publisher William Randolph Hearst, writers and performers for comedy television shows such as Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, and even media scion James Murdoch, son of Rupert. Satirists and humorists emerged in amazing numbers to bounce off each other in ever‐shifting groups and combinations, generating considerable heat, occasional light, and more than a few dramatic explosions. The Lampoon and its offspring reflected, defined, and enhanced an iconoclastic sensibility that would emerge as the dominant style of the ’70s, a decade that otherwise seemed like the ­hangover after the blowout of the ’60s. (Stein 2013, p. 2)

In American culture, satire has become a pervasive mode of discourse, one that filters into everyday life and mainstream publications, and occasionally verges on the cynical. But the guarantees of free speech in the USA make the satirical mode a valid means of expression, rather than a dangerous, underground voice.

Private Eye

In Britain, the contemporary satirical magazine Private Eye had its roots as a student publication at a secondary school, the independent, exclusive Shrewsbury School, and hit its stride when the key founders met each other as undergraduates at Oxford University (Self 2011). The founders had been fans of the best days of Punch, but they thought that the magazine had lost its wit and daring by 1961, as they were beginning their own publication. Private Eye even refers directly to Punch in its own mascot, a drawing of Mr. Punch, the puppet mascot of the earlier magazine, riding a donkey. Mr. Punch has a gigantic erection and is fondling a woman. The original drawing appeared regularly on the cover of Punch, woven into a frieze where his nudity and turgidity could pass relatively unnoticed. Private Eye, with its collegiate sense of humor, enlarged the image to fill the entire front cover of the magazine, and eventually, in 1964, the image became the logo atop its news pages (Private Eye Covers Library, n.d.).

The Nation

The tone and approach of satirical magazines can also seep into more traditional contemporary magazines, and sometimes those connections are explicit and obvious. For example, Navasky, a founding editor of Monocle, later went on to edit, and then serve as publisher of the left‐wing political magazine The Nation, which had been founded only a few years after Harper’s Weekly,

352 Lerner originally as an anti‐slavery publication (Guttenplan 2015). While The Nation is largely a serious magazine of investigative journalism and in‐depth policy pieces, Navasky clearly brought with him his love of satire and visual culture. The journalist Calvin Trillin writes a weekly piece of doggerel under the rubric “Deadline Poet,” often satirizing a piece of the week’s news in as little as a rhymed couplet. The Nation regularly features cartoons as well, including one by David Levine that showed Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, literally screwing the world, portrayed as a woman with a globe for her head, as Kissinger had his way with her underneath an American flag blanket (Navasky 2013). But perhaps most tellingly, The Nation published a widely circulated cover in which it depicted then-US President George W. Bush as Alfred E. Neuman, shortly after Bush had been declared the winner of the 2000 Presidential election. Instead of running Neuman’s usual “What, me worry?” catchphrase, The Nation depicted Bush with a campaign button that said, simply, “Worry.” The American Society of Magazine Editors declared the cover the 23rd best magazine cover of the previous 40 years in 2005 (Coverjunkie 2005).

Satire Gets Serious As Private Eye gained steam in 1960s and 1970s Britain, it became a mixture of a satire and a public affairs magazine, maintaining a mostly restrained news section that would occasionally publish works by mainstream writers who would normally choose other venues for their work, but who would turn to Private Eye when their stories were too controversial to be published in those straighter publications. Roughly the first half of the magazine consists of more or less straightforward journalism. But the covers and the balance of the interior pages remained as ­rollicking as ever, often finding itself the target of libel suits, but also influencing the day‐to‐day intellectual life of Britain. Like many satire magazines, Private Eye nurtures a collection of in‐jokes and references that reward the long‐time reader. Famously, the magazine uses the euphemism “tired and emotional” instead of “drunk” (McIntyre 2006). The style has been wildly popular for more than 50 years, and as of the 2010s, Private Eye is regularly Britain’s best‐selling public affairs magazine – in a category where it competes with the most sober and serious magazines (Dowell 2012; Ponsford 2017). And it still reserves almost all its stories for its print edition, putting only a few teaser stories onto the internet, emphasizing the serendipitous juxtapositions that a print magazine can provide.

Spy In the USA, two and a half decades after Private Eye’s founding in 1986, two friends, both employees at the magazine publishing behemoth Time‐Life, left the company and founded their own contemporary satirical magazine, which they called Spy. They opened their offices in the same building in New York City that had once housed their satirical forebear, Puck (Anderson et al. 2006). Building on the irreverent tone of humor magazines but layering in a reverence for the techniques of serious in‐depth journalism, Kurt Anderson and Graydon Carter invented a new style of satire that was even more powerful for its reliance on fact as a basis for its critique. Spy was an influential magazine for its graphic design, as well as for some of its funnier, less serious recurring features, such as “Separated at Birth?” which juxtaposed photos of two unrelated people and suggested, jokingly, that they might actually be long-lost twins (Hall 2006). The magazine also perfected a tone of voice that would pervade journalism of the first years of the internet’s pervasiveness, a period that immediately followed the demise of the magazine in 1998 (Buckley 2006; Avni 2011). Some of that tone was a deliberate reference to earlier periods of magazine‐making. For example, Spy appropriated and transmuted the usage of appositive ­epithets that had characterized the writing of early Time magazine, which added a descriptive



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phrase to each person identified, as in “famed poet William Shakespeare” (Lepore 2010). In Spy, these became sly, cruel satire of their subjects, honing in on obvious truths that the mainstream press would ignore out of politesse (“socialite war criminal Henry Kissinger”) or prodding their softest sore spots. Spy coined the phrase “short‐fingered vulgarian” to describe New York real estate developer Donald Trump, a description that would follow him to the White House. These repeated epithets also echo the in‐jokes of Spy’s transatlantic cousin, Private Eye. The tone of Spy’s prose tended toward what has been described as “snarky,” which can be summarized as meanness for the sake of the reader’s amusement. Certainly, this style proliferated on the web, but Spy’s wit was, at its best, refined to a sharper point, and used to deflate those whose self‐ importance, or whose public regard, had grown far beyond what the editors and writers at Spy felt they deserved (Lerner 2016). Perhaps more importantly, Spy invented and refined a style of writing that could be described as “reported satire.” Fusing the meticulous, in‐depth reporting of news organizations with the tone and attitude of the satirist – or arguably fusing the front and back halves of Private Eye, Spy created something new, and a mode of cultural critique that could not be easily dismissed as merely the sophomoric japery of jealous outsiders. In one 1989 issue of the magazine, Spy published a report on Bohemian Grove, an exclusive retreat for members of the conservative elite in American politics. Spy’s reporter infiltrated the wooded campground and, over the course of three weeks of reporting, meticulously described what he saw there, including rampant sexism, racism, and elitism. The accretion of solid fact that underlay the attacks that Spy perpetrated on members of the political and social elite gave its satire power. The anti‐discursive argument of visual parody and caricature wields its power in the permanence of its ability to reframe a public image (and Spy engaged in much of this as well). But these reported satires come even closer to the early modern Swift/Pope ideal of matching a flawed discourse in the guise of its own level of discourse. Fatuously unquestioning journalism that reinforced hegemony could be deflated using the very techniques of reporting that they were attacking.

Satire Magazines in Free and Repressive Societies Satirical magazines exist in societies that encourage freedom of speech and those that repress it. However, they tend to flourish only in the former, for reasons that seem too obvious even to explicate. Nevertheless, the underground nature of satire in less permissive societies gives the practice a special kind of urgency, making its role of political resistance even more vital. As of 2018, Wikipedia lists more than 100 satire magazines – many of them defunct – around the world (Wikipedia n.d.). A review of their capsule histories show that they flourish in times of political turmoil, but are often shut down when one party takes control of the nation in which they publish. Germany and German‐language nations, for example, have a long tradition of intellectual satire, including venerable magazines such as Simplicissimus, which suspended publication during World War II, and other titles such as Fliegende Blätter and Kladderdatsch. Volker Langbehn argues that in the 19th and early 20th centuries, German satirical magazines simultaneously critiqued and reinforced racial and colonialist stereotypes (Langbehn 2010). Meanwhile, the Swiss Nebelspalter (The Fog Cleaver) claims to be the oldest continuously published humor magazine, even though it was banned in Germany beginning in 1933, for its anti‐Hitler positions. With the exception of World War II, Germany, Italy, and Spain seem to have been particularly fertile nations for the growth of satire, as the continent experimented with new ways of arranging its nation states. Similarly, the nations of South America often have vibrant satirical cultures, as Paul Alonso (2018) describes. Though his first book focuses on television satire in the Americas, his forthcoming research addresses how magazines in particular contribute to this culture (Alonso 2019).

354 Lerner Even the Soviet Union had a vital satirical magazine, Krokodil, but its range of targets belied the state control that made it dangerous to criticize the government or the party: laziness among workers; drunkenness; and the enemies of the Soviet state  –  notably the Jewish people. Pre‐ Soviet Russia had a stronger tradition of satire magazines, which flowered in at least three eras, the last of which was in the early twentieth century, during the Revolution of 1905 (Brooks 2013). In South Africa, satire is likewise a dangerous affair. Noseweek, the country’s leading ­satirical publication, is notable mostly for the amount of legal action against it. Likewise, Asian nations largely participate in satirical criticism of power in proportion to the press freedom they enjoy. Hong Kong, for example, is more likely to support a satirical magazine than mainland China; for example, see 100Most, a magazine that has become a beacon for the generation that occupied the Central neighborhood in Hong Kong in political protest (Yau 2015).

The Television Interregnum, and the Return of Satire Magazines on the Web In much of the world, including the USA, North Africa, Europe, and South America, the 2000s were a period in which televised satire (The Daily Show is often cited as a lodestar here) overtook printed satire of any kind. However, as the internet grew, The Onion, a satirical newspaper launched at The University of Wisconsin, maintained its relevance by shifting online, and sites such as the now‐defunct Gawker appropriated the snarky, satirical tone of precursors such as Mad. They were not alone in their attempts to transition the idea of the satirical magazine into new formats maintaining the mixture of visual culture, subversive humor, and political commentary that defined the earlier form. The tradition of the satirical magazine continues both in print  –  see the relaunched Mad, for example, or the record circulation numbers for Private Eye – and online, both in the all‐satire format of The Onion or McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, or  in the mixed‐format magazine, such as the website for The New Yorker, which combines in‐depth reporting, serious essays, and criticism with light single‐panel cartoons and the news parody column The Borowitz Report, a sort of liberal‐fantasy version of The Onion. The print version of The New Yorker has a regular department called “Shouts and Murmurs”, which is a humor piece that also occasionally engages in satire, though is often just intended for laughs unconnected to social critique. In his essay about the importance of Mad Magazine, Michael Socolow quoted Mad’s longtime editor John Ficarra: “The editorial mission statement has always been the same: ‘Everyone is lying to you, including magazines. Think for yourself. Question authority’” (Socolow 2018). Ficarra here is unconsciously echoing the argument of literature scholar Christian Thorne, who wrote that the early satire of Swift and Pope used the forms of public discourse to critique the idea of public discourse. Ficarra tells the readers of his magazine to develop their own critical faculties, to question every source of information (including his magazine), and not to trust anyone (including his magazine). It is heady and important stuff for the developing brain of a future critical media consumer, the teenagers who were reading Mad. “Just as intellectuals Daniel Boorstin, Marshall McLuhan and Guy Debord were starting to level critiques against this media environment, Mad was doing the same,” Socolow writes, “but in a way that was widely accessible, proudly idiotic and surprisingly sophisticated.” In the end, this is the broader mission of satirical magazines in general: criticism not only of political power, but also of media power, along with criticism of the modes of discourse that the media employ – presented in a way that appears to be using the same modes of discourse while actually undermining them. For all its proud idiocy, and despite actually being fun to read and to look at, the satire magazine might be one of the most important manifestations of the natural impulse toward free expression. And the need to protect that impulse explains at least some part of the outpouring of sympathy to the victims of the Charlie Hebdo office attacks.



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References Abrahamson, D. (2015). Scholarly engagement with the magazine form: expansion and coalescence. In: The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research: The Future of the Magazine Form (eds. D. Abrahamson and M. Prior‐Miller), 1–5. New York: Routledge. Alonso, P. (2018). Satiric TV in the Americas: Critical Metatainment as Negotiated Dissent. Oxford University Press. Alonso, P. (2019). Satiric magazines as hybrid alternative Media in Latin America. Latin American Research Review 54 (4). Altick, R.D. (1997). Punch: The Lively Youth of a British Institution. Athens: Ohio University Press. Anderson, K., Carter, G., and Kalogerakis, G. (2006). Spy: The Funny Years. New York: Miramax Books. Appelbaum, S. and Kelly, R.M. (1981). Great Drawings and Illustrations from Punch, 1841–1901: 192 Works by Leech, Keene, Du Maurier, May and 21 Others. Courier Corporation. Avni, S. (2011). Spy magazine (1986–1998) now online. Open Culture (28 April). http://www.openculture. com/2011/04/spy_magazine_1986‐1998_now_online.html. BBC News (2015). Charlie Hebdo Expands Print Run. BBC News: Europe (14 January 2015). https:// www.bbc.com/news/world‐europe‐30808284. Brooks, J. (2013). Marvelous destruction: the left‐leaning satirical magazines of 1905‐1907. Experiment 19: 24–62. Buckley, C. (2006). Bonfire of inanities. New York Times Book Review (23 December). https://www. nytimes.com/2006/12/03/books/review/bonfire‐of‐inanities.html. Campbell, W.J. (2013). The Year that Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms. Routledge. Coverjunkie (2005). #23 ASME’s Top 40 (blog) (24 September). https://coverjunkie.com/cover‐ categories/classic‐covers/23‐asmes‐top‐40. Daly, C.B. (2018). Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism. University of Massachusetts Press. Danky, J.P. (2015). Preface. In: Protest on the Page: Essays on Print and the Culture of Dissent since 1865 (eds. J.L. Baughman, J. Ratner‐Rosenhagen and J.P. Danky). University of Wisconsin Press. DiFabio, A. (2013). Thomas Nast takes down Tammany: a cartoonist’s crusade against a political boss. MCNY Blog: New York Stories (blog) (24 September). https://blog.mcny.org/2013/09/24/thomas‐ nast‐takes‐down‐tammany‐a‐cartoonists‐crusade‐against‐a‐political‐boss. Dowell, B. (2012). Private Eye hits highest circulation for more than 25 years. The Guardian (16 February). https://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/feb/16/private‐eye‐circulation‐25‐years (accessed 11 March 2019). Dueben, A. (2014). Puck magazine and the birth of modern political cartooning. Vulture (10 September). https://www.vulture.com/2014/09/puck‐magazine‐and‐the‐birth‐of‐modern‐political‐cartooning. html. Goldman D. and Pagliery, J. (2015). #JeSuisCharlie becomes one of most popular hashtags in Twitter’s history.CNNMoney(9January).https://money.cnn.com/2015/01/09/technology/social/jesuischarlie‐ hashtag‐twitter/index.html. Gretton, T. (1997). European illustrated weekly magazines, c. 1850–1900A model and a counter‐model for the work of José Guadalupe posada. Anales Del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas: 70. Guttenplan, D.D. (2015). The Nation: A Biography. The Nation Co. LLC. Habermas, J. (1991). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. MIT Press. Hall, P. (2006). Spy magazine  –  1986. Metropolis (blog) (1 April). https://www.metropolismag.com/ uncategorized/spy‐magazine‐1986. Haveman, H. (2015). Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Herman, J. (2007). MAD Magazine + Tom Hayden = SDS. Huffington Post (blog) (5 December). https:// www.huffingtonpost.com/jan‐herman/mad‐magazine‐tom‐hayden‐s_b_75438.html. Hiss, T. and Lewis, J. (1977). The ‘MAD’ generation: after 25 years of perpetrating humor in the jugular vein, the magazine that wised up millions of kids is still a crazy hit. New York Times, 1977, sec. The New York Times Magazine.

356 Lerner Hodgart, M. (1969). Satire: Origins and Principles. McGraw‐Hill. Hudson, B. and Lance, E.A. (2015). Photography and illustration: the power and promise of the image. In: The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research: The Future of the Magazine Form (eds. D. Abrahamson and M.R. Prior‐Miller). New York: Routledge. Kahn, M.A. and West, R.S. (2014). What Fools these Mortals be!: The Story of Puck. IDW Publishing. Karp, J. (2006). A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever. Chicago Review Press. Kercher, S.E. (2010). Revel with a Cause: Liberal Satire in Postwar America. University of Chicago Press. Khanduri, R.G. (2014). Caricaturing Culture in India: Cartoons and History in the Modern World. Cambridge University Press. Kifner, J. (1999). L. C. Lewin, writer of satire of government plot, dies at 82. The New York Times (30  January), sec. US. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/30/us/l‐c‐lewin‐writer‐of‐satire‐of‐ government‐plot‐dies‐at‐82.html. Kitch, C. (2015). Models for understanding magazines. In: The Routledge Handbook of Magazine Research: The Future of the Magazine Form (eds. D. Abrahamson and M. Prior‐Miller), 9–21. New York: Routledge. Krassner, P. (2004). Slaughtering cows and popping cherries. The New York Press (via the Wayback Machine) (8 February). https://web.archive.org/web/20040208104724/http://www.nypress.com/16/34/ news%26columns/feature.cfm. Langbehn, V. (2010). Satire magazines and racial politics. In: German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory, vol. 13 (ed. V. Langbehn), 105–123. Routledge Studies in Modern European History. New York: Routledge. Lepore, J. (2010). Henry Luce vs. Harold Ross | The New Yorker. The New Yorker (19 April). https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/04/19/untimely‐jill‐lepore. Lerner, K.M. (2016). How spy, the iconic satirical magazine of the 1980s, invented contemporary Snark, and how internet journalism has misappropriated it. In: The Funniest Pages: International Perspectives on Journalism and Humor (eds. D. Swick and R.L. Keeble), 249–263. Mass Communication and Journalism. New York: Peter Lang. Lewin, L.C. (2008). Report from Iron Mountain. Free Press. McIntyre, B. 2006. “From Squiffy to Blotto: A Lexicon of Lushes.” The Times of London. January 7. accessed March 11, 2019. www.thetimes.co.uk/article/from‐squiffy‐to‐blotto‐a‐lexicon‐of‐lushes‐h756mbbxr68. McMillian, J. (2014). Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America. Oxford University Press. McNamara, R. (2017). How and why cartoonist Thomas Nast brought down boss Tweed. ThoughtCo. (31 December). https://www.thoughtco.com/thomas‐nasts‐campaign‐against‐boss‐tweed‐4039578. Navasky, V.S. (2006). A Matter of Opinion. Picador. Navasky, V.S. (2013). The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and their Enduring Power, 1e. New York: Knopf. Nyberg, A.K. (1994). Seal of Approval: The Origins and History of the Comics Code. University Press of Mississippi. Ponsford, D. (2017). Private Eye hits highest circulation in 55‐year history ‘which is quite something given that print is meant to be dead.’. PressGazette (9 February). https://www.pressgazette.co.uk/private‐ eye‐hits‐highest‐circulation‐in‐55‐year‐history‐which‐is‐quite‐something‐given‐that‐print‐is‐meant‐ to‐be‐dead (accessed 9 October 2019). Private Eye Covers Library (n.d.). Issue 69: 7 August 1964. http://www.private‐eye.co.uk/covers/ cover‐69 (accessed 11 March 2019). Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive (n.d.). Cartoons from the inter‐war period in Punch. https://punch. photoshelter.com/image/I0000oTiAUZIcJTI (accessed 16 November 2018). Punch Magazine Cartoon Archive (n.d.). Nick (Nicholas Hobart) cartoons from Punch magazine. https:// punch.photoshelter.com/gallery‐image/Nick‐Cartoons‐Nicholas‐Hobart/G00000EIcu5NqHT8/ I0000YKEJlQ3RfX4 (accessed 16 November 2018). Self, W. (2011). Private Eye: the first 50 years by Adam Macqueen – review. The Guardian (9 November). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/nov/09/private‐eye‐adam‐macqueen‐review (accessed 11 March 2019). Sloane, D.E.E. (1987). American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals. Greenwood Press.



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Socolow, M. (2018). In its heyday, Mad magazine was a lot more than silly jokes. Smithsonian (11 May 2018). https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/heyday‐mad‐magazine‐lot‐more‐than‐silly‐jokes‐180969055. Spielmann, M.H. (1895). The History of “Punch”. London: Cassell http://archive.org/details/bub_gb_ o5o4AAAAIAAJ. Stein, E. (2013). That’s Not Funny, That’s Sick: The National Lampoon and the Comedy Insurgents Who Captured the Mainstream. W. W. Norton & Company. The Harvard Lampoon (1926). The Harvard Lampoon, Fiftieth Anniversary 1876–1926. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015030426871. Thomas, S.J. (2004). Mugwump cartoonists, the papacy, and Tammany Hall in America’s gilded age. Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 14 (2): 213–250. https://doi.org/ 10.1525/rac.2004.14.2.213. Thorne, C. (2001). Thumbing our nose at the public sphere: satire, the market, and the invention of ­literature. PMLA 116 (3): 531–544. United States v. Schwimmer (1975). 279 U.S. 644. No. 484 Supreme Court. AD. Wikipedia (n.d.). List of satirical magazines. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_satirical_magazines (accessed 19 November 2018). Yau, E. (2015). 100Most – a satirical weekly that’s a hit with Hong Kong’s occupy generation. South China Morning Post (2 February). https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts‐culture/article/1695786/100most‐ satirical‐weekly‐thats‐hit‐hong‐kongs‐occupy.

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The Cultural Campaigners The Role of Advocacy in Shaping and Changing Magazine Identities Sharon Maxwell Magnus

Introduction The influence of magazines has, until recently, been the subject of relatively little study. A study referenced by Endres (2015) in the Handbook of Magazine Research found that over a 20‐year period, only 6% of studies in the US Journalism Quarterly were of magazines. A trawl through the contents of The British Journalism Review (2019) found a similar focus on newspapers and news sites vastly outweighing research and commentary on magazines. What research interest there is in magazines has, according to Kitch (2015), been largely interdisciplinary, with communications, social sciences, and humanities predominating. It has also tended to focus largely on women’s magazines, with Korinek (2000) describing Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (1963) as the starting point for all study of magazines. Friedan, at the time herself a writer for women’s magazines, depicted them as fluffy, air‐headed, and regressive publications relentlessly advocating a stifling domestic role of motherhood and husband‐tending. This critique was extended by later writers such as Ferguson (1983), who labeled them as ­promoting a “cult of femininity”; McCracken (1993), who honed in on their commercialism; and Naomi Wolf (1991), who held them responsible for society’s and women’s own obsession with beauty. However, this relentlessly negative critique has subsequently been moderated by historians such as Meyerowitz (1993) as well as journalism scholars, such as Le Masurier (2007), who regarded the Australian Cleo magazine as a vehicle for disseminating some of the most important feminist messages to young women, and Carter (2016), who similarly celebrates the sixties’ UK magazine Honey for its role in encouraging teen independence. The debate over whether such magazines are retrogressive or progressive, enmesh women in a web of deadly domesticity, or encourage their careers and sexual liberation, has obscured their more general role as being an excellent vehicle for both popularizing and actively advocating desires that are close to the reader’s interests and their effective championing of particular causes. The focus on the ideologies of such magazines has also obscured the fact that there are a whole host of magazines – from periodicals with a political viewpoint, such as the prominent Nouvel Observateur, to professional ones, such as Construction News – which are also capable of using their content and visuals for advocacy purposes. In this chapter I will explore how and why some magazines have historically been advocates for particular causes and how such advocacy can be an effective part of building reader loyalty, The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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engagement, and identity. I will examine both historic examples and contemporary ones and pose the question as to whether, in an age of online petitions and viral videos, magazine advocacy can be effective.

What Magazine Advocacy Means Advocacy is defined by the Oxford Dictionary (2016) as public support for or recommendation of a particular cause or policy. In his study of advocacy in journalism in a modern global context, Waisbord (2009) notes that until the rise of modern ideas of objective news reporting, particularly in the USA (which he dates from the 1920s), all journalism was advocacy ­ ­journalism. He suggests that in European countries many journalists embrace the idea of the journalist as an advocate for a particular cause rather than an objective reporter, and contrasts this with American newspaper journalism where the aim, if not the result was, (at least in the twentieth century) to be an objective bystander. (The state‐owned British Broadcasting Corporation also attempts to follow the unbiased model, as laid down in an Appendix to its Charter, where it is mandated to be impartial and objective.1) Magazines, however, both in the West and elsewhere, appear to have been far freer from the need to at least appear objective. This is likely to have been for several reasons. Print schedules meant that it was rarely possible to deal primarily in news. As a result, magazines needed to find subject matter that would interest and engage their readers, appear topical, and yet be unlikely to date. (For instance, in the 1970s, letters in the UK edition of Cosmopolitan referred to issues three to four months earlier due to the length of production and print times). Campaigning on particular issues through long‐form pieces, editorial content, and images, particularly those that were not in the national press but were of concern to the reader, met editorial objectives. Also, as Abrahamson (2007) has noted, magazines and their editorial teams in particular, have a different relationship with their readers than other media, which he describes as a unique ­closeness because of shared hobbies, values, or demographics. Often, he notes, the editorial teams are identical in their interests or profile to the reader. To give an example, it would be difficult, for instance, to have an editorial team on Top Gear magazine who had never driven cars and had no interest in them. Savvy editors both identify and anticipate their readers’ desires and anxieties. This could mean focusing on personal safety issues for the Cosmopolitan reader after quantitative research. For instance, then editor Lorraine Candy stated in an interview with Rowan (2002) that research had revealed that “rape is a big draw for us,” which is an honest if a rather unfortunate turn of phrase. On the other hand, magazines may immerse themselves in the reader experience. Watson (2016) has pointed out that in the mid‐twentieth century the owners of Farmers Weekly went to the length of buying several farms to be sure that readers were informed about the latest farming techniques. For this reason, advocating a particular cause that the readers were likely to empathize with could enhance loyalty and engagement with the magazine. Indeed, as Schmidt (1989) argues, magazines not only reflect public opinion (and, especially, the opinion of their readers), but they also seek to shape it. This may be through the content of an article, through choosing particular writers associated with specific topics or through moving or graphic images. Memorable images that embody particular attitudes or that seek to call our attention to specific issues include, for instance, the much‐reproduced haunting image of the girl with the green eyes who symbolized the misery of the conflicts in Afghanistan and which was used a cover for National Geographic (McCurry 1985). The equally striking follow‐up photos and story (Newman 2002) charted the misery of her life as a symbol of war. More recently, follow‐up articles detailed her fight to remain in Pakistan, where she was an illegal immigrant, and her ultimate return to Afghanistan. The first picture was taken when the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, resulting in the displacement of half of the country’s population (BBC 2019).

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At the time when the second photograph was taken, the accession of the Taliban and the US‐led invasion of Afghanistan had resulted in even greater turmoil. The contrast between the beautiful but clearly traumatized young girl and the exhausted woman looking far older than her age, revealed the human tragedy of that conflict more movingly than words. A writer can also influence and advocate, particularly, if the theme is central to a specific issue or is repeated in various guises. For instance, when domestic violence was only gradually being acknowledged in the UK as a major problem rather than a private matter, Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first women’s refuge in the UK wrote a series of articles for UK Cosmopolitan between 1977 and 1982, later collated into a book, Erin Pizzey Collects (1983), publicizing ­various aspects of domestic violence that she had encountered in her work. She questioned the prevailing view that such violence was a problem of poverty, but also homed in on childhood abuse as a reason why some women both chose and returned to violent men. She also wrote that men, as well as women, could be subject to domestic violence. These points of view led to ­hostility from more radical feminists (Jackson 1989/2010). When she ceased writing for the magazine in 1982, shortly before emigrating with her new husband, there was a considerable reduction of coverage of the issue. As Korinek (2000) also astutely points out in her history of Chatelaine magazine, the miscellany of voices and attitudes that are an intrinsic part of any magazine mean that many different points of view can be displayed, even contradictory ones. Even Chatelaine, which she believes disseminated the tenets of second‐wave feminism, simultaneously portrayed conservative attitudes to the domestic role. Similarly, as Pizzey showed, Cosmopolitan could portray the sassy, independent, man‐hungry young woman while simultaneously acknowledging the cruelty that ensued from some relationships. This sort of mercurial complexity is typical of magazines, where views that are not entirely consistent may be held by both readers and the editorial team. Furthermore, it is often extremely hard to gauge the effectiveness of such advocacy. Within newspapers, magazines, and TV, especially in an age of media saturation, it may be hard for readers to identify whether a particular article or issue (unless it is entirely original and there is nothing about it elsewhere) changed their mind. This is a subject on which there appears to be little research and where more may be needed.

Types of Advocacy Within Magazines The Magazine as Cause There is one type of magazine in which the message is intrinsic to the periodical and no contradiction or dilution is likely to occur. These are magazines that are the “voice” of a particular campaign or cause. Such publications, as Vann and Van Arsdel (1994) explain in their study of Victorian magazines, have played an active role in advocacy since Victorian times. For instance, as Niessen (1995) reports, there were a multiplicity of magazines devoted to temperance (­abstention from alcohol) in Victorian England, including local and regional magazines as well as temperance magazines for women and even for juveniles. In the USA, The Crisis magazine (www.thecrisismagazine.com), published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1910, is an excellent example of a periodical whose sole reason for being is the advocacy it espouses – in this case, civil rights. The ability of the magazine format to cover a wide range of issues, all held together within a single theme, has meant, as Kirschke (2014) notes, that material could range from the outrage of lynchings and racist violence to articles about women’s suffrage and to beautiful pictures from black artists – both within a single issue and sequentially. Today, the ability of the magazine form to combine hard‐hitting reportage with photo journalism means it is still serving its core purpose.



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Magazines characteristically combine text and pictures to enhance their message. Such reliance on the visual makes them highly attractive as a vehicle of advocacy for charities that want to engage their readers through images as well as words. So in Nature’s Home, the magazine for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Britain, which has the tenth largest‐circulation in the UK (Ponsford 2016), articles about the loss of habitat and the ways an individual can promote bird‐friendly environments mix seamlessly with beautiful pictures of the birds themselves. The campaigning side of the magazine is effectively sugar‐coated by the visual stimulation and enchantment of the images, which remind the reader of the charity’s core purpose of protecting birds and their habitats. At the same time, the images provide entertainment and enjoyment, and the circulation of over 600 000 (ibid.) mean that it is also an attractive vehicle for environmentally conscious or outdoor living advertisers (Immediate Media 2015). In addition, the core age of donors for this and other similar charities is over 50, so Snapchat or Twitter communication is likely to be less meaningful. As Holmes (2012a) has noted, magazines can have a myriad of purposes: information, entertainment, and building a community, often all at the same time. Magazines such as Nature’s Home and WI Life, the magazine of the Women’s Institute sent in print to members, set out to fulfill these roles for their members through a unique combination of advocacy, entertainment, and information. Independent, often small‐scale, magazines can act as a form of advocacy, with the medium being the message. For instance, Groeneveld (2016) explores a variety of feminist magazines in the USA and Canada, which, despite small circulations, offer a different narrative to the prevailing gloss of the glossies. She points out that Hues (1992–1999), which started as a university project, challenged the norms of whiteness and gave a chance for women of color to express their identity and values in a way which is only becoming mainstream in the twenty‐first century.

Advocacy in “Editorial Interest” Magazines There are many ways of categorizing magazines. Holmes (2012b), for instance, uses the industry standard of consumer, business‐to‐business, and customer. However, for the purposes of this article, Prior‐Miller’s (2015) “editorial interest” is more appropriate for the categorization of magazines, given that many different types of magazines can advocate for many ­different causes. While the purpose of membership magazines is to espouse and publicize their cause, many general interest and news magazines will advocate a particular campaign, particularly if it chimes with their readers. Where they differ from magazines which are offshoots of a particular campaign or charity, is that they will occasionally promote a cause that some of their readers may even oppose. For instance, according to Kelly (2014), the French current‐affairs magazine Nouvel Observateur (1964–2016) is generally left leaning but was heavily criticized over an article by Michel Foucault about the Iranian revolution of 1979 that seemed to both celebrate its spirituality and advocate political Islam, a stance heavily criticized in the letters page at the time by Iranian women who felt he had chosen to ignore the freedoms being taken from them. Here the influence of a “celebrity” writer and the fact that he was writing about a revolution, something the French have historically been sympathetic toward, meant the resulting advocacy for this cause was out of step with many of the readers. By contrast, in Britain, according to Courtauld (1999), the Spectator, a British political magazine generally on the right of the political divide, kept entirely to its own libertarian principles when in 1956 its editor, Sir Ian Gilmour, wrote a passionate plea for the law on male homosexuality to be changed. He urged readers to back homosexual acts becoming legal between consenting adults. This, Courtauld adds, was at a time when most of the press  –  especially the tabloid press  –  were firmly against such legalization. Sir Ian Gilmour was berated for such

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support by the tabloid press and, in particular, the Daily Express, which called the magazine the “Bugger’s Bugle.” Eleven years later, the law was changed with the support of the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins, who had written frequently for the magazine. In this case, editorial judgment was swayed by the views of the editor, who is, as Abrahamson (2007) notes, generally someone who shares many of the characteristics of the readership; but many does not mean all. The editor’s firm views may not have been shared by many of the readers, but he clearly sought to use the magazine as a vehicle of education. This is not uncommon. A few decades ago, UK Cosmopolitan ran campaigning sections about women’s issues in Ireland, despite most of its readership being in England (e.g., Boylan and Maher 1980). The editor at the time, Deirdre McSharry, was Irish. When she left, there were far fewer articles about abortion and contraception in the Republic. On the other side of the political spectrum, the left‐leaning New Statesman was, according to Evans (1995), the inspiration behind Charter 88 which started as a letter to the newspaper and quickly garnered the support of the readers. The Charter, which ran from the New Statesman’s offices for several years called for a Bill of Human rights, proportional representation, and a Freedom of Information Act, two of which have subsequently been passed. In this respect, the advocacy for this particular cause was precisely what would be expected of successful advocacy by a magazine – a cause that allies itself with the readers’ interests, a call to action, and a long‐term commitment to promoting the issue. Unlike The Spectator, the impetus for the advocacy came directly from the readers rather than the editors revealing that magazines, as Ritchie (2016) has remarked, are a triangular creation formed of editorial team, advertisers, and readers.

Women’s Magazines Critics such as Ferguson (1983), McCracken (1993), and Gill (2007) regard women’s magazines as advocates for a regressive, anti‐feminist, and consumerist form of patriarchy. For them, such magazines are in the vanguard of the capitalist system and conspire to keep women subservient and domesticated, but Richie (2016) argues that the truth is a lot more nuanced. In a study of women’s magazines of the Friedan era, Meyerowitz (1993) remarks that Friedan had underplayed the portrayals of career and independent women and overplayed the domestic goddess. By contrast, popular magazines at the time portrayed both the domestic and the non‐domestic role: “a bifocal vision of women both as feminine and domestic and as public achievers” that “offered a postwar version of today’s ‘superwoman’, the woman who successfully combines motherhood and career” (p. 1459). Indeed, it could be argued that women’s magazines have even since their earliest inception, not only reflected but also advocated on behalf of their readers. It is just that this message was obscured because of the domestic articles and setting of the magazine. It is generally agreed that the first UK women’s magazine was The Ladies’ Mercury, launched in 1693 (Braithwaite 1995; White 1970). This was no feminist tract by modern standards. Adburgham (1972) points out that its publisher, John Dunton, was generally regarded as crazy. However, the magazine acknowledged women as being worthy of their own magazines and as a distinct interest group and it included contributors such as the celebrated Mary Astell of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (Waters 2015). By allowing such women to develop their writing skills and enter the public sphere, women’s magazines were already performing an advocacy role for the advancement of women. However, as Robinson (2009) writes, the first magazine that can be truly said to be dedicated to advocacy for women’s education and rights in the UK is the English Woman’s Journal of 1858–1864; the “house‐journal” of the Ladies of Langham Place – a group of wealthy, influential “bluestocking” women. This magazine contained articles on the first woman to qualify as a doctor, women’s education, demands for suffrage, and articles on women’s health and fashion



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which promoted comfort and movement. The magazine was a way of both promoting and ­publicizing the changes these women sought. During its publication, as Robinson (2009) explains, legislation and the changes the magazine espoused – such as allowing women to retain their property after marriage and public exams for girls – all came into being. Furthermore, its commitment to advocacy as its primary purpose meant that according to Beetham and Boardman (2001), it had: “A uniformity of tone and address absent from its more commercial competitors” (p. 61). While the number of readers is likely to have been small compared to the reading public, given the narrow focus of the magazine, its reach was considerable. The same could be said of Spare Rib, its 1970s equivalent, which even though it never reached a readership of more than 25 000, advocated what were then‐radical causes, such as lesbian equality and marriage, the criminalization of marital rape, and more legislation on domestic abuse (Law 2000). Indeed, Spare Rib was, as writer Ann Scott (1975) proclaimed, the “magazine of the women’s movement” (p. 6), a claim that could not be challenged since the women’s movement was in itself diffuse and made up of a plethora of competing and sometimes contradictory organizations loosely unified by a conference, a point made most strongly by Tweedie (1976/2010) in her Guardian article on this theme. Spare Rib magazine was launched in July 1972 by the founders Boycott and Rowe and funded largely by advertising. It was briefly run by a collective largely funded by the now defunct Greater London Council, (Gelb 1989) as well as an independent collective. It ceased publication in 1993 at the same time that its focus on domestic policy shifted to global issues. In an editorial in 1975 (mentioned earlier) that may have accidentally revealed one of the publication’s weaknesses, Ann Scott, a founding member of the magazine, answered the ­ question “Why is your magazine so depressing,” with the statement that, essentially, life was depressing for women. While this may be true, it may explain why its US equivalent, Ms. magazine (www.msmagazine. com), with its mix of feminist campaigning on abortion, equal pay, and date rape, and features on adultery and women of the year, is still publishing, while Spare Rib is not. Advocacy in magazines needs to be hopeful, targeted, and a mixture of light and shade. In generalist magazines, it needs to be part of the mix, not the mix. While advocacy of feminist causes by avowedly feminist magazines may not be surprising, there is plenty to be found in the more commercial women’s magazines. Ten years before Friedan criticized women’s magazines for their retrogressive attitudes (although she also criticized anthropology, psychiatry, and society in general for such attitudes), White (1970) recalls that magazines such as Good Housekeeping were running articles on neglected but socially important areas such prisons, education legislation, and adoption. The fact that these are everyday issues, which are rarely newsworthy except when riots or incompetence appear, does not make them trivial. One of the errors of those who criticized women’s magazines as trivial was assuming that domestic or caring issues were insignificant beside the more traditionally “hard” news areas of politics or crime. Although mainstream magazines have often been (rightly) lambasted for failing to engage in anti‐racist advocacy or the normalization of black identity (Currie 1999), this is not always the case. Goff (1995) noted that the US magazine Redbook had a markedly anti‐racist agenda, including running the first interview with Dr. Martin Luther King. One of the magazine’s editors, Sey Chassler, persuaded 35 other magazines as well as his own to run articles backing the Equal Rights Amendment in their July 1976 issues. Such consolidated and persistent advocacy showcases the ability of magazines to advocate effectively when there is editorial energy to back it up. In the UK, such concerted action was lacking, with few pieces on racism and only intermittent inclusion of non white faces (and sometimes far fewer than that). The nearest to campaigning on these issues is perhaps Nova magazine, which in 1966 featured a cover with a small black child in a pretty dress and the words, “You may think I look cute but would you live next door to my mummy and daddy?”

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Nova’s 10‐year lifespan from 1965 to 1975 could be characterized as one long controversy and advocacy for issues such as abortion on demand, acceptance of couples who were not ­married, and race. Its legacy is such that UK feminist magazine, Riposte, celebrated its blend of bravery, brazenness, and modernity (Ronayne 2015). It could be argued, however, that one of the reasons it failed was that, in terms of issues covered, it was simply too advanced for both its readership (numbers of readers declined as the years went on) and its advertisers. Advocacy can only be successful when it is in tune with its readers at that moment in time; being ahead of the game simply loses readership. White (1970) gives an excellent example of this when she cites the case of Woman magazine, which cut its domestic focus just before the World War II to embrace articles dealing with a myriad of social problems, resulting in a devastating 30% drop in sales. Magazines are intended to be pleasurable, a private treat – and while advocating a cause that the reader empathizes with will be seen as being in tune with the readership, advocating ones that do not catch the readers’ imagination run the risk of being perceived as being out of touch. For instance, during the 1980s, AIDS was a significant cause of death among young people, but many thought of it as an illness that only affected the gay community (Treichler 1987). The UK edition of Cosmopolitan responded with an article titled “Smart Girls Carry Condoms” (Winn 1987), advocating that young women change their sexual behavior to insist on safer sex. This article was both campaigning and positive, as well as in line with the readers’ core values. Such advocacy is typical of the small‐scale magazine campaign on topics that are often bubbling under the headlines rather than necessarily making them. Ytre‐Arne (2011), for instance, has argued that magazines in Norway should be exempt, as newspapers are, from value‐added tax on the grounds that they promote public interest. Her view is that women’s magazines concentrate on attitudinal change in areas such as the environment and women’s rights, but that such advocacy is no less important than legal changes. Similarly, Saarenmaa and Ruoho (2014) highlighted the role that Finnish women’s magazines have played in promoting and publicizing female politicians.

Advocacy in Magazines in the Digital Age The preceding examples have established how magazines have, historically, advocated change. To be effective, they have targeted the interest and empathy of the reader at that particular time, being neither too retrogressive nor too progressive. Coverage, while only a small component of the whole magazine, has been aided either by prominence within the magazine or by repetition. For instance, the UK edition of Cosmopolitan had a year‐long campaign on domestic violence in association with the charity Refuge (www.refuge.org.uk) in 2001, while the New Statesman magazine featured Charter 88 in many articles. Most of these examples date from a time when print was paramount and when readers had much more severely curtailed opportunities for engaging with and sourcing information. Editorial staff were creators of content rather than creators and curators. In the age of digital petitions and worldwide viral YouTube campaigns, such as the Ice Bucket challenge (Woolf 2016), can magazines still advocate effectively on behalf of their readers? The answer is a conditional yes. For membership magazines, advocating a cause, the immediate future is bright. The particular charity or campaigning group will still want to send exclusive, upbeat, visual, and targeted information to its audience. The importance of exclusivity and print advertising rates is likely to mean that, despite the cost, print will continue to be a favored medium. In addition, donors to causes such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds have grown up with the traditional magazine format and are likely to continue to view it with pleasure and respect. For such institutions, print is just one weapon in a strategy that is likely to encompass Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter as well.



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For general‐interest, news, and hobby magazines, strategic thinking about the use of platforms and demographics is key. While magazines still create a sense of community and a call to action, which Abrahamson (2007) noted among their unique characteristics, to be successful they need to be canny in their use of platforms and in terms of market segmentation. It is perfectly possible to segment a magazine with different platforms being used extensively for different demographics of readership. The more precise and clearly defined the readership, the more likely the magazine – and its advocacy – are to succeed. Even major general interest juggernauts such as Cosmopolitan have started to adapt in this way, as editor Farah Storr revealed in a recent Media Show interview (Mangold 2016), by using the hugely popular Snapchat app for younger readers and different content in print for the older ones. The most successful magazine advocacy campaigns will appeal to both a very specific readership and devote considerable effort to a multi‐platform approach. An excellent example of this is Construction News’ #Lovelives campaign (2015), which won a British Society of Magazine editors award in 2015, recognizing its success. The magazine, aimed at workers in the building trade, aimed to raise £400 000 from their readers to keep afloat the charity Building Lives which trains young people to work in the construction industry, an industry where there is a considerable skills shortage. The advocacy included high profile articles about the campaign, including moving personal stories online and in print of apprentices and young builders whose lives had been changed as a result of their jobs, a cover story, and a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #loveLIVES. Each feature was enlivened with pictures of young people who had benefited from the scheme. The campaign raised the money and more – one easy way to evaluate the success of that particular campaign. This campaign reflected the three successful tenets of magazine advocacy. First, the cause was highly specific to the core audience’s interests and concerns, in this case both the building industry and the future of young people working within it. Second, the advocacy was both prominent and continued over several issues and several key platforms. Appropriate images of the young people involved and personal stories added to the immersive experience and there was a distinct “call to action” (Abrahamson 2013) as readers were asked to contribute and to persuade employers to contribute. The magazine used the new possibilities of social media to continually refresh, reinvent, and inform readers about the progress of the campaign and to continue both to inspire them and to reaffirm their loyalty to the magazine. The campaign was given resonance and respectability because it was teamed with a reputable charity with expertise in the field. Construction News used print, online, and social media for its key messaging. However, Randle, cited in Filak (2015), has argued that the web was a better medium for satisfying niche needs rather than print. Certainly, Nursing Times (UK) ran a highly successful campaign (if sign‐up and awareness are measures of success), using a website as its major platform. Arguing that government legislation was too weak, the magazine’s Speak Out Safely campaign (SOS 2015) put pressure on nursing employers to protect staff who spoke out about poor conditions. In some ways, this might appear an old‐fashioned campaign, with its use of SOS and the main focus being on asking hospital trusts to sign up to a simple pledge. The incentives were the positive publicity of being named in Nursing Times as a signatory and the inclusion being sent to 50 000 social media followers. The campaign was hugely successful, however, with hundreds of trusts currently signed up (2017) and one trust producing an app for staff to report concerns anonymously. This campaign is simple, perfectly targeted at readers, specific, and uses a variety of platforms (but with emphasis on the website) to engage readers and ensure they feel that the magazine cares about them and their concerns. Again, here the results of the advocacy could be measured in terms of sign up to the pledge. A rather different advocacy with more mixed results was that of UK Elle magazine, which teamed up with the Fawcett Society (www.fawcettsociety.org.uk), a long‐standing gender

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equality charity named after the early suffragist Millicent Fawcett, to run an issue dedicated to feminism, with prominent celebrities, such as Emma Watson, talking about her UN campaigns. The initiative included brand extensions such as a “This is what a Feminist Looks Like T‐shirt,” which was worn by prominent actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch and the politician Nick Clegg. Elle is predominantly a fashion magazine and here, the link with celebrity and fashion was as important as the link with the highly respected charity. In this campaign, the readers’ core concerns  –  fashion and their gendered identity  –  were addressed. The campaign used appropriate (in this case celebrity) images. The publicity and related pieces, while focused on one month, were carried over several months and platforms, resulting in mentions in the national press and considerable traction in social media. The uniqueness of this campaign was that it utilized a key tenet of the magazine – fashion – to make a point. Unfortunately, however, the gloss rather got taken off the campaign when The Daily Mail (Ellery 2014) ran a piece outlining the exploitation of the workers who had made the T‐shirts in a factory in Mauritius. The story was then also picked up by The Guardian (Hoskins 2014) and other news sources. This development highlighted the pitfalls of events and sources that are beyond a magazine’s control. One arguably more successful campaign was based on a single article, whose impact reflected the fact that it was so unexpected: in 2016, Teen Vogue – whose readers could more normally be expected to want to know about fashion – published a piece on how Donald Trump was gaslighting (i.e. psychologically manipulating) the USA through the spread of lies. The teen readers were then given advice on how to combat being impacted by fake news (Duca 2016). The article went viral, with the author’s own Twitter following doubling almost instantly (Johnson 2018). Her mix of memes, trivia, and hard‐hitting activism have won her a Twitter audience of nearly half a million and media recognition way outside the women’s magazine bubble. Similarly, People’s magazine “Share Your Size” campaign (Calderone 2016) depended on readers becoming a part of the campaign, not being passive recipients. Such campaigns show that even though social media has caused considerable disruption in the magazine world, successful advocacy is still possible. It may need to be more tightly tailored and it may need to fight for the attention of the reader for whom there has never been such a glut of media vying for their attention. But the possibility exists provided the issue is central to the readers’ perception both of themselves, their identity, and their view of the magazine as enhancing that identity. As Filak (2015) put it: People see value in these publications far beyond the content itself. In offering people the opportunity to receive information in communal ways, magazine publishers are providing readers with the opportunity to gain social utility and forge relationships with others of similar interests. (p. 265)

Note 1 BBC. (n.d.). Editorial guidelines. https://downloads.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/pdfs/ Section_04_Impartiality.pdf (accessed 18 March 2019).

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28

American Magazines as Champions of Environmental and Corporate Sustainability Matthew Yeomans

Introduction It is not often that a single media event has such an impact that governments, corporations, and society in general are shocked into changing how they act in the world. That was the effect the BBC nature television program Blue Planet II had when it aired in the UK and globally in 2017. It depicted the destruction plastic was having on life in our oceans  –  and how that plastic pollution was coming back to hurt humans through the food chain. That one TV program had such an impact (Sustainable Brands 2018) – amplified dramatically by social media discourse  –  that it has encouraged companies to change their production methods and packaging. It prompted governments to pledge funds and programs to combat plastic waste (de la Mare 2018). And, in the UK and other nations, it has made the problem of ocean plastic part of the national discourse (de Vos 2018). In today’s social media‐driven ecosystem, where we struggle to keep pace of the information flowing through the digital devices that we have been conditioned to check almost constantly, an hour‐long episode of Blue Planet II is very much an anomaly – its length and commitment to the topic of ocean pollution a testament to how important an issue this is. Yet, just a generation ago, a TV show, even one as well‐researched and presented as Blue Planet II, might have been considered somewhat lightweight – or at least not the go‐to medium for serious reporting on social and environmental issues, even though the “photogenic quality of what environmentalists are campaigning for and against, which makes for visually exciting journalism” was already noted 35 years ago (Lowe and Morrison 1984, pp. 80–81). For most of the twentieth century, magazines and long‐form newspaper articles were the sources of environmental and social issue journalism offering perspective, a sense of gravitas, and often‐harrowing visual depictions. For example, Time magazine’s first environmental cover, exposing the dangers of radioactive contamination, dates back to the 1940s (Meisner and Takahashi 2013). Magazine journalism, especially  –  with its focus on investigative reporting, crafted storytelling, and an in‐built sense of reflection – has provided an important platform for understanding social and environmental issues, and for challenging the status quo. An example of such a challenge to the status quo resulting from magazine coverage was the formation of the UK’s Ecology Party after the publication of the 1972 article “Blueprint for Survival” by the monthly magazine The Ecologist (Lowe and Morrison 1984).

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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During that time, our understanding of what constitutes sustainability has also evolved c­onsiderably. While just 20 years ago sustainability was mostly viewed through the lens of ­environmental issues, the term is now often used in the context of corporate responsibility, which is understood as a company’s responsible interaction not only with the physical, but also with the social environment (Amini and Bienstock 2014). This chapter retells and contextualizes the stories of some of the pioneers of what we might call “sustainability magazine journalism” – tracing its roots from the earliest investigative reporters to the dawn of the Internet era  that would strip magazines of their audience and hence their authority.

McClure’s Standard Oil Investigation Provides Inspiration to the Muckrakers It was President Theodore Roosevelt who coined the term muckrakers. Despite being a great champion of the turn of the twentieth century reform movement that saw corporate Robber Barons brought to account by new federal legislation, Roosevelt was frustrated at the constant crusading (and what he considered complaining) of a new breed of journalists committed to righting social and corporate wrongs. In a 1906 speech in Washington, DC, the President complained: Now it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck‐rake: and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes save of his feats with the muck‐rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil. (Roosevelt 1906, para. 4)

The “muckrake” term stuck and was eagerly embraced by a growing movement of socially ­motivated journalists and publications. Leading the charge was New York‐based McClure’s, co‐founded in 1893 by two college friends: the famously volatile Irishman S.S. McClure and his placid counterpoint, John Sanborn Phillips. McClure’s was notable for the caliber of its writers – Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Arthur Conan Doyle were contributors – and also for its journalistic approach. At a time when much of the nascent US press was focused on quick hit reports, McClure’s encouraged (and funded) in‐depth investigative journalism. In early 1901, McClure’s editors decided they should investigate the great industrial monopolies – trusts – that had grown up over the past quarter century and now dominated much of the US economy and political life. The trust they decided to focus on was Standard Oil, the most powerful and most aggressive oil company in the USA. McClure and Phillips had just the writer in mind – Ida Tarbell, a native of Pennsylvania, whose previous long exploration of the life of Napoleon had been a major success for the magazine. It took six months of editorial meetings in the USA and across Europe (McClure didn’t like to stay in one place for too long) before the story idea was fully shaped and Tarbell was ready to start reporting (Starkman 2011). She spent the next two years researching, reporting, and writing her investigative opus, “History of the Standard Oil Company,” which was serialized into 18 articles (Streitmatter 1998). Tarbell’s forensic approach chronicled the ways in which Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller had built his dynasty on the back of bribery, criminal violence, and corporate espionage (Catte 2018). Certainly, the US government took note. In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and forced the company to dissolve into 34 smaller entities (The Learning Network 2012). With a proven public appetite for this type of ­campaigning

372 Yeomans and evocative journalism, other magazines joined with McClure’s in the pursuit of muckraking. Leslie’s showed the shocking number of fatalities on the railroads while Ladies’ Home Journal and Collier’s ruthlessly pursued the “snake oil” sham of patent medicine marketing. Collier’s brought another storytelling weapon to the fight – provocative images, such as its 1905 cover that featured a skull surrounded by money bags (Kimble 1905). On 3 June 1905, the magazine published a full‐page cartoon titled “Death’s Laboratory.” The drawing featured a skull branded with the words “The Patent Medicine Trust – Palatable Poison for the Poor.” It “became a symbol of the hollow promise and deadly results of drug fraud” as Rodger Streitmatter wrote in Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have shaped American History (Streitmatter 1998, p. 97).

The New Yorker Sounds the Alarm About Nuclear Weapons On 6 August 1945, at 8:15 a.m., the city of Hiroshima, Japan, was devastated by a single atomic bomb delivered by a United States B‐29 Superfortress airplane nicknamed The Enola Gay. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki suffered a similar, horrific fate. Within 24 hours the Japanese authorities had agreed to an unconditional surrender and World War II was over. In the USA, news of the bombings was greeted with great jubilation. Many thousands of American troops had already been killed in the war against Japan. Even with the enemy in retreat, hundreds of thousands more soldiers would have died in a full‐scale invasion of Japan. The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had saved American lives, argued the December 1946 issue of The Atlantic (Compton 1946). In the months after the attack, however, more and more people started to question the power of the bomb and raise concerns about the revolutionization of modern warfare. Some activists argued the newly formed United Nations should have control over when and whether an atomic bomb is used again. More than half of the US population favored a world government that would outlaw weapons of mass destruction (Schlosser 2015). It was amid this growing sense of unease that The New Yorker editors Harold Ross and William Shawn decided their magazine should explore in more depth the legacy of Hiroshima. In the spring of 1946, they commissioned an already accomplished war correspondent called John Hersey to visit Hiroshima and write about his experience. Hersey had already won a Pulitzer prize for his war reporting, but none of his past experience would prepare him for what he encountered in Hiroshima. His initial idea had been to write about the shattered city – notably the destruction of the buildings and how, nine months later, rebuilding work was progressing. However, on the long boat voyage to Japan, Hersey started reading Thornton Wilders’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It retraced the histories of five people stranded on the eponymous bridge as it collapsed and how they had come to be there at that tragic moment. Inspired by the personal insight, Hersey decided he would focus on Hiroshima’s people, not its buildings. When he arrived in the decimated city, he sought survivors of the bomb. Hersey met and chatted with 50 survivors before settling on the six personal stories that would give his article incredible power and hammer home the real human cost of the bomb. Hersey spent three weeks in Hiroshima, and when he departed, he was imbued with an overriding sense of fear and dread. The New Yorker reported on the 70th anniversary of the story’s publication that Hersey’s experience of “the profundity of the nuclear attack, and his consequent need to try to convey the reality of it to readers, forced him outside of journalistic conventions” (Shorto 2016, para. 7). Hersey left Japan without sharing his notes with US military censors. On his return to the USA he wrote at speed so that, a few weeks later, he had produced more than 30 000 words of material. The original intention was for The New Yorker to run Hersey’s reporting in four consecutive parts but his editors, Harold Ross and William Shawn,



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knew they had an extraordinary piece of journalism and took the unprecedented step of ­publishing it as a stand‐alone feature (Schlosser 2015). Never before had the entire New Yorker’s editorial well been dedicated to a single story (and it has never happened since). Its editing and production took place in complete secrecy, so much so that other writers who were expecting to have their stories in that week’s edition began to wonder why they had not received proof of their stories even as the publication deadline approached (Raphael 2016). Just hours before publication, The New Yorker sent copies of the story to every major US newspaper. Most published editorials the next day urging the public to read Hersey’s story. All 300 000 copies of the original print run sold out. Those who obtained a copy were greeted with this editor’s note: To our readers, The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use. (Sumner 2010, p. 112)

It is hard for us to comprehend today – in a world dictated by instantaneous news updates, social media chatter, and video overload – the impact a single magazine story could have when it was published a year after the bombing took place. Within weeks copies were being auctioned at more than 120 times the cover price. Even Albert Einstein struggled to share the information. When he attempted to buy 1000 copies of the magazine to send to fellow nuclear skeptic scientists, he had to make facsimile copies. As the BBC Magazine wrote on the 70th anniversary of The New Yorker story, Hiroshima was the first publication to make the man on the San Francisco trolleybus and the woman on the Clapham omnibus confront the miseries of radiation sickness, to understand that you could survive the bomb and still die from its after effects. John Hersey in his calm unflinching prose reported what those who had survived had witnessed. As the nuclear arms race began, just three months after the testing of further atom bombs at Bikini Atoll, the true power of the new weapons began to be understood. (Raphael 2016, para. 15)

The New Yorker’s “Silent Spring” In the summer of 1962, The New Yorker agreed to run a three‐part excerpt of a new book called “Silent Spring.” The book’s author, Rachel Carson, was a highly respected nature writer who had freelanced for The Atlantic and Reader’s Digest and had written three well‐received though not particularly contentious books about the sea (Lepore 2018). “Silent Spring” was different. It was a damning investigation of the US chemical industry – specifically the impact that the insect pesticide DDT was having on the environment (and bird populations in particular). The US military had developed DDT during World War II to fight lice and other insects. When the war ended, producer E.I. Du Pont had large stocks of DDT left over and, soon, it was being employed in commercial agriculture. Carson had been concerned about DDT’s impact on the environment for over a decade, ever since she had worked as an editor at the Fish and Wildlife Service. Back in 1945, Carson had pitched a story to Reader’s Digest and other outlets about the danger DDT posed if used in agriculture but could not generate any interest (Alfred 2011). She later tried, with little success, to interest other reporters in pursuing the DDT investigation but, ultimately, legendary New York writer and editor E.B. White convinced Carson she was the only writer who could pursue what she came to refer to as “the poison book” (Griswold 2012). The New Yorker’s excerpts of Carson’s reporting were devastating – not least that the

374 Yeomans well‐documented environmental damage being caused by new, untested, and unregulated pesticides was no accident. Instead, Carson accused the US chemical industry of spreading disinformation and government officials of being complicit in the lies. Thanks to The New Yorker’s coverage, the book became an instant bestseller when it was ­published in September 1962. “Silent Spring” sent shockwaves through modern US society because it arrived at a time when the word of corporations – especially around claims of scientific breakthroughs and know how – was pretty much still taken for granted. As The New York Times wrote, reflecting on its publication half a century later: “‘Silent Spring’ was more than a study of the effects of synthetic pesticides; it was an indictment of the late 1950s. Humans, Carson argued, should not seek to dominate nature through chemistry, in the name of progress. In  Carson’s view, technological innovation could easily and irrevocably disrupt the natural system” (Griswold 2012, para. 15). The outrage around the book’s discoveries punctured the idea that companies could or should be trusted. The book is widely credited as the catalyst for the modern environmental movement which, by extension, exerted the political pressure that drove the formation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 (Griswold 2012). It also awakened a sense of moral outrage and a newfound intellectual scrutiny of the complacency about the material world that had clouded American senses in the postwar decade. Now, like a generation of housewives shaking themselves out of a valium stupor, many journalists and academics started to question a system that seemed to favor corporations over the public.

The Nation and The New Republic Propel “Unsafe at Any Speed” Rachel Carson’s critique of corporate America was reinforced by consumer activist Ralph Nader in his 1965 dissection of the automobile industry, “Unsafe at Any Speed.” The book, which started life as a series of articles for The Nation in 1959, claimed that carmakers had resisted introducing seat belts and were reluctant to spend money on improving driver and passenger safety. It was particularly damning of one vehicle  –  the Chevrolet Corvair. Nader had begun researching automotive safety in 1956 as a second‐year student at Harvard Law School. His Nation magazine work brought him and the issue of vehicle safety more prominence. He started to explore writing a book on the topic but found little success in attracting publishers. Then, in 1964, James Ridgeway, a pioneering activist journalist, cited Nader’s research in a New Republic article titled “The Corvair Tragedy.” That piece of reporting caught the attention of an independent book publisher, Richard Grossman. He asked Ridgeway to expand his New Republic piece into a book, but Ridgeway had other writing commitments. Instead, Ridgeway introduced Grossman to Nader, who, at the time, was working as a researcher on auto safety issues for the young Democratic senator (and future Senate Majority Leader) Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Marcello 2004). Nader signed a $1500 advance with Grossman, and “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed‐In Dangers of the American Automobile” was published on 30 November 1965. From the very first sentence, readers were left in no doubt what to expect. It read: “For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people” (Jensen 2015, para. 11). In early 1966, Nader was asked by Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff, Democrat of Connecticut, to testify before a Senate subcommittee on automotive safety. But what really helped raise awareness of Nader’s crusade was the revelation (again by Ridgeway in The New Republic) that General Motors (GM; owner of the Corvair brand) had hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on Nader. When Ribicoff publicly criticized GM in a subcommittee hearing for its “attempt to



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downgrade and smear a man,” the company was forced to apologize (Jensen 2015, para. 17). As  the New Republic would observe many years later, “Nader became a folk hero, GM a ­corporate villain, and the Corvair the leading example of Detroit’s indifference to auto safety” (Noah 2011). Within six months of its publication, Unsafe at Any Speed was a best seller rivaling Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (Jensen 2015). Nader’s reporting also delivered a serious legislative effect. By 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson had established a new regulatory body, the National Traffic Safety Agency and the US Congress had enacted two auto‐safety bills addressing a range of issues, including safety codes, vehicle inspection, and driver education. Nader even graced the cover of Time magazine with the headline “America’s Toughest Customer” (Rothman 2015). As Robert Lutz, an iconic auto industry executive told The New York Times on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed: “The book had a seminal effect…. I don’t like Ralph Nader and I didn’t like the book, but there was definitely a role for government in automotive safety” (Jensen 2015 para. 4). In his book Car Safety Wars, Michael R. Lemov (2015) summed up Unsafe at Any Speed in this way: “Time may have dimmed the memory of Ralph Nader’s successful crusade for safer automobiles [but] the result – remaking of the law and the reality of automobile safety – cannot be dimmed … the events of those years would lead to Detroit’s worst nightmare – a national motor vehicle safety law” (p. 86).

The 1970s–1990s: mainstreaming Environmental and Social Coverage The 1970s heralded a growing public awareness of the fragility of the planet, the effects of pollution, and the outsized influence that corporations were playing in everyday lives. This increased awareness was due in no small part to the social and environmental reporting of the past few decades, much of which was done by magazines (Bowman and Hanaford 1977; McGeachy 1989; Schoenfeld 1982). In the mid‐twentieth century, the long shelf life and inherent visual appeal of magazines became perfect tools to re‐kindle the more‐than‐a‐century‐ old juxtaposition between industrial life and peaceful nature (Podeschi 2007). On a more pragmatic level, magazines also “act[ed] as extra links between the environmental movement and the general press in that they [were] sometimes used as sources by the national dailies” (Lowe and Morrison 1984, p. 83). Magazines were major players in fostering the environmental and consumer movement in the months leading up to the first Earth Day in 1970. A famed Life magazine photo of a woman and a toddler in gas masks appeared in January 1970, and a Time magazine environmental illustration the following month suggested that a mother’s breast is to be kept “Out of the reach of children” due to the likelihood of DDT in mother’s milk (Dunaway 2008). The first Earth Day, a grassroots demonstration in which 20 million people participated across the USA, surprised policymakers with its wide reach and is credited for spurring Congress to extend the Clean Air Act (originally enacted in 1963) by establishing strict air quality standards (Rogers 1990). From a media perspective, environmental and social issues became acceptable topics for mainstream audiences, while mass market publications such as Time, National Geographic, and Newsweek began dedicating more print pages to topics such as industrial pollution and air quality. At the same time, new magazines dedicated to environmental issues and a celebration of the great outdoors began publishing. The UK’s Ecologist sprang to life in 1970, and Outside launched in 1977 (featuring the writing of radical Western environmentalists, such as Edward Abbey), while already established modern muckraking publications, including Rolling Stone, The Nation, and The Village Voice dedicated increasing coverage to what they characterized as corporate “crimes” (even in the absence of formal charges) against the environment and communities.

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Eugene W. Smith Spotlights Mercury Poisoning in Life Magazine The work of the new breed of increasingly counter‐cultural journalists and activists through the late 1950s and 1960 put a premium on public health and respect for the environment while raising serious questions about the priorities of major corporations. Yet even the most outrageous actions detailed by the likes of Carson and Nader could not prepare the USA and global public for the visual horror that Eugene W. Smith captured in the pages of Life magazine as he documented industrial mercury pollution in Minamata, Japan, in the early 1970s. Smith was already a legend among photojournalists. Over a 40‐year career he had perfected the narrative photo essay that made newsweeklies like Life a must‐read for a generation of magazine readers. His work documenting World War II and life in Spain under the rule of General Franco, as well as his in‐depth portrait of Nobel prize winner and “medical missionary” Albert Schweitzer titled “Man of Mercy,” which ran in Life in 1954, inspired a generation of photojournalists and street photographers – especially those driven with documenting social injustice around the world (Ronk 2014). In 1971, Smith was approaching the end of his career when he and his wife, Aileen, traveled to Japan to explore environmental problems in a small Japanese fishing village that also housed a chemical factory owned by the Chisso Corporation. Between 1932 and 1968, wastewater containing more than 600 tons of mercury from the Chisso factory had been discharged into Minamata Bay. In 1956, a doctor at the factory had reported an increased number of cases of individuals with nervous system damage. Symptoms included loss of motor control, seizures, spasms, paralysis, and even death. The disease, it was later diagnosed, was caused by mercury poisoning from eating fish caught in the bay. A group of Minamata victims had filed a lawsuit in 1969 against the company, alleging corporate negligence (Sanger 1991). Smith spent three years in Minamata documenting the victims of the poisoning, and his work helped turn what was then a local issue into an international scandal. One photo in particular, taken in 1971 and published in Life in 1972, shocked the world. It was of an adolescent girl, Tomoko Uemura, in the bath, cradled by her mother. Born in 1956, Tomoko had suffered the destructive effects of mercury, which had entered her bloodstream through the placenta, leaving her blind, deaf, and crippled. Smith and his wife had babysat for the family, and he knew he wanted to photograph the child’s clearly deformed body. The mother suggested taking the photo in the traditional Japanese bathing chamber, fully aware that the picture would serve “purposes she believed could benefit the villagers, and similarly victimized people the world over” (Hughes 2000, para. 7). Smith paid a heavy price for their commitment to the Minamata victims. In July 1972 he, along with other victims, was severely beaten by six men during a protest against the Chisso Corporation (Cambody 1974). Smith almost completely lost his eyesight as a result of the attack. Six months later, the Life photo essay was published, and three years later, his work was published as a book. Smith died in 1978, but decades later his commitment to documenting the plight of the Minamata victims had a concrete effect. In 2013, 74 United Nations member countries ratified the Minamata Convention on Mercury – a treaty designed to ensure that this type of industrial poisoning can never happen again (Sokol 2017).

Mother Jones Takes Down the Ford Pinto In the early 1970s, the once‐dominant US auto industry was facing a double threat. Oil prices were at a historic high, having been manipulated by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel, intent on flexing its geopolitical muscle. At the same time, Japanese



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and European car makers were releasing onto the US market a new type of small, compact vehicle, which immediately appealed to a public struggling to fill their US‐built gas guzzlers amid high prices at the pump. As Car and Driver magazine noted at the time, by ignoring the  foreign assault, US automakers were setting themselves up for an industrial Waterloo (Sherefkin 2003). The reaction from Detroit’s so‐called Big Three automakers was to beat Europe and Japan at their own game by building a small, affordable, and cheap‐to‐run vehicle. Leading the US charge was Lee Iacocca, president of Ford Motor Company. He was already a legend in the industry based on his success introducing the iconic muscle car, the Ford Mustang. Eager for a quick win, Iacocca set a price tag of just $2000 on the new Pinto, and it quickly became a consumer hit – so much so that it earned the nickname “Lee’s car” (Sherefkin 2003). To get the Pinto to market, corners were cut in the production schedule. Normally, production planning for a new car took about 43 months. Ford rushed the Pinto into production in just 25. According to a 2003 Automotive News report, “Pinto’s tooling was developed at the same time as product development. So, it was later alleged, when Ford engineers found a serious defect in the gasoline tank, it was too late. The tooling process was well under way” (Sherefkin 2003, para. 13). Echoing the concerns about auto safety first raised by Ralph Nader a decade earlier, the US media began to get suspicious of the high number of gas tank explosions when Ford Pinto vehicles were rear‐ended. Lawsuits and subsequent court depositions would reveal that Ford had been aware of the fire risk since the car first went into production in 1970. Most damaging to the company were memos published by writer Mark Dowie in Mother Jones magazine in 1977, which showed Ford had undertaken a detailed cost analysis of its corporate liability, should it have to compensate crash victims (Dowie 1977). According to Dowie’s reporting, the Pinto gasoline tank could buckle if it was forced against the car’s “differential housing” (1977, para. 12). A spark from a cigarette, ignition, or even scraping metal would then ignite the tank. Normally, this type of defect could be fixed in the product design phase. But because Ford rushed the production, the assembly‐line machinery for making the car had already been set in place when Ford discovered the defect. Senior Ford ­officials decided to build the car anyway, even though Ford already owned the patent on a much safer gasoline tank. Because of Iacocca’s $2000 limit on the car’s production cost, there was no extra money to retroactively protect the fuel system. Mother Jones was not exactly a household name when Dowie published his expose. The magazine had only been launched the year before. So, to maximize the story’s impact, Dowie held a news conference in Washington, D.C., with none other than Ralph Nader, now known nationally as the champion of consumer rights. Ford denied Dowie’s allegation, but the article, drawing on internal company documents, convinced the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to investigate. On 9 June 1978, Ford, in a pre‐emptive move, recalled 1.5 million Ford Pintos as well as 30 000 Mercury Bobcat sedan and hatchback models. The next month, Iacocca lost his job (Sherefkin 2003).

Rolling Stone Takes Aim at Nuclear Power On November 13, 1974, a young woman died in a car crash on a state highway in the US state of Oklahoma. Her name was Karen Silkwood, and her story might have perished with her was it not for the committed work of a small number of journalists and one magazine in particular  –  Rolling Stone. Karen Silkwood was a laboratory worker at the Kerr‐McGee Corporation’s Cimarron Facility, where plutonium was manufactured to fuel nuclear power plants. While working there, she became concerned about safety standards at the facility  – ­particularly, that she and fellow workers might have been exposed to radioactive material.

378 Yeomans In  September 1974, Silkwood agreed to spy for her union, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International (OCAW) and to collect evidence of illegal safety practices at the plant. A month later, she informed the union that she had compiled a manila folder of documents. It was agreed that Silkwood would bring the incriminating documents to a meeting with a union official and a reporter from The New York Times, but she died on her way to that meeting (Burnham 1984). One week before the meeting, Silkwood discovered she and her apartment had become ­contaminated with a tiny amount of plutonium  –  enough for her to be briefly hospitalized (Los Alamos Science 1995). The day after her release from hospital, Silkwood set off for the meeting. She never made it. When police searched the car crash, the manila folder Silkwood said she was bringing to the meeting had disappeared. Silkwood’s death generated a good deal of media coverage at the time from local and national newspapers. The FBI, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and even the US Congress also investigated, but Silkwood’s death and her exposure to plutonium remained unresolved. The authorities pointed to traces of alcohol and sedatives in her blood as the probable cause of the crash. Then, in 1977, Rolling Stone magazine published an exhaustive 12 000‐word investigation titled “The Case of Karen Silkwood.” Journalist Howard Kohn retraced the days and weeks leading up to Silkwood’s death and came to the conclusion that she may have been murdered. There was evidence that her car had been hit from behind, which could have caused her to swerve off the highway (Kohn 1977). Over the next few years, Kohn and Rolling Stone would keep the pressure on with more ­articles raising doubts about Silkwood’s death and safety standards in the US nuclear power industry. The accusations of murder were never proven, but in 1979 a federal court awarded $10.5 million in damages to Silkwood’s family for her exposure to radiation in the workplace. The jury in the case rejected Kerr‐McGee’s defense arguments citing government standards and its safety and security systems. As The Washington Post wrote at the time: “In another blow to the nation’s nuclear industry, the jury’s decision was a rejection of federal radiation safety standards and industry safety claims. It represents the first citizens’ verdict on issues historically settled between the atomic industry and generally friendly US government agencies” (Curry and Wenske 1979, para 3). At the time, the judgment was the harshest penalty a trial court had ever assessed a US corporation. However, after appeals and a ruling by the US Supreme Court, the final settlement was reduced to $1.3 million in 1984 (Curry and Wenske 1979).

Harper’s Forces Nike to Discover a Social Conscience Because corporate sustainability is increasingly understood to include a corporation’s interaction with its social environment, it is worth noting the case of a magazine that uncovered one of the most high‐profile corporate sustainability failures of the past 30 years. In 1992, the US sports clothing company Nike was on the top of its game. Eight years after signaling its intention to dominate the sportswear market by signing a sponsorship deal with basketball superstar Michael Jordan, the company had topped $3 billion in sales and had just launched a whole new shopping experience in the form of Niketown (Yeomans 2018). But in August, just as the Barcelona Olympics, where Nike featured prominently, were taking place, Harper’s magazine published an expose titled “The New Free Trade Heel” (Ballinger 1992). Its subhead read: “Nike’s profits jump on the back of Asian workers.” The article outlined the damning working conditions at some of the factories supplying Nike. In one example, an Indonesian worker for a Nike subcontractor was paid just 14 cents an hour. These were not the first criticisms of Nike’s outsourcing standards. The Economist had reported on worker unrest at Nike contractor factories the year before, while local Indonesian newspapers had chronicled wage‐related protests at some factories as early as 1988 and 1989. But the



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Harper’s story, combined with anti‐Nike protests in Barcelona and a CBS interview of Nike factory workers in 1993, guaranteed the sweatshop issue would start to get more mainstream coverage. Then, in 1996, revelations that clothing produced for TV celebrity Kathie Lee Gifford’s designer line was being made by 13‐ and 14‐year‐olds working 20‐hour days in ­factories in Honduras turned the issue of sweatshop labor into a national story in the USA (Strom 1996). That year, as questions about its credibility swirled, Nike established a department that would focus on improving the lives of factory workers. But still, the physical protests and the negative media coverage of the factories supplying the company grew. Star brand ambassador Michael Jordan found himself having to defend Nike’s working conditions, and a student protest movement across US colleges started to mobilize. Nike tried to appease critics by commissioning a report into working practices at its contractors’ factories, but it was widely dismissed as greenwashing. In 1998, as the years of negative publicity negatively affected sales, and as the company was forced to lay off workers, CEO Phil Knight announced Nike would raise the minimum age for workers at its Asian plants and improve factory working conditions (CNN Money 1998). It also pledged to require overseas manufacturers of its products to meet strict US health and safety standards. “The Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime, and arbitrary abuse,” Knight said. “I truly believe the American consumer doesn’t want to buy products made under abusive conditions” (Cushman 1998, para. 8). Between 2002 and 2004, Nike would perform some 600 factory audits, including return visits to problematic factories, as it sought to rectify the problems with its suppliers (Bernstein 2004). In 2005, it became the first apparel maker to publish a complete list of factories it was contracting with as well as a 108‐page report revealing conditions and pay in its factories. As The Guardian noted at the time, for a company that had spent more than a decade glossing over working conditions, the report “admits to widespread problems, particularly in Nike’s Asian factories.” The company had audited hundreds of factories in 2003 and 2004 and found cases of “abusive treatment” in more than a quarter of its south Asian plants (Teather 2005). Nike’s commitment to improving labor conditions at its contracting factories would continue apace – so much so that by the time the 2012 Olympics took place, media organizations and NGOs that had been highly critical of Nike started applauding its change in corporate culture even as they urged the company to do more. “For a company which 20 years ago was denying that workers’ rights at supplier factories were any of its concern, Nike has come a long way,” Ethical Consumer editor Rob Harrison told The Guardian (Birch 2012, para. 8).

Epilogue: magazines Lose Their Voice Just as Companies Gain Theirs The birth of the World Wide Web and the advent of online journalism did not decimate the power of magazines overnight. Instead, the decline of magazines and print in general resembled more a death by a thousand cuts. The decision by the majority of media companies to embrace an advertising‐only business model for online publishing rather than the subscription approach that had been so successful in the print era meant that content and information had to be free, and the more information that could be disseminated, the more opportunities there would be to sell advertising against it. The result, we now know, was a glut of media content driven by both legacy publishers and new upstart digital operations that engineered content for social media audiences and preached the need for short, visual “snackable” journalism. With advertising money gravitating to the short‐form gratification of the online experience, magazines have struggled to fund the type of long‐form reporting that had made them so popular and relevant in a slower, analog age. The contrast is especially stark when we consider that since the 1970s, traditional magazines’ interest in environmental reporting has helped their advertising revenues because of the influx of “green”

380 Yeomans advertising from companies hustling to either claim ecological innocence and innovation (Brown and Crable 1973; Bortree et al. 2013) or sell “green” products to the environmentally conscious magazine readers (Baum 2012). Some important social and environmental reporting has still been produced, of course – and not just by general‐audience national magazines in the USA (for other examples, see Blahna and Toch 1993; Currie 1994; Sivek 2012; Skov 2013; Smith and Bortree 2012). In 1995, The Village Voice weekly newspaper, similar in many regards to weekly newsmagazines, was the first US publication1 to offer an in‐depth investigation into the death of Nigerian anti‐oil activist Ken Saro Wiwa. Other publications, such as Harper’s, Details, Mother Jones, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and Wired continued to cover issues of corporate pollution and corruption, while other magazines, such as Time and the National Geographic, continually raised the alarm about climate change (for example, see Loi 2010). The New Yorker delivered especially thought‐provoking reporting and analysis on climate change, thanks to articles by Elizabeth Kolbert. Another New Yorker writer, Kathryn Schulz, in 2017 became the first ­magazine reporter to win the Pulitzer for feature writing for a story described as “a masterwork of environmental reporting and writing” (Marum 2016). Compared to the heyday of US magazines’ popularity, however, their influence on both the national agenda and public mood was on the wane. Will magazines, with their commitment to in‐depth reporting and exploration of complex themes, ever regain their importance in this hyper‐speed digital media world? The answer might well be yes if the growth of long‐form publishing platforms, such as Medium and ProPublica, and the current social media trend of lauding feature journalism, such as The Guardian’s Long Read series, is any indication. At a time when the speed of digital information is being used as a weapon to confuse and blind society surely a new generation of magazine muckrakers is needed now more than ever.

Note 1 The Village Voice was preceded in the coverage of the case by The Guardian and Human Rights Watch Africa (Nixon 1996).

References Alfred, R. (2011). Feb. 3, 1958: Silent Spring seeks its voice. Wired. https://www.wired. com/2011/02/0203rachel‐carson‐eb‐white‐pesticide‐book (accessed 26 March 2019). Amini, M. and Bienstock, C.C. (2014). Corporate sustainability: an integrative definition and framework to evaluate corporate practice and guide academic research. Journal of Cleaner Production 76: 12–19. Ballinger, J. (1992). The new free‐trade heel. Harper’s. https://harpers.org/archive/1992/08/the‐new‐ free‐trade‐heel (accessed 26 March 2019). Baum, L.M. (2012). It’s not easy being green… or is it? A content analysis of environmental claims in magazine advertisements from the United States and United Kingdom. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 6 (4): 423–440. Bernstein, A. (2004). Online extra: Nike’s new game plan for sweatshops. Bloomberg Businessweek. https:// www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2004‐09‐19/online‐extra‐nikes‐new‐game‐plan‐for‐sweatshops (accessed 26 March 2019). Birch, S. (2012). How activism forced Nike to change its ethical game. The Guardian. https://www. theguardian.com/environment/green‐living‐blog/2012/jul/06/activism‐nike (accessed 26 March 2019). Blahna, D.J. and Toch, M.F. (1993). Environmental reporting in ethnic magazines: implications for incorporating minority concerns. The Journal of Environmental Education 24 (2): 22–29.



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Bortree, D.S., Ahern, L., Smith, A.N., and Dou, X. (2013). Framing environmental responsibility: 30 years of CSR messages in National Geographic Magazine. Public Relations Review 39 (5): 491–496. Bowman, J.S. and Hanaford, K. (1977). Mass media and the environment since Earth Day. Journalism Quarterly 54 (1): 160–165. Brown, W.R. and Crable, R.E. (1973). Industry, mass magazines, and the ecology issue. Quarterly Journal of Speech 59 (3): 259–272. Burnham, D. (1984). Screen credit: a reporter who said no. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/1984/02/12/arts/screen‐credit‐a‐reporter‐who‐said‐no.html (accessed 26 March 2019). Cambody, D. (1974). Blinded in beating, photographer still presses a crusade. The New York Times (9 April). https://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/09/archives/blinded‐in‐beating‐photographer‐still‐presses‐a‐ crusade‐colleagues.html (accessed 26 March 2019). Catte, E. (2018). Ida Tarbell and the spirit of reform. Belt Magazine. https://beltmag.com/ida‐tarbell‐ standard‐oil‐spirit‐reform. (accessed 26 March 2019). CNN Money (1998). Nike CEO: ’I can’ change. CNN Money (12 May). https://money.cnn.com/ 1998/05/12/companies/nike (accessed 26 March 2019). Compton, K.T. (1946). If the atomic bomb had not been used. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic. com/magazine/archive/1946/12/if‐the‐atomic‐bomb‐had‐not‐been‐used/376238 (accessed 26 March 1999). Currie, D.H. (1994). ‘Going Green’ mythologies of consumption in adolescent magazines. Youth & Society 26 (1): 92–117. Curry, B. and Wenske, P. (1979). Silkwood family awarded $10.5 million in damages. The Washington Post. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/05/19/silkwood‐family‐awarded‐105‐million‐in‐ damages/d1a89193‐bbc1‐4d5e‐a07b‐55a66e7ef355/?noredirect=on&utm:term=.a98910ce6c7c (accessed 26 March 2019). Cushman, J.H. (1998). Nike pledges to end child labor and apply U.S. rules abroad. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/13/business/international‐business‐nike‐pledges‐to‐end‐ child‐labor‐and‐apply‐us‐rules‐abroad.html (accessed 26 March 2019). Dowie, M. (1977). Pinto madness. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto‐ madness (accessed 26 March 2019). Dunaway, F. (2008). Gas masks, pogo, and the ecological Indian: Earth Day and the visual politics of American environmentalism. American Quarterly 60 (1): 67–99. Griswold, E. (2012). How ‘Silent Spring’ ignited the environmental movement. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/magazine/how‐silent‐spring‐ignited‐the‐environmental‐ movement.html (accessed 26 March 2019). Hughes, J. (2000). Tomoko Uemura, R.I.P. The Digital Journalist. http://digitaljournalist.org/ issue0007/hughes.htm (accessed 17 September 2019). Jensen, C. (2015). 50 years ago, ‘Unsafe at any speed’ shook the auto world. The New York Times. https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/automobiles/50‐years‐ago‐unsafe‐at‐any‐speed‐shook‐the‐auto‐ world.html (accessed 26 March 2019). Kimble, E.W. (illustrator). (1905). Death’s laboratory: the Patent Medicine Trust. Palatable poison for the people. Collier’s [Library of Congress]. (accessed 26 March 1999). https://www.loc.gov/item/ 2005693234. Kohn, H. (1977). Karen Silkwood: the case of the activist’s death. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone. com/culture/culture‐news/karen‐silkwood‐the‐case‐of‐the‐activists‐death‐52287 (accessed 26 March 2019). Lemov, M.R. (2015). Car Safety Wars: One Hundred Years of Technology, Politics, and Death. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lepore, J. (2018). The right way to remember Rachel Carson. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2018/03/26/the‐right‐way‐to‐remember‐rachel‐carson (accessed 26 March 2019). Loi, R. (2010). Case study: climate change reporting in Time magazine. In: Handbook of Climate Change and Society (ed. C. Lever‐Tracy), 219–227. New York and London: Routledge. Los Alamos Science (1995). The Karen Silkwood Story. https://library.lanl.gov/cgi‐bin/getfile?00326645. pdf (accessed 26 March 2019). Lowe, P. and Morrison, D. (1984). Bad news or good news: environmental politics and the mass media. The Sociological Review 32 (1): 75–90.

382 Yeomans Marcello, P.C. (2004). Ralph Nader: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. de la Mare, T. (2018). Government promises £61m to tackle scourge of ocean plastic pollution with Commonwealth Nations. Independent. www.independent.co.uk/environment/theresa‐may‐ commonwealth‐plastic‐climate‐change‐ocean‐pollution‐david‐attenborough‐blue‐planet‐a8305721. html (accessed 26 March 2019). Marum, A. (2016). New Yorker writer wins Pulitzer for ‘the really big one’, thanks Steve Novick. The  Oregonian. https://www.oregonlive.com/today/2016/04/really_big_one_pulitzer_new_ yorker.html (accessed 26 March 2019). McGeachy, L. (1989). Trends in magazine coverage of environmental issues, 1961–1986. The Journal of Environmental Education 20 (2): 6–13. Meisner, M.S. and Takahashi, B. (2013). The nature of Time: how the covers of the world’s most widely read weekly news magazine visualize environmental affairs. Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 7 (2): 255–276. Nixon, R. (1996). Pipe dreams: Ken Saro‐Wiwa, environmental justice, and micro‐minority rights. Black Renaissance 1 (1): 39. Noah, T. (2011). Nader and the Corvair. The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/95749/ nader‐and‐the‐corvair (accessed 26 March 2019). Podeschi, C.W. (2007). The culture of nature and the rise of modern environmentalism: the view through general audience magazines, 1945–1980. Sociological Spectrum 27 (3): 299–331. Raphael, C. (2016). How John Hersey’s Hiroshima revealed the horror of the bomb. BBC Magazine. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine‐37131894 (accessed 26 March 2019). Rogers, P.G. (1990). EPA sistory: the Clean Air Act of 1970. EPA Journal. https://archive.epa.gov/epa/ aboutepa/epa‐history‐clean‐air‐act‐1970.html (accessed 26 March 2019). Ronk, L. (2014). Behind the picture: Albert Schweitzer in Africa. Time. http://time.com/3878732/ albert‐schweitzer‐in‐africa‐behind‐the‐picture (accessed 26 March 2019). Roosevelt, T. (1906). Muckrakers speech. American History: ABC‐CLIO. http://readingsinjournalism. pbworks.com/f/Theodore%20Roosevelt’s%20Muckrakers%20Speech,%201906.pdf (accessed 26 March 2019). Rothman, L. (2015). This book has kept American drivers safe for 50 years. Time. http://time. com/4124987/50‐years‐unsafe‐at‐any‐speed (accessed 26 March 2019). Sanger, D.E. (1991). Japan and the mercury‐poisoned sea: a reckoning that won’t go away. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/01/16/world/japan‐and‐the‐mercury‐poisoned‐sea‐a‐ reckoning‐that‐won‐t‐go‐away.html (accessed 26 March 2019). Schlosser, E. (2015). Why Hiroshima now matters more than ever. The Telegraph. www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/books/11773305/Eric‐Schlosser‐why‐Hiroshima‐now‐matters‐more‐than‐ever.html (accessed 26 March 2019). Schoenfeld, C.A. (1982). American magazines and the environmental movement: symbiotic relationship, 1966–1975. Paper presented to the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism, Athens, Ohio. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED225804.pdf#page=225. (accessed 27 March 2019). Sherefkin, R. (2003). Lee Lacocca’s pinto: a fiery failure. Automotive News. https://www.autonews.com/ article/20030616/SUB/306160770/lee‐iacocca‐s‐pinto‐a‐fiery‐failure (accessed 26 March 2019). Shorto, R. (2016). John Hersey, the writer who let ‘Hiroshima’ speak for itself.” The New Yorker. https:// www.newyorker.com/culture/culture‐desk/john‐hersey‐the‐writer‐who‐let‐hiroshima‐speak‐for‐ itself (accessed 26 March 2019). Sivek, S.C. (2012). The role of city magazines in informing the public about local ecological issues. Poster presented at the 97th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America, Portland (6‐11 August). Skov, L. (2013). Environmentalism seen through Japanese women’s magazines. In: Women, Media and Consumption in Japan (eds. L. Skov and B. Moeran), 170–196. New York and London: Routledge. Smith, A.N. and Bortree, D.S. (2012). Buying green or being green: environmental consciousness frames in English language teen girl magazines. Journal of Children and Media 6 (4): 520–540. Sokol, J. (2017). Life after mercury poisoning. Independent (27 September 2017). https://www. independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/something‐in‐the‐water‐life‐after‐mercury‐poisoning‐ a7961281.html (accessed 17 September 2019). Starkman, D. (2011). Confidence game: the limited vision of the new gurus. Columbia Journalism Review. https://archives.cjr.org/essay/confidence_game.php (accessed 26 March 2019).



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Streitmatter, R. (1998). Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Strom, S. (1996). A sweetheart becomes suspect: looking behind those Kathie Lee labels. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/27/business/a‐sweetheart‐becomes‐suspect‐looking‐ behind‐those‐kathie‐lee‐labels.html (accessed 26 March 2019). Sumner, D.E. (2010). The Magazine Century: American Magazines Since 1900. Peter Lang. Sustainable Brands (2018). ‘Blue Planet II’ demonstrates mainstream media’s role in driving consumer behavior change. https://sustainablebrands.com/read/behavior‐change/blue‐planet‐ii‐demonstrates‐ mainstream‐media‐s‐role‐in‐driving‐consumer‐behavior‐change (accessed 26 March 2019). Teather, D. (2005). Nike lists abuses at Asian factories. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ business/2005/apr/14/ethicalbusiness.money (accessed 26 March 2019). The Learning Network (2012). May 15, 1911: Supreme Court orders Standard Oil to be broken up. The  New York Times. https://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/15/may‐15‐1911‐supreme‐ court‐orders‐standard‐oil‐to‐be‐broken‐up (accessed 26 March 2019). de Vos, K. (2018). One year on from Blue Planet II – how is conservation and sustainable development of the ocean viewed? Business Green. https://www.businessgreen.com/bg/opinion/3067906/one‐ year‐on‐from‐blue‐planet‐ii‐how‐is‐conservation‐and‐sustainable‐development‐of‐the‐ocean‐viewed (accessed 26 March 2019). Yeomans, M. (2018). Trust Inc.: How Business Wins Respect in a Social Media Age. New York and London: Routledge.

29

Case Study: Constructing an Imagined Community in Al‐Qaeda’s Magazine Inspire Lara Tarantini

Introduction The rapid evolution and diffusion of the internet during the last two decades has led to the diversification in production and consumption of media content. On the one hand, this phenomenon affected what is known as traditional or legacy media, which have been forced to adapt to the demands of a new audience; on the other, it provided a new outlet for alternative forms of content production, a shift that proved to be particularly advantageous for groups seeking to promote political mobilization. Inspire, the magazine published by al‐Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), is one of these alternative sources, and it is presented by its authors as being produced by the Muslim community for the Muslim community itself. It gained worldwide attention in 2010 among both journalists and security analysts for being the first publication promoting jihad in English. However, the competition with other publications, especially with Dabiq, the magazine published by ISIS in different languages, along with the killing of a number of its main contributors, most notably Anwar al‐Awlaki and Samir Khan, has pushed Inspire temporarily out of the spotlight. Inspire magazine might strike the uninformed observer as a novelty, and even the (supposedly) more informed researcher often approaches it as such. Whether informed by the long‐lasting bias of Orientalist scholarship1 or sheer disregard for the cultural and social context in which the magazine is embedded, this approach overlooks the fact that the expertise developed by Inspire has not been established in a vacuum, but it is part of a longer tradition of informal sharing of content in the Muslim world.2 This approach also affects the ways in which the magazine has hitherto been analyzed, with a predominant focus on its violent message of “transnational jihad” (Gerges 2009) against the USA and its Western allies.

Inspire Magazine at First Glance Inspire is a periodical magazine issued by Al‐Malahem Media Foundation, the media outlet of AQAP, and it has 17 issues to date, the first published in the summer of 2010 and the latest in the summer of 2017.3 The magazine does not provide an official editorial board, with the names of those who participate in the publication as contributors or graphic designers. During

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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the first year and half of its existence, the magazine was published regularly, counting six seasonal issues and two special issues, going from issue 1 to issue 8; afterward, a year‐long hiatus follows, and then the publication reduced to no more than two issues every year. The sudden interruption of the publication can be explained by the death of Anwar al‐Awlaki and Samir Khan, the two members of al‐Qaeda who were killed in Yemen by an American drone strike on 30 September 2011. Indeed, most of the contributions to the magazine were penned by al‐Awlaki, an American‐born cleric whose video‐recorded sermons are still widely available on the Internet.4 The magazine gained worldwide attention for being the first systematic attempt at writing and distributing a publication dedicated to jihadi propaganda in English, although it has also been published in Arabic and translated into other languages, including, for example, Russian. The reason behind the decision to use English as the primary language is explained by the editor in his letter opening the first issue of the magazine: Under the media foundation of al‐Malahem, we present the first magazine to be issued by the al‐Qā’idah Organization in the English language. In the West; in East, West and South Africa; in South and Southeast Asia and elsewhere are millions of Muslims whose first or second language is English. It is our intent for this magazine to be a platform to present the important issues facing the ummah today to the wide and dispersed English speaking Muslim readership. (Letter from the Editor 2010)

This is a clear acknowledgment of the importance of English as viable language to reach a wide readership, especially those Muslims whose first language is not Arabic, such as second‐generation Muslims in English‐speaking countries, as well as Arab and non‐Arab Muslims around the world whose second language is English. Thus, the authors of Inspire strongly rely on the potential offered by the power of print capitalism to build an imagined umma, a term referring to the worldwide community of Muslims linked by religion, by addressing the non‐Arabic‐speaking Muslims around the world.5

Why “Inspire”? As explained in the letter from the editor in the first issue, the name of the magazine derives from the word harrid, found in the Surah al‐Anfal in the Qur’an [8 : 65]. The editor points out that the word is commonly translated as “incite,” a word that is generally perceived as having a negative connotation, a semantic aspect that, according to the editor, is not present in Arabic. This is the reason why the word “inspire” has been chosen as a preferred translation. The editor also offers what he claims is the right interpretation of the word, supported by the authority al‐Zajjāj, a classic Arabic philologist: “[…] he says that when you inspire someone towards something using the word ĥarid ̄, [sic] you are saying that unless they do what you are inspiring them to do they would perish. So what the word ĥarid ̄ [means] is an inspiration that saves a person and guides them towards what is good for them” (Letter from the Editor 2010). Therefore, the believer is inspired to do something that guarantees the survival of both oneself and the community, and that something is jihad: “It is jihād that gives this nation life. We survive through jihād and perish without it. Our history is a testimony of it” (Letter from the Editor 2010). The use of the word “nation” is interesting, as it conveys the idea that the umma is not just a religious community that is transnational and (virtually) infinite, but an entity that indeed has all the characteristics of an actual nation – a body of people living in a territory defined by boundaries who share a common culture, religion, language, and so on – thus finite. Once the boundaries have been created, whether imaginary or not, not everybody can be part of this “nation,”

386 Tarantini and belonging to it requires a certain understanding of Islam and its relation vis‐à‐vis the nonbelievers. This aspect will be explored further in the rest of this chapter.

The Purpose of Inspire The authors and editors of Inspire ensure they are unambiguous about the purpose of the magazine since its very first page. As explained in the letter from the editor in the first issue, “[t]his Islam ̄ ic Magazine is geared towards making the Muslim a mujah ̄ id in Allah’s path. Our intent is to give the most accurate presentation of Islam ̄ as followed by the Şalaf as‐Şalih. [sic] […] Jihad ̄ has been deconstructed in our age and thus its revival in comprehension and endeavor is of utmost importance for the Caliphate’s manifestation” (Letter from the Editor 2010). As the editor clearly states, the intent is to mobilize the Muslims around the world to join the global fight in the name of God, and to do so, Inspire will provide the reader with the true interpretation of Islam according to the Salafi tradition. What is important to note is that the final aim of Muslims should be the manifestation of the Caliphate through jihad. In other words, there is no mention regarding the actual establishment of a Caliphate in terms of time and space; it is assumed to simply arise as the natural consequence of a just jihad.

The Content of Inspire Following the conventions of the magazine medium, Inspire presents its content in an organized manner that is fairly consistent throughout its publications, thus showing the careful editing process behind the publication of the magazine (see Figure 29.1, “Table of Content”). Integral aspects of the content of Inspire are also the accounts of those fighters who directly experienced jihad in the battlefield. These accounts can be categorized in two groups: the first group includes accounts that introduce to the readers the mujahidin who proudly joined the fight against the nonbelievers; the second includes accounts of martyrs who died in the path of Islam. Both groups of fighters are portrayed as winning the battles against the nonbelievers, which will ultimately lead to their complete defeat. These accounts are functional for creating and reinforcing the narrative of the winning jihad. According to the ideologues of Inspire, joining al‐Qaeda is the right bet not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is the winning horse. Therefore, according to Inspire, every good Muslim should join the fight, lest they risk being on the wrong side of history. References to the “umma” are copious, as it is used 380 times throughout the issues of magazine. However, the authors of Inspire often refer to it in alternative ways. The discourse analysis performed on the content of the magazine shows that “Muslim community” and “Muslim nation” are alternatively used to refer to the umma for a total of 14 and 88 times, respectively. When added up, there are 482 direct and indirect references to umma throughout the issues of the magazine, with a sharp increase starting in the ninth issue, after the killing of the magazine’s editors. It is important to point out that Inspire does not see itself as confined to the mediatic universe of jihadi propaganda. The section titled “Hear the World: A collection of quotes from friend and foe” is dedicated to collecting what the foreign media say about al‐Qaeda and Islam in general, and Inspire in particular, and provides an example of how the magazine seeks to partake in the global mediascape on the one hand, and to exploit an external point of view to legitimize and reinforce its own point of view. By means of extracting excerpts from interviews and public statements made by analysts and journalists, the authors engage in a dialog with the media worldwide and propose their alternative perspective on the matters discussed. However, while acknowledging who said what, the context in which a certain statement has been made



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Figure 29.1  “Table of Content.” Screenshot from Inspire Magazine, no. 5 (2011): 2.

or the source it has been taken from is never provided, thus making it impossible to retrieve the original context of such statements. This selective use of content is a common strategy that is also used for the interpretation of the Qur’an and the Hadith. The rationale behind this strategy appears to be the deliberate attempt to break up the semiotic relation between the quotes selected and their context, whereby the editors of Inspire can appropriate and reframe these quotes according to their needs. In other words, what matters is not to understand what something means in a given context, but the legitimacy it can grant to Inspire’s message. Furthermore, besides highlighting the passages in the quotes to which the editors of Inspire want to draw the readers’ attention, no commentary is provided, placing the onus of interpreting the content on the reader. Whether this is a deliberate deployment of a postmodernist approach or not is hard to tell. However, this choice can also be interpreted as an indication that the authors of Inspire expect their readers to be aligned with their ideology, thus making any interpretation or explanation of the meaning of the quotes selected irrelevant or redundant.

388 Tarantini

Inspire as a Medium and a Magazine: avoiding Oversimplification The case of Inspire poses interesting questions about what the best way might be to approach the analysis of its content, on the one hand, and the analysis of Inspire as a magazine, on the other. The scholarly work on Inspire is scant and has been characterized by a disciplinary narrowness that likely explains the strong focus of this corpus on security issues and the prevention of homegrown terrorism, a consequence of which is a limited understanding of the magazine’s message on the one hand, and the context in which Inspire as a medium is embedded and operates on the other. Aspects such as how the magazine talks about itself, what kind of alternative to the political status quo it proposes, as well as concerns regarding the encroachment of Western interests in the Middle East, are overlooked in the current scholarship. Lemieux et al. (2014) analyze Inspire through the information, motivation, and behavioral (IMB) skills model, which seeks to provide a theoretical framework for the analysis of the processes of radicalization and mobilization within Inspire (p. 355). According to the researchers, the combination of a slick look and an easy‐to‐understand ideological and tactical material facilitates the reader’s engagement in violent behavior (p. 360). Although Lemieux et al. admit that they cannot demonstrate whether the authors of Inspire are aware of this model and deliberately deploy it, they argue that the magazine presents all the aspects of a product where the information is carefully selected and packaged to fit a specific jihadi narrative that legitimizes violence, and to provide a series of tools in order to convince the reader to engage in a terrorist act. However, the authors overlook the fact that the violence promoted by the magazine is not restricted to Americans and non‐Muslims in general, but also against Muslims. Rather than bringing out the ways in which Inspire deviates from canonical regulation of violence against non‐Muslims and Muslims alike, they accept the dichotomous notion of “us against them,” which, consequently, does not provide a deeper understanding of the jihadi message promoted by the magazine. In her analysis of Inspire, media expert Susan Currie Sivek (2013) seeks to assess the self‐ radicalization potential of the magazine drawing from studies on the magazine medium. Based on this literature, Sivek argues that by reducing the distance between the editors and their readership, the magazine medium can foster community‐building and affect lifestyle changes by means of engaging its readers with its content. Sivek proposes a compelling analysis, which situates Inspire within the broader context of jihadi propaganda, in particular by referring to the previous experience of the magazine’s main contributor Samir Khan as a blogger. However, this work presents some limitations. First, Sivek argues that “a magazine, even in digital form, is a unitary, stable package of content that is harder to halter. The digital magazine medium offers advantages for communicating a consistent, motivating message to AQAP’s target audience” (p. 589). As a matter of fact, Inspire magazine presents various inconsistencies, some incidental as the visual outline often changes from one issue to the other; others are more substantial content inconsistencies, such the treatment of the sectarian division between Sunni and Shi‛I which is far from being consistent and changes throughout the magazine’s publications. Second, Sivek’s analysis of Inspire rests on the assumption that the magazine has an editorial board of professional journalists and editors behind it, whereas this seems not to be the case. In fact, despite presenting itself as the production of Al‐Malahem Media,6 it is impossible to determine with absolute certainty who the members of the editorial board of Inspire are and to assess their degree of professionalism, for most of the contributors cover their real identity with a nom de plume. One aspect of Sivek’s analysis that is particularly problematic is the bias concerning the readership of Inspire: according to her, “Inspire is targeted primarily to Muslim readers in the West, many of whom struggle in difficult economic circumstances and intolerant social environments, and likely feel they live on the fringes of society” (p. 598). While it might be true that among the readers of the magazine there are many young marginalized Muslims, there is no evidence



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in the magazine that supports this assumption. On the contrary, the length of the articles and the punctiliousness of the analyses, in particular those concerning religious topics, suggests that Inspire strives to establish its credibility and legitimacy also among Muslims who are educated and not necessarily marginalized. One assumption that is shared by the scholarly works on Inspire regards the readership of the magazine, which is usually identified as alienated young Muslims living in the West. While it is possible to speculate that the content of the magazine could prove particularly effective with this demographic, scholars should nevertheless consider that the readership of Inspire could be different, and not necessarily limited to Muslims. Drawing from Michael Warner’s (2002) theorization of the public (and counterpublic), this work explores a different perspective on the readership of the magazine. As Warner argues, “personal identity does not in itself make one part of a public” (2002, p. 53). Warner’s intersectional approach further stresses the fact that being part of a given public does not derive from class, gender, religion, nor national identity; that is, it is not “a state of being” (p. 53). Therefore, being Muslim in and of itself does not necessarily imply an active interest in the magazine. Arguably, the exclusion of potential readers based on essentialist assumptions may hinder the effectiveness of counter‐terrorist efforts. Broadening the scope of the analyses of Inspire does not seek to downplay the role that violence plays in the magazine’s propaganda, nor to say that the promotion of jihad against the West is in any way justified or justifiable. However, the refusal to acknowledge that the topics tackled by Inspire could resonate with a broader audience than just marginalized Muslims, as often argued in this literature, is highly problematic. Indeed, it conflates any form of criticism toward (factually) questionable policies deployed by the West in the Muslim world with jihadi propaganda, thus erasing any differences between the two. One of the results of this approach is that it leads to an over‐simplified, dichotomized formulation of identities, according to which Muslims can only be either “good” or “bad.” This is what anthropologist and political scientist Mahmood Mamdani (2002) calls “culture talk,” that is, “the predilection to define cultures according to their presumed ‘essential’ characteristics, especially as regards politics” (p. 766). According to Mamdani, this approach dismisses the role of history in the construction of political identities, which are tackled as if they were the product of an essential and unchanging culture (p. 767). As Mamdani argues, this approach is problematic for it fails to see that “terrorism is not born of the residue of premodern culture in modern politics. Rather, terrorism is a modern construction” (p. 767) that is, the product of specific historical contingencies. Security specialists Julian Droogan and Shane Peattie (2018) seek to provide a comprehensive analysis of the narrative and themes within the magazine. They point out that the extant literature on Inspire, in addition to being thin, is also limited in its focus. Indeed, they argue that the “tendency to characterise Inspire as a Western‐centric instrument of jihadi discourse is correct in many ways, but it also represents a failure to appreciate the magazine’s thematic nuances and falls short of a comprehensive or balanced analysis of its content” (p. 712). In their analysis of Inspire, they pinpoint a list of 74 recurring themes, which are identified according to the number of times they appear in the issues of the magazine, which, in turn, should highlight the different degrees of pervasiveness of these themes. However, Droogan and Peattie admit that “while thematic network analysis allows us to understand which themes a text contains, it does not allow us to measure how strongly a given theme may resonate with individual readers, or which themes readers themselves will see as important or trivial” (p. 714). Indeed, rather than a qualitative analysis, Droogan and Peattie provide what is arguably a quantitative one; they do not provide a detailed analysis of the content of each theme they identify, except for a brief description. Furthermore, their analysis does not correlate the pervasiveness of a given theme with the events ongoing at the time of an issue’s publication. For example, their analysis of the themes present in Issue 5 from March 2011 highlights a predominance of “religious themes, as well as an emphasis on local issues” (p. 699).

390 Tarantini They argue that “this issue of Inspire is best characterized as an attempt to frame a religious and political narrative in response to the ‘Arab Spring’” (p. 700). Although Droogan and Peattie correctly observe that the religious themes in this issue are highly pervasive, they overlook the fact that this focus serves the purpose of rejecting the national discourse that informed the revolts. It is also important to keep in mind that a quantitative approach can be misleading if not supported by a qualitative analysis of the content. For example, low frequency of a specific theme does not necessarily imply its lack of importance; rather, it could signify something else, as in the case of takfīr. Droogan and Peattie identify takfīr as a theme and define it as “any claim that an individual or group has apostatised from Islam, and are claimed to be non‐Muslim as a result” (p. 695). The notion of takfīr appears only four times in the pages of Inspire, and it is mainly mentioned in order to reject the accusation leveled against al‐Qaeda of being a takfīrī group. While Droogan and Peattie identify takfīr as one of many themes in Inspire, their methodological approach would consider it not worthy of attention. However, the very low frequency of its appearance is telling with regards to the kind of image of AQAP that Inspire wishes to convey. Considering how controversial the notion of takfīr is for Muslims, the authors of Inspire seem to prefer avoiding any accusation of arbitrarily excluding Muslims from the umma – which does not necessarily mean that they do not find other ways to justify harming them. Despite their acknowledgment that their positionality as Western scholars without a background in Islamic studies can hinder their grasp of the magazine’s nuances, Droogan and Peattie (2018) appear to fall victim of the bias that derives from it. First, they, too, essentialize the readership of the magazine. They argue that the choice of English as the language for the publication, and the “frequent, direct addresses to Western Muslims” (p. 708) are indicative of the fact that this demographic is the intended audience of the magazine. However, Western Muslims are not the only Muslims who speak English, and the authors of Inspire seem to be more aware of this fact than Droogan and Peattie when, in the “Letter From The Editor” in the very first issue of the magazine, they explain that the reason they chose English as the language for the publication is to be able to reach Muslims “in the West; in East, West and South Africa; in South and Southeast Asia […] whose first or second language is English” (Letter from the Editor 2010), as mentioned earlier. Second, the authors of Inspire affirm that they seek to address the Muslim umma at large, and whether this umma is a rhetorical addressee or not is irrelevant, because to understand the content of the magazine, it is important to look at the ways in which the magazine speaks of itself and its (desired) public. Therefore, even Droogan and Peattie’s (2018) argument that, while certain topics remain consistent throughout all publication of Inspire, the magazine “struggled to maintain its focus on anti‐Western themes throughout its lifecycle” (p. 713), and that the “focus on the magazine’s anti‐Western themes has typically come at the cost of any significant focus on local issues and, vice versa” (Droogan and Peattie 2018, p. 713) should be subject of reconsideration. Although it is true that there is a tension between the global and the local issues, this chapter suggests that this tension is not caused by the magazine’s failure to maintain its focus on the West, for two reasons. First, it is the magazine itself that states that “our concern for the umma is worldwide and thus we try to touch upon all major issues while giving attention to the events unfolding in the Arabian Peninsula as we witness it [sic] on the ground” (Letter from the Editor 2010). Once again, unless we, as researchers, decide that we can put our words in someone else’s mouth, we must take into consideration how the magazine describes itself, without imposing our own assumptions. Second, in the attempt to present themselves as the umma’s spokespersons, the authors of Inspire have to deal with real‐life events that challenge this very attempt, along with their ideology. The literature on Inspire provides different perspectives from which the magazine, both as a medium and as a source of jihadi content. However, not only do these scholarly works appear to neglect the historicity of the magazine, but they also seem to be unable to eschew a



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Western‐centric perspective. In other words, these approaches tend to be deaf to what the magazine tells its readership about itself, and they tend to neglect the meanings that specific notions and concepts bear within the Islamic religious system. This is not to say that all Muslims interpret and/or understand these notions and concepts in the same way. Notwithstanding, these works seem to be unconcerned with the emotional effect that certain topics and notions could elicit in the readership, such as in the case of takfīr. As a result, they provide only a partial perspective about Inspire’s potenatial attractiveness for its readership. One final comment regarding Sivek’s analysis regards the overall applicability of her theoretical framework. The premise that Inspire can, in fact, be compared to and analyzed in likewise manner as The Atlantic or Vanity Fair appears to be quite a stretch. Magazine media studies have typically focused on established, professional publications, not amateurish ones. Despite the effort, Inspire undeniably belongs to the latter category. Perhaps future research on other jihadi magazines may provide further data to support or challenge this perspective.

Conclusion By means of considering the construction of the Muslim umma, it is possible to appreciate the flexibility of the jihadi ideology of Inspire, which is both the product and the reflection of the dialectic negotiation of the ideal community and the real world. By means of defining the boundaries of this umma according to the moral standards of its members, the magazine contributors can elude the accusation of deploying takfīr against fellow Muslims while still justifying violence against Muslim and non‐Muslims civilians alike. While the publication of Inspire is still ongoing, its impact factor as a jihadi publication has been challenged by the shifting geopolitical landscape of the Middle East and North Africa. Other publications have claimed the role of being the legitimate representative of the instances of the Muslim community, with ISIS’s Dabiq being the most notable. Although it is impossible to predict the development of this form of propaganda in general, and Inspire in particular, future research should expand its purview to include other constitutive elements of jihadi magazines’ narratives.

Notes 1 Since its publication, Edward Said’s book Orientalism (1979) has been the subject of both praises and criticism. Salim Kerboua (2016) argues that the knowledge produced through the lens of Orientalism is dynamic and is affected by the context in which it is produced. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, Kerboua argues, it is possible to observe a distinctive form of Orientalism, which he calls neo‐Orientalism. According to Kerboua, its paradigm is the “Clash of Civilization,” a form of knowledge that sees the “Oriental other” as a monolithic threat to the West. The term “neo‐Orientalism” is also used by Behdad and Williams (2010) to describe a new form of popular literature informed by Orientalist paradigms that is now produced by Middle Eastern writers. This chapter is informed by Kerboua’s notion of neo‐Orientalism rather than by Behdad’s and Williams’s. 2 See, for example, Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 3 Al‐Malahem Media also produced didactical videos and video interviews with prominent ideologues of AQAP, such as Anwar al‐Awlaki, which had been widely distributed on the major video‐sharing websites, such as YouTube, as well as more specialized ones, such as IslamicTube. 4 The names Anwar al‐Awlaki and Samir Khan are also the among the few named that are not noms de plume. Indeed, the real identity and nationality of most of the contributors of the magazine is unknown. For more information about Anwar al‐Awlaki, see Scott Shane (2015), Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone (Hardcover ed. Crown/Archetype); for more information about

392 Tarantini Samir Khan, see Saeed Kamali Dehghan, “Samir Khan Named as Second US Citizen to Die in Drone Strike,” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/30/samir‐khan‐anwar‐al‐awlaki. 5 Although Benedict Anderson (1983) used the concept of imagined community to explain the rise of nationalism, this framework can be applied, with specific limitations, to the community envisioned by Inspire. First, it is imagined since most of the members will never know each other, even in the era of hyper‐connectedness through social media. Second, it is finite. This very aspect, though, needs to be scrutinized: while in Anderson’s framework the national community is limited by boundaries between nation‐states, in the case of Inspire the umma is transnational and borderless (in the strong sense of the term). Therefore, the process whereby the community is delimited is based on criteria other than language and nationality. Hence, the need to integrate Anderson’s imagined community with a second theoretical framework, Opotow’s (1990) notion of moral exclusion: “Moral exclusion occurs when individuals or groups are perceived as outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply.” Muslims who are morally excluded from the umma do not belong to Inspire’s imagined umma, despite their religious affiliation. 6 Nowhere in the magazine is it specified what exactly this media production consists of or by whom it is operated. The literature on Inspire as well as specialized security think tanks (regardless of how controversial their stance may be) do not address the issue.

References Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso Books. Behdad, A. and Williams, J. (2010). Neo‐Orientalism. In: Globalizing American Studies (eds. B. Edwards and D. Gaonkar), 283–299. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Droogan, J. and Peattie, S. (2018). Reading Jihad: mapping the shifting themes of inspire magazine. Terrorism and Political Violence 30 (4): 684–717. Gerges, F.A. (2009). The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global, 2e. New York: Cambridge University Press. Kerboua, S. (2016). From orientalism to neo‐orientalism: early and contemporary constructions of Islam and the Muslim world. Intellectual Discourse 24 (1): 7–34. Lemieux, A.F., Brachman, J.M., Levitt, J., and Wood, J. (2014). Inspire magazine: a critical analysis of its significance and potential impact through the lens of the information, motivation, and behavioral skills model. Terrorism and Political Violence 26 (2): 354–371. Letter from the Editor (2010). Inspire 1: 2. Mamdani, M. (2002). Good Muslim, bad Muslim: a political perspective on culture and terrorism. American Anthropologist 104 (3): 766–775. Opotow, S. (1990). Moral exclusion and injustice: an introduction. Journal of Social Issues 46 (1): 1–20. Said, E.W. (1979). Orientalism. Vintage. Sivek, S.C. (2013). Packaging inspiration: Al Qaeda’s digital magazine inspire in the self‐radicalization process. International Journal of Communication 7 (1): 584–606. Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. Public Culture 14 (1): 49–90.

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Case Study: How gal‐dem Magazine Succeeded Where Mainstream Media Failed Esther Egbeyemi

Introduction After embarking on her studies at the University of Bristol, Liv Little found herself challenged. She struggled to find friendships with other women of color, a result of the lack of diversity at the institution. Little hoped to establish a community of people with whom she shared similarities in identity, and it was this goal that led her in September 2015 to found gal‐dem1 (http:// gal‐dem.com), an online magazine based in the UK and written by those who identify as women and non‐binary people of color. Despite gal‐dem’s relative newness to the world of media and publishing, the magazine has drawn a widespread and dedicated readership since its launch. Little and her team have witnessed the rapid growth of the brand. Not only does the gal‐dem collective now produce a print magazine alongside the online publication, but it has also hosted various popular events, such as music nights, politics panels, and museum takeovers. In August 2018, the team had the opportunity to take over The Guardian’s Weekend magazine, a prominent platform for gal‐dem’s contributors to tell their stories on their own terms. This case study looks at the ever‐growing popularity of gal‐dem, which has emerged as a unique and important source of information and community for its readers. The magazine has successfully connected with millennials, in particular with readers concentrated within the 18–34 age bracket. Women make up 70% of gal‐dem’s readership, with men making up the remaining 30%. The publication’s impact is not solely limited to readers in the UK, with 26% of the magazine’s online readership coming from the USA (Brinkhurst‐Cuff and Egbeyemi 2018). The study’s goal is to unpack how the publication’s team identified a gap in the media market and then filled it by providing topical and thought‐provoking content highlighting the voices of the marginalized.

Cultural Context Women’s magazines have played an important part in British history for centuries. The Ladies’ Mercury, a sub‐publication of The Athenian Mercury created in 1693 by publisher John Dunton (Encyclopedia Britannica 2018), was the very first product of its kind in the UK. Dunton attempted to introduce a periodical for women following the popularity of The Mercury among both male and female readers. Despite lasting only four issues (Hughes 2008), The Ladies’ The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

394 Egbeyemi Mercury represented the beginnings of a medium that would become a fundamental part of many women’s lives in Britain and the rest of the world. Fast forward several hundred years, and it is clear that The Ladies’ Mercury set an important precedent for the various waves of women’s magazine to come (Braithwaite 1995, p. 10). While the 1950s saw a stark rise in the popularity of magazines like Woman’s Weekly and Woman, famed for their provision of reliable knitting and dress patterns (Hackney 2010, p. 22), short fictional literature, advice pages, and readers submissions (Hackney 2010, p. 23), the publications of the noughties were dominated by celeb culture, body shaming (Fischer 2017), fashion, sex, love, and relationships. The women’s magazines of today share many similarities with those of the 2000s but they are also transitioning into a new age. Reimagined as not just magazines but brands, many are working harder than ever to establish themselves online – a shift driven by the dominance of the Internet and social media  –  and the heavy critique of those in the spotlight has largely been replaced with a greater focus on body positivity (London 2018) and inclusivity (Cirilli 2017). Moreover, many women’s magazines are focusing on previously underexplored areas by highlighting issues surrounding politics, mental health, and identity. Despite these notable developments, the women’s magazine industry has fallen victim to rapid declines in circulation and readership in recent years. This slump has not only posed a threat to the very existence of some of the big names in magazine publishing, but it has also led less established brands, including The Debrief (BBC News 2018), Grazia’s sister publication, and Standard Issue (Noonan 2017), to shut up shop completely. Moreover, despite the many important changes occurring in journalism and magazine publishing in recent years, the lack of diverse voices within mainstream media has remained a clear constant. Not only is the lack of adequate representation failing to reflect the British population at present (Harker et al. 2016), but it can also play a dangerous role in reinforcing social disparities that exist today. Simon Cottle (2000) argues that, The media occupy a key site and perform a crucial role in the public representation of unequal social relations and the play of cultural power. It is in and through representations, for example, that members of the media audience are variously invited to construct a sense of who ‘we’ are in relation to who ‘we’ are not, whether as ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’, ‘citizen’ and ‘foreigner,’ ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, ‘friend’ and ‘foe’, ‘the west’ and ‘the rest.’ (p. 2)

In other words, media have the power – and arguably the duty – to promote cultural diversity and challenge ill‐informed ideas regarding various groups within society. Once again, however, this depends largely on sufficient representation.

Black British Media British publications aimed at audience members from ethnic minority backgrounds have existed for many years. More specifically, a number have been introduced to serve those within the black community. The Voice, a weekly newspaper established in 1982 by Val McCalla, aimed to meet the needs of the British Afro‐Caribbean community in a way that other publications had failed to. Before the introduction of The Voice, the black press had largely focused on providing news for those who had immigrated to the UK, with British‐born individuals left underserved (The Voice Newspaper). Now in its 37th year, The Voice is said to be Britain’s longest running black newspaper (The Voice 2017). The UK has also seen a number of black lifestyle publications emerge over the past 30 years, such as Pride magazine, launched in 1991, Black Hair, established in 1998, and Black Beauty

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and Hair, which on the “About” section of its website claims to be the UK’s best‐selling black magazine.2 Despite the positive impact of their existence and loyal readership, such glossies have often found themselves “tucked away unobtrusively on the bottom shelf at the newsagent’s” (Helcké 2003), and have struggled to win the support of the very women readers they were created for. In November 2017, it was announced that Black Hair’s print magazine would cease and the brand was soon after re‐launched as a website. There have also been criticisms regarding the production standards and appeal of British magazines aimed at black women. Dissatisfied with the market, Tobi Oredein, founder of the website Black Ballad, decided to create a platform for black women to share their stories and experiences. Not only did she struggle to relate to the content on mainstream websites, but she was also unhappy with the offerings provided by magazines aimed at the black‐British female audience. After speaking to a number of black women, Oredein soon realized they shared her feelings. “I have a friend who’s in her thirties, she has a senior job at ASOS, and she said something which really made me think,” Oredein says. “I would rather pick up Grazia where my skin is not represented, but at least it’s of a standard. And I thought that was so telling. She would rather not be herself skin wise [sic], but felt the standard was so important of what they produced” (Oredein and Egbeyemi 2016). Although black British magazines like Pride and Black Beauty have stood the test of time, they are not necessarily regarded as key publications within the community. Furthermore, the beauty and lifestyle magazines created to serve women whose skin tones and hair types had not been acknowledged by mainstream publications appear to have become largely redundant in an era in which the likes of Instagram (Shoneye 2018) and Pinterest are increasingly the go‐to sources for hair and beauty related inspiration.

The Age of gal‐dem With mainstream magazines failing to appeal to those from black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds and publications aimed at individuals from ethnic minorities failing to connect with their target audiences, gal‐dem may be seen as a product birthed out of great frustration. Liv Little decided to found the website with a number of other editors, all of whom met each other online. “I was used to not seeing people like myself reflected in newsrooms and in print in general. So that’s the reason why I was keen to get onboard with it,” explains Charlie Brinkhurst‐Cuff (2017), the publication’s deputy editor. At the time, Brinkhurst‐Cuff was training to be a journalist, but she did not meet many people who looked like her. Launching gal‐dem represented a direct challenge to the very white, very middle‐class status quo. With its launch on 25 September 2015, gal‐dem ushered into the online space the first wave of stories shared on its platform. As the brand began to gain momentum, other activities followed. The #Ineedgaldembecause campaign (Twitter.com 2018) invited readers and contributors to share why they felt the brand’s existence was so important. This campaign also served as “a clear statement to anyone who question[ed] why platforms like gal‐dem [were] needed” (Twitter.com 2018). At the end of 2016, gal‐dem hosted its V&A Friday Late Takeover, an event held at the Victoria and Albert Museum of art and design in London and attended by about 4000 people. “…the queue went around the block, which was really beautiful, and we sort of took over the space filled with old white men,” says Brinkhurst‐Cuff. “The place was filled with people of color, and that was really cool” (2017). Not only did the event demonstrate the impact that a brand like gal‐dem could have, but it also presented gal‐dem as much more than just a magazine. What had emerged was a “creative collective” (Brinkhurst‐Cuff and Egbeyemi 2017).

396 Egbeyemi The team also produces a 260‐page annual publication, with the first issue, galhood, published in September 2016. Each magazine explores a specific theme, with contributor stories, illustrations, photos, and interviews all tying into this common thread. Despite the meaningful success of the print magazine, however, its creation was somewhat grounded in the need for gal‐dem to present an offering that would have it taken seriously in the publishing world, attracting sufficient advertising and support from the people with the means to help elevate the brand. Brinkhurst‐ Cuff (2017) explains: …at a really basic level, we’re a start‐up business and people take us more seriously because we have a print magazine. We’re very aware of the power of the internet, but a lot of the older generation, the people who have money, still need to see that physical copy. I feel like us having something in print has made such a difference to how we’re regarded and the type of people we have access to in terms of who we can interview and even in terms of the awards that we’ve won. People are just like, “oh you’re an online publication”, and as soon as you tell them we run a print magazine as well, that’s when people are like, “oh ok, you’re taking you’re s*** seriously.” It doesn’t matter that our generation couldn’t necessarily give a s*** whether or not we’re in print or online.

For the first two issues of gal‐dem’s print magazine, the team offered inexpensive advertising spots for women of color, and in past years, they have also produced some branded content online. However, the third print issue contained advertising provided exclusively by the beauty brand, Glossier (Brinkhurst‐Cuff and Egbeyemi 2018). Glossier is very much a newcomer in the beauty world, having only begun trading in 2013 (Wolf and Bhasin 2018). However, the brand generated more than US$100 million in revenue in 2018 (Chang and Bhasin 2018). As well as the need to attract better advertising opportunities, other important factors also inspired the print magazine’s introduction: “Zine culture in our generation is an important thing as well, and we’re tapping into that also. Everyone likes something that they can hold,” says Brinkhurst‐Cuff (2017). The team has been intentional in asking many of its regular contributors, who are dedicated to gal‐dem and all it stands for, to provide content for the print magazine. However, the gal‐dem collective has also used the print publication to highlight new voices in the magazine’s editorial and visual content. Thanks to gal‐dem’s resonance with audiences and the brand’s significant growth in readership and impact, in August 2018, the team took over The Guardian’s Weekend magazine. For the cover, the editors chose Michaela Coel, actress and creator of the popular TV comedy series Chewing Gum, which had been joyfully welcomed by many black British girls and women who had previously failed to see themselves reflected on TV (Little 2018). Other stories in the issue explored dating, transphobia, solo‐traveling as a black female, and dealing with microaggressions in the workplace. The Weekend magazine, which is sold alongside the Guardian newspaper, saw a notable increase in sales as a result of gal‐dem’s issue takeover, and many young people who would not ordinarily engage with print media purchased the publication to show support for the brand. The project was described as “an incredible exercise and a clear demonstration of the power of championing marginalized voices,” and its success served as a clear reminder that “diversity breeds creativity” (Little and Denes 2018). There is no doubt that for many young women and non‐binary people of color – and also those who do not fall into these categories – a magazine like gal‐dem had been a long time coming. “I know for me, it was definitely something that I was waiting for, I was waiting for a publication like gal‐dem to come up. I get the impression that it’s the same for a lot of other people, we’ve essentially filled a gap in the market,” Brinkhurst‐Cuff says. “In terms of what we’re producing, all the newspapers run articles like ours. It’s not like we’re necessarily doing anything that’s totally, totally new. But, it’s the scale, and it’s the continued drive to give a voice to people who are marginalized which I think appeals to people. In the newspapers, even a left‐wing one, like The Guardian or The Independent, you’ll be searching for someone like you. You might get

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the odd article every few weeks, but on gal‐dem, you click on it and there’s a range of opinions from a range of different women of color” (Brinkhurst‐Cuff and Egbeyemi 2017).

The Impact of gal‐dem and Beyond The introduction and resulting success of gal‐dem are representative of a changing climate in which the need for representation in the media is beginning to be taken more seriously. Recent times have seen the emergence of numerous print publications, books, websites, and podcasts aiming to challenge the problematic makeup of voices within the mainstream media by providing alternative stories and viewpoints. Furthermore, social media platforms have played a crucial part in facilitating the development of hubs specifically for those with shared cultural identities to openly and publicly express their views on various issues. “Black Twitter,” which gained initial popularity in the African-American community, represents a prominent example (Ramsey 2015). Black Ballad, a website striving to empower black and mixed‐race women by providing a space for them to share their experiences, is another example of a publication that, like gal‐dem, focuses on the voices of the marginalized. “Black women weren’t being served,” says Tobi Oredein, the website’s founder. “If you hold up four women’s publications and you read an article, I bet you couldn’t tell me which article belongs to which publication. Nobody could. They’re absolutely all the same, and it’s boring. Black Ballad came out and was really bold with an offering that was so different because there was a group of women that had never been recognized in this way” (Oredein and Esther 2018). Oredein also acknowledges Black Ballad’s greater purpose: “There’s a social meaning behind Black Ballad. It’s about social change as well as filling the gaps in black women’s days. People are looking to have meaning, people are looking to have change, people want to feel like they’re changing the world from their computers and seats.” Similarly, Skin Deep, an offering that began as an online platform for students at a predominately white and academically conservative institution (Henriques and Egbeyemi 2017), aims to “amplify voices of colour through the discussion of race and culture,” sparking conversations often “misrepresented or depoliticized by the mainstream media” (Skin Deep 2018). Like gal‐ dem and Black Ballad, Skin Deep holds events, providing safe spaces for people of color to interact with and support one another and to share their views on pressing issues. Burnt Roti, a print and online magazine for South Asian women in the UK, is another publication created for a community that mainstream media has failed to adequately serve (Burnt Roti 2018). The publication tackles a range of issues, including those which are known to carry social stigmas within the South Asian community, such as racism, mental health, and sexuality. In the realm of mainstream media, there are indications that this need for diverse voices has begun to infiltrate more prominent spaces. In 2017, Edward Enninful became the first black male editor‐in‐chief of British Vogue, an iconic publication that has been in circulation for 100‐ plus years. As illustrated by his first issue, which boasted British‐Ghanaian model Adwoa Aboah as its cover star (Cartner‐Morley 2017), Enninful has been very intentional in championing diversity. This intentionality extended beyond the Vogue cover, as illustrated by a range of content and contributors to promote the call for genuine inclusivity. In September 2018, black women graced the covers of seven mainstream women’s magazines, an unprecedented move in publishing history (Wilson‐Ojo 2018) and a far cry from the “whitewashed” offering that mainstream publications have arguably become synonymous with. Despite the success of publications like gal‐dem, however, important questions remain about the future of journalism and publishing. Although the type of content provided by mainstream publications appears to be shifting, attempts at inclusivity in content have not necessarily translated to more people of color being employed by these organizations. “The reason that a lot of the time people give for us being underrepresented in the media is because there’s not enough

398 Egbeyemi black women interested in becoming journalists [or] who are interested in becoming writers. [Editors say] ‘we look to them but we can’t find them’, and it’s like, well, they’re there, you’re obviously just not looking hard enough,” argues Brinkhurst‐Cuff (2017). This shortage of writers can be said to indirectly affect how audiences respond to these publications. “I think people [publications] think if they do a beauty story with one or two token black and brown people, or have a freelancer every other month that’s writing around race, that’s serving people. But people want genuine inclusion. They want to see publications that really take on their issues and run with them,” Tobi Oredein says (2018). Another area in which gal‐dem remains unmatched by mainstream publications is bringing intersectionality to the fore through its various platforms, with a focus not only on race, but also gender and sexuality. Despite a notable push for diversity within the media and beyond (Warner 2018), identities encompassing not only ethnicity and gender, but also disabilities, body types, and mental health are still mostly out of view and without a voice. Although publications like gal‐dem have made an impact in this respect, it is uncertain whether the call for diversity and inclusion on a wider scale is authentic or represents only a fleeting trend that the media and other social institutions have exploited for self‐gain (Brown 2018). Notwithstanding, gal‐dem’s popularity shows readers are aware of what genuine diversity and inclusion look like, and that is because they have experienced first‐hand the detrimental effects of exclusion and marginalization. As long as mainstream media remain ignorant to the very real and pressing nature of the call for representation, platforms like gal‐dem will continue to emerge, grow, and successfully serve those who have, until now, been largely ignored.

Notes 1 gal‐dem means a group of girls in UK slang. 2 https://www.blackbeautyandhair.com/about‐us‐2.

References BBC News (2018). Digital brand The Debrief faces closure. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk‐43886118 (accessed 23 September 2018). Braithwaite, B. (1995). Women’s Magazines: The First 300 Years. London: Peter Owen. Brinkhurst‐Cuff, C. and Egbeyemi, E. (2017). Interview. Brinkhurst‐Cuff, C. and Egbeyemi, E. (2018). Interview (email). Brown, N. (2018). Why I’m still skeptical of the diversity movement as a black beauty editor. StyleCaster. http://stylecaster.com/beauty/the‐pros‐and‐cons‐of‐being‐a‐black‐beauty‐editor‐during‐the‐ diversity‐movement (accessed 25 October 2018). Cartner‐Morley, J. (2017). Edward Enninful addresses diversity debate with first cover for British Vogue. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2017/nov/07/enninful‐fronts‐up‐to‐diversity‐ debate‐with‐first‐british‐vogue‐cover (accessed 2 October 2018). Chang, E. and Bhasin, K. (2018). Glossier hits $100 million in sales and takes aim at Big Beauty. Bloomberg (10 December). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018‐12‐10/glossier‐hits‐100‐ million‐in‐sales‐and‐takes‐aim‐at‐big‐beauty (accessed 24 December 2018). Cirilli, C. (2017). Is 2017 already the most diverse year ever for mainstream women’s mags? http://coveteur. com/2017/05/11/mainstream‐women‐magazines‐most‐diverse‐2017 (accessed 12 December 2018). Cottle, S. (2000). Ethnic Minorities and The Media. www.mheducation.co.uk/openup/chapters/0335202705. pdf (accessed 18 September 2018). Skin Deep (2018). About Us | Skin Deep | Race + Culture. http://www.skindeepmag.com/about‐us (accessed 4 October 2018). Encyclopedia Britannica (2018). History of publishing  –  magazine publishing. https://www.britannica. com/topic/publishing/Magazine‐publishing#ref398304 (accessed 28 September 2018).

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Fischer, M. (2017). Fat figures only got screen time when films or shows needed a comedic boost. Revelist. https://www.revelist.com/pop‐culture/body‐positivity‐in‐the‐2000s/8224/fat‐figures‐only‐got‐ screen‐time‐when‐films‐or‐shows‐needed‐a‐comedic‐boost/5 (accessed 28 October 2018). Hackney, F. (2010). “They opened up a whole new world”: feminine modernity and the feminine imagination in women’s magazines, 1919–1939. Doctoral thesis. University of London. https://research. gold.ac.uk/7998/1/Redacted_History_thesis_Hackney.pdf (accessed 27 August 2018). Harker, J., Green, L., and Rinvolucri, B. (2016). Can ethnic minorities trust the British press? – video. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2016/dec/28/can‐ethnic‐ minorities‐trust‐british‐press‐video?CMP=share_btn_tw (accessed 2 October 2018). Helcké, J. (2003). Magazines in everyday life: negotiating identity, femininity and belonging in lifestyle magazines for minority ethnic women in France and the UK. London School of Economics. www.lse. ac.uk/media@lse/research/EMTEL/Conference/papers/Helcke.doc (accessed 19 February 2019). Henriques, A. and Egbeyemi, E. (2017). Interview. Hughes, K. (2008). Women’s magazines down the ages. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2008/dec/20/women‐pressandpublishing (accessed 9 October 2018). Little, L. (2018). Michaela Coel: ‘I was trying to be someone else and failing.’ The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/11/michaela‐coel‐trying‐to‐be‐someone‐else‐failing (accessed 22 August 2018). Little, L. and Denes, M. (2018). gal‐dem Guardian takeover proves diversity breeds creativity. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2018/aug/18/gal‐dem‐guardian‐takeover‐ proves‐diversity‐breeds‐creativity (accessed 22 August 2018). London, B. (2018). ‘I’ve been told I’m a fat pig and should be slaughtered’: Felicity Hayward on trolls, body positivity and self‐love. Glamour. www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/felicity‐hayward‐body‐ positivity‐interview (accessed 28 October 2018). Noonan, M. (2017). So long, and thanks for all the love – Standard Issue. https://web.archive.org/ web/20170413033043/http://standardissuemagazine.com/in‐the‐news/long‐thanks‐love (accessed 30 September 2019). Oredein, T. and Egbeyemi, E. (2016). Interview. Oredein, T. and Egbeyemi, E. (2018). Interview. Ramsey, D.X. (2015). The truth about black Twitter. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2015/04/the‐truth‐about‐black‐twitter/390120 (accessed 19 February 2019). Burnt Roti (2018). “Home” [online]. www.burntroti.com (accessed 24 September 2019). Shoneye, T. (2018). How Instagram accounts dedicated to black beauty taught me to love myself. Elle (14 June). https://www.elle.com/uk/beauty/make‐up/a21267448/instagram‐accounts‐dedicated‐to‐ black‐beauty‐taught‐me‐to‐love‐myself (accessed 24 December 2018). Twitter.com (2018). gal‐dem status. https://twitter.com/galdemzine/status/1044584018514108418 (accessed 25 September 2018). The Voice (2017). City Hall hosts Voice newspaper exhibition. The Voice (19 October). https://web.archive. org/web/20171022132227/https://www.voice‐online.co.uk/article/city‐hall‐hosts‐voice‐ newspaper‐exhibition (accessed 24 September 2019). Warner, M. (2018). Photo Vogue Festival: embracing diversity and the many shades of masculinity. British Journal of Photography (15 October). http://www.bjp‐online.com/2018/10/photo‐vogue‐festival‐ embracing‐diversity‐and‐the‐many‐shades‐of‐masculinity (accessed 18 October 2018). Wilson‐Ojo, M. (2018). The September issue: the month black women grace the covers of our favourite magazines. HuffPost UK. www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/the‐september‐issue‐black‐women‐ grace‐the‐covers‐of_uk_5b6b366fe4b08f26b374e6a2 (accessed 28 October 2018). Wolf, J. and Bhasin, K. (2018). Inside Glossier’s plans to shake up your makeup routine. Bloomberg. https:// www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018‐08‐30/millennial‐makeup‐brand‐glossier‐shakeup‐ makeup‐routine (accessed 24 December 2018).

Part VI

Global Markets and Audiences

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Magazines in Spanish and Portuguese America Kenton T. Wilkinson and Cristóbal Benavides Almarza

Introduction As in other regions of the world, magazines in Spanish America and Brazil have fulfilled diverse political, economic, cultural, and social functions while informing and entertaining a variety of reading publics. Although magazine readership among literate populations in the region has cut across class and educational hierarchies, magazines command only a small fraction of the audiences and revenues of broadcast media  –  especially television  –  in Latin America, a region accounting for only 2.4% of the global advertising spending in 2016 (Zenith 2017). As elsewhere, the magazine industry in the region experienced significant changes in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries as market segmentation and technological advances challenged traditional media platforms. This chapter examines industry and audience developments surrounding Latin American magazines, striving to provide a balanced perspective on magazine publishing and consumption in Spanish and Portuguese America. Also included is a discussion of Spanish‐language magazines in the USA, which constitutes a significant national market for Spanish‐language media, even though it is sometimes separated from research on Latin America. The literature informing this chapter is drawn from a broad variety of sources, including our own collection of data from government and industry reports.1 We begin with background information on the development of print media in Latin America.

Historical Background Print media has had a long history in Latin America since printing presses began operating in the sixteenth century. The first was established in Mexico City in 1536, a mere 15 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico had begun. More printing presses followed over the next century in Lima (present‐day Peru), in 1583, and in La Paz (Bolivia), in 1610. Due to the protectionist policies of the Spanish Crown, other regional presses arrived much later – 1738 in Colombia, 1748 in Chile, and 1766 in Argentina (Earle 1997; Tarrago 1996). Brazil did not have an official press until 1808 (Gauz 2013). Throughout Latin America’s early and middle colonial periods (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries), official presses were employed by the Spanish

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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monarchs, their viceroys, and the Catholic Church for management purposes as well as political, economic, and religious control (LaFaye 1984). LaFaye (1984) identifies the first Spanish American periodical as Mercurio Volante, published from 1693 by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a prominent and prolific intellectual based in Mexico City. Unlike in North America and France, during Latin America’s late colonial period rogue presses played limited roles in disseminating oppositional texts that would contribute to the independence movements between 1808 and 1826. Earle (1997) argues that rumor and other forms of verbal communication were more influential political forces in the region. In the early independence period of the mid‐nineteenth century, Latin American periodicals became more instrumental in debates over which political and economic systems would prevail, as well as the Church’s proper role in the new nations. As in other regions of the world, the government’s power to control the news media, and information flow more broadly, became a point of contention in many of the new republics (Hobsbawm 2012). Modern magazines began circulating in the 1900s, their popularity propelled in part by advanced printing techniques that could reproduce high‐quality images while simultaneously lowering the per‐unit costs of production (Sumner 2010). Titles steadily expanded in number and topical focus during the twentieth century, with the important exceptions of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s when military dictatorships clamped down on media production and dissemination, in some cases placing military leaders directly in charge of media management (Fox and Waisbord 2009). Literary magazines have a long history in Spanish America, beginning in the era of the New Spain‐born intellectual Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700) and his contemporary writer and scholar Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695), and continuing to today, when they are largely eclipsed by mass‐circulation magazines and electronic media, but remain important in intellectual circles. These magazines have connected thought, art, and philosophy from Europe, North America, and Latin America for centuries, acting as important conduits for the interchange of ideas and esthetics (Buckman 1990). Prominent Latin American voices, such as those of Isabel Allende, Jorge Luís Borges, Julio Cortázar, Gabriela Mistral, Gabriel García Márquez, Pablo Neruda, and Mario Vargas Llosa, would be muffled without the influence of periodical literature, including magazines. This dynamic continues, although many readers now access such content via electronic platforms rather than in print. In the late 1980s, the region began to move away from protectionist policies toward freer trade, privatization of some state‐held media, increased foreign direct investment, and media ownership consolidation. These developments stimulated media market expansion – as well as interruptions in many sectors – at the same time as the internet and other elements of the “digital turn” were transforming the media landscape (Lugo‐Ocando 2008). Significantly, the average percentage of the population using the internet across 20 countries in Latin American increased from 4.3% in 2000 to 48.6% in 2015 (Salaverría et al. 2019).

Recent Developments in the Business of Magazines Beginning in the 1990s, the traditional business models of magazines transformed in response to increased competition accompanied by decreases in readership and advertising revenues. This scenario pushed the magazine industry to seek new sources of income, new distribution platforms, and the expansion of related business opportunities (Holmes 2007; Santos 2011). In 2017, magazines captured only 2.4% market share among Latin American media, compared to 5.4% worldwide, according to a Statista special report (Zenith 2017), and magazine ad spending amounted to US$637 million, about half of the sum spent in 2010. The forecast is inauspicious; it is expected that by 2020 the figure will fall to US$577 mil­lion (Statista 2019).



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Yet, throughout these tumultuous times, Latin American magazines have maintained their ability to reach specific niche audiences – a valuable attribute as the media environment becomes increasingly complex and saturated with stimuli and messages. What advertisers seek in such an environment is a close, reliable, and binding relationship that transcends the functional dimension in order to appeal in an emotional dimension – closer to the heart than to the mind. Magazines have consistently delivered insightful journalistic analysis, in‐depth features, beautiful design, and other engaging content attractive to readers. These attributes have endured over time, making magazines an effective advertising platform not only on paper, but also in their digital and experiential forms, such as the events and haptic elements of physical magazines briefly discussed below (Santos 2011). Technological advances have allowed magazines to simplify their production processes by not only minimizing the amount of time needed to create a new edition, but also by reducing the number of people involved in the different phases of production. As early in the Digital Age as the mid‐1990s, Worthington (1994) claimed that a designer and a journalist/editor could jointly produce a 100‐page monthly magazine by subcontracting freelance labor. Magazines in the region generate reader experiences that have a positive impact on advertising effectiveness. Benavides and van Weezel (2013) found that Chilean readers consider advertising in magazines clearer and more entertaining than ads in newspapers and on television. Magazine ads also have a lower rejection rate than other media. And most readers think magazine ads make products look attractive. However, magazines’ advantageous position has not been leveraged by publishers in many media markets (Benavides 2012). Magazines must focus on reader experiences, such as discussing and sharing content, generating feelings of community belonging and connectedness, being inspired, and enjoying some downtime. This is essential because these experiences generate a mood that makes the reader more open to advertising appeals (Benavides and van Weezel 2013). The typical consumer performs a three‐part process before purchasing a product or service: recognition, when she acknowledges a need; search for information, in which she begins to investigate possible solutions to meet the needs internally (known alternatives) or externally (recommended alternatives); and decision, when she uses the information to evaluate what to do (Kotler and Armstrong 2003). Magazines – in comparison to other media – operate mostly in the second stage, since they orient consumers and aspire to build a brand, while television advertising operates largely in the first stage by introducing new products, endeavoring to generate new needs, and newspaper ads operate in the third phase, by differentiating attributes for readers to decide among before purchasing (Benavides and van Weezel 2013). For magazines, congruence between the message and its channel provides a more convenient approach than contrast, generating higher recall and better attitudes toward the ad (De Pelsmacker et  al. 2002). This is relevant for the industry in Latin America, because these are relatively small markets (except Brazil), characterized by strong competition to capture limited advertising spending. Another successful strategy for magazines in Latin America to generate new and important revenues, just like in other regions of the world, has been organizing fairs and events that are often but not always related to magazine contents. Thus, the strength of some brands allow them to capitalize on their credibility and prestige in different fields such as gastronomy, fashion, seminars, and travel.2 These activities open opportunities for readers and non‐readers alike to engage with others sharing their interests and to connect with the brand (Benavides 2012). This is an increasingly commonly revenue strategy across the world, and in Latin America some magazines generate between 10 and 33% of their income from this source (Ives 2009; Mathew 2015). ByC, a Chilean media enterprise is an example of a communication company that launched with a single magazine but now pursues a 360° strategy. It owns four magazines targeting different stages of life. De novios (Fiancés) is for people who plan to marry and are preparing their

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wedding; Mamá y bebe is for young parents; Platos y copas (Dishes and Cups), for those interested in culinary content; and Blue Life, aims to raise awareness on environmental issues, sustainable food, recycling, and similar topics. ByC organizes events and generates other content like books, catalogs and social media around these brands. But it also provides similar activities for other companies that lack the experience and knowledge to manage it on their own. This strategy has allowed ByC to diversify its revenue sources without relying exclusively on print products (Benavides 2012).

Magazine Audiences Magazines have changed and adapted to the new demands of the market, including audience segmentation; thus, publishers strive to understand readers’ preferences and behavior in detail (Albarran et al. 1996). In competitive markets like Latin America’s, the challenge is to ensure that brands connect with consumers, emotionally, rather than functionally. Generating close relationships and compelling experiences with audiences is the objective. Benavides and van Weezel (2012) demonstrate that magazines are principal media vehicles to achieve such connections in the region. In most Latin American countries, magazine publishers belong to local industry associations, which fall under the umbrella of FIPP,3 a global magazine trade organization. Data management has not only been used by editors to know what content is preferred by audiences; the commercial area has elaborated distinct consumer profiles through psychographics and similar measures. This information, and newer techniques like data mining, has attracted new niche‐seeking advertisers that did not fit well in earlier magazine business models and platforms. Some examples of trade magazines are Estrategas in Argentina (insurance and banking), Minería Chile (mining), and InfoAgro (agriculture) in Mexico. These trade journals operate under different economic dynamics than commercial magazines targeting the general public. The most successful magazines have continuously focused on understanding and satisfying the needs and interests of their readers (Johnson and Prijatel 2007). As in the rest of the world, such magazines are publications that have stood out for their quality of writing, design, creativity, innovation, and good management, but perhaps most importantly, they have managed to position themselves and find audiences attractive to advertisers based on quality and not simply because of their availability through wide circulation (Benavides 2012). Veja in Brazil is an example of this trend. It was founded in 1968 by Roberto Civita, son of the founder of Abril Group  –  one of the largest, most influential media groups in Brazil. In 2018 Veja had 6.7 million readers, including 800 000 subscribers. For decades, it has been Brazil’s most influential political magazine, and it has managed to stay current over the years, by monitoring and incorporating key innovations in both the editorial and commercial areas (dos Anjos Fonseca and Barbosa 2016; Benetti and Storch 2011). One example of such innovation is a partnership between the skin product company Nivea and the regional magazine Veja Rio which advertised an ultra‐thin solar panel that powered the reader’s phone (FIPP 2014).4 Accompanying the multiplication of media forms and outlets in many markets has been an increase in special‐interest magazines. As elsewhere, most common across Latin America are women’s magazines as well as titles related to entertainment themes (espectáculos) and celebrity gossip (chismes). Titles such as TV y Novelas in Mexico; Caras and Gente in Argentina; and Claudia in Brazil are consistent top‐sellers. Magazine popularity among female audiences in the region has endured as women’s roles in society and spheres of activity have expanded, particularly from the home to the workplace. Thus, women’s magazine articles focused on independence and career development often appear alongside others about housekeeping and childrearing. Many Latin American magazines also



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serve as significant self‐help resources for women who seek tips about balancing multiple demands on their time and energy. For men, the leading magazines in the region are those linked to sports news. El Gráfico (soccer) is considered a milestone in the history of Argentine sports journalism. According to Giorgis (2015), it has played a central role in constructing and reproducing the Argentine sports imagination, through the creation of a unique creole style involving the use and combination of unique local vocabulary and tapping into the mythical feelings and experiences associated with different sports, especially soccer (Alabarces 2002). Its broad and deep coverage, in addition to its compelling photographic imagery, has turned it into “the sports Bible” (López and López 2012, p. 4). El Gráfico was established in 1919 and published regularly until January 2018. Torneos, the magazine’s parent company, explained that the crisis facing nearly all print media forced it to stop printing. In a statement reporting the magazine’s demise Torneos commented, “in recent years the company has carried out various product and commercial strategies to try to reverse the deficit economic situation of the magazine”; yet, it failed anyway (Mitre 2018).

Magazines as Forms of Political Communication As noted above Latin American magazines have historically played a key role in debates over what forms government should take, the distribution of power, and other essential questions as the newly independent nations established themselves throughout the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century, news and opinion magazines in the region fluctuated in number and degree of freedom of expression due to economic cycles and national and regional political shifts, such as the Mexican (1910–1920) and Cuban (1953–1959) revolutions, military dictatorships in South America in the 1960s–1980s, and leftist revolts in Central America and Colombia in the 1980s. Such fluctuations persist in the twenty‐first century as demonstrated in threats to press freedom under the so‐called “pink tide” of left‐leaning populist governments that took power in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (Artz 2017), among other factors. Venezuela had been a powerhouse of privately‐held media prior to the political and economic shift executed by Hugo Chavez (1999–2013) and his presidential successor Nicolás Maduro (2013–), both of who have been critical of, and aggressive toward, the press. Many news organizations, including news and political magazines, disappeared or were co‐opted under the heavy political and economic pressure. As this volume went to press, Venezuelan society was suffering greatly under the weight of political strife, economic chaos and the exodus of substantial numbers of its citizens. News magazines continue to represent a relevant genre in Latin America as forms of political communication. Examples of influential news magazines in the region include Semana (Colombia), Veja (Brazil); Caretas (Peru) and Proceso and Nexos in Mexico. Latin American or country‐specific editions of extra‐regional magazines, such as Newsweek, are also popular among readers of print and electronic news. Business‐oriented publications, such as Forbes, compete against regional publications like América Economía (Chile, in Spanish and Portuguese), Expansión (Mexico, no relation to the French publication of the same name), Capital (Chile) and Apertura (Argentina). Although forces outlined above and in other chapters of this volume have placed significant pressure on traditional magazine publishing, there are promising signs that digital news media are growing in presence, readership, and quality (Salaverría et al. 2019). The negative effects on press freedom and journalists’ security of gang violence and narcotrafficking in Central America and Mexico are also relevant to the magazine industry. Although much of the media coverage focuses on newspaper and broadcast journalists, those writing for magazines and related digital media face the same threats. This is a topic that academic researchers are beginning to examine, especially in Mexico, where the threat is severe, with at least 20 journalists killed in 2017 and 2018 (Holt 2019); it requires further investigation in future research (Holland and Rios 2017; Hughes and Márquez‐Ramírez 2017).

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Country Studies: Magazines in Seven National Contexts Searches on databases specializing in Latin America and Iberia turned up analyses of academic and scientific publishing as well as literary and cultural magazines targeting educated readers, but relatively little on popular magazines. Clearly it is important that such publications receive attention, but as increasing percentages of the world’s media comes under commercial imperatives and control, more research should focus on for‐profit magazines. This finding reinforces the challenges to the magazine studies field outlined in the introduction, in other chapters, and elsewhere (Holmes 2007). It is also difficult to obtain consistent data on magazine circulation and readership in Latin American markets. Sporadic studies have been conducted by government and private‐sector agencies (as the reference list reveals), but they vary in timing, focus, and methodology. Thus, the treatment of these markets and their development is quite uneven in both the historical and contemporary literature. The shortage of magazine‐related scholarship and industry data therefore challenges consistent, longitudinal inquiry into trends and patterns within and across national magazine markets. This section reports some country‐specific findings from recent reports, and our own investigation; the summaries demonstrate both a cross‐national diversity and some continuities across the region.

Argentina Historically, Argentina has been a society of readers and writers, at least among people of means and education. Many post‐Independence literary magazines enjoyed short lives, but were regularly replaced by others (King 1981). Elizabeth Fox (1995) notes the deep presence of print media in Argentina prior to the introduction of radio broadcasting, “… 345 newspapers were published in 1885 [and there was] a large urban audience for popular weekly magazines like Consejero del Hogar (1903), Mundo Argentino (1911) and Atlantida (1918)” (p. 520). King (1981) analyzed the literary magazine Sur, which enjoyed an unusually long run, from 1931 to 1970, due to its steady benefactor Victoria Ocampo, and concluded it was “one of the most important achievements in the cultural life of Latin America in the twentieth century” (p. 75). Unfortunately, after the Argentine military took control of the country in 1976, restrictions were placed on media, military leaders became managers of many outlets, and magazine circulation dropped to almost half of the pre‐coup numbers (Fox 1995). An economic crisis in 2002 further diminished the country’s total magazine circulation to 64 million issues, down from almost 207 million in 1998 (Silvestri and Vassolo 2009). In 2008, approximately 1405 magazine titles were published in Argentina (Silvestri and Vassolo 2009), but nine years later a report on print circulation counted 65 subscription magazines and 20 free ones (Instituto Verificador de Inscripciones 2017). In 2013, magazines captured 4% of Argentina’s advertising spend, and 88% of magazine sales occurred at newsstands, suggesting a limited subscription culture in the country (FIPP 2015). A number of popular titles are of foreign origin, including Disney Junior, Elle, Hola, National Geographic, and Rolling Stone. Foreign magazines captured about 10% of total sales between 1998 and 2007 (Silvestri and Vassolo 2009).

Brazil In addition to the use of the Portuguese language, two features that distinguish Brazil from the other countries in the region are its size, both in land mass (8.5 million square kilometers) and population (211 million in 2019), which ranks it as the sixth largest country in the world. Brazil’s physical expanse and social history also contribute to its ethnic and racial diversity resulting from a sizable indigenous population, an Atlantic slave trade that brought in an estimated 4.9 million Africans over nearly 400 years, various waves of European immigration, and



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the world’s largest community of expatriate Japanese.5 Such diversity creates a broad spectrum of niche audiences for magazine publishers to reach. Brazil was a relative latecomer to domestically‐produced print media in comparison to its Spanish American neighbors, with the first official printing press established in 18086 (Gauz 2013), more than three centuries after Pedro Álvares Cabral arrived in Porto Seguro, and only 14 years before the country declared its independence from Portugal. Brazil experienced an early independence period distinct from its Spanish American neighbors because it was ruled by successive regents, Dom Pedro I and II, until 1889. The latter was an advocate for education, and print media expanded under his rule, despite its much‐delayed start. As in Argentina and Chile, a coup brought the Brazilian military to power from 1964 to 1985. Czajka (2010), who argues that various institutions collaborated in political and cultural resistance against the dictatorship, opening new dynamics and possibilities in Brazilian society, specifically credits Revista Civilização Brasileira (Brazilian Civilization Magazine) for focusing the political Left’s resistance efforts. In 2013, magazines commanded 5.6% of Brazil’s media ad spend, trailing newspapers (10.2%) and television (72%) (FIPP 2015). By 2017, magazines’ share had fallen to 3.5% of advertising investment, compared to 11.6% for newspapers and 66.8% for television. According to Kantar IBOPE Media, in 2017 Brazil’s top 10 economic sectors together spent US$1.4 billion in magazine advertising. Given the Brazilian economy’s downturn since 2014, spending in the media sector is likely to continue declining. The prospects are particularly dim for print magazines as rising costs and readers’ diminishing disposable incomes push more content online. Media researchers in (and of) Brazil have been particularly focused on women’s issues and gender representation in magazines. Cavalcanti (1995) examined how three popular women’s magazines, Claudia, Marie Claire, and Nova, discussed sex and protection against HIV/AIDS as the disease became known to affect heterosexuals; protection was presented as a woman’s responsibility, and discussions of sexual behaviors seldom deviated from the traditional. De Oliveira et  al. (2009) analyzed gender‐related imagery and story content appearing in three large‐circulation Brazilian newsmagazines, finding that they conformed closely to market imperatives. Rocha and Frid (2018) came to similar conclusions in a study of three women’s magazines, finding that images of women’s fragmented bodies were often associated with advertisements for consumer goods. Marin et  al. (2014) focused on rational and emotional arguments in more than 5500 advertisements in six Brazilian women’s magazines published between May 2008 and August 2009; non‐durable goods were more likely to be promoted by emotional appeal, and services and durable goods by rational arguments. Another intriguing study looked at how gender was represented in the three major weekly news magazines Veja, Época, and Carta Capital when they covered three female politicians in 2006 and 2007 – Heloisa Helena, Marta Suplicy, and Dilma Rousseff (who served as president 2011–2016). Biroli (2010) found that the women were less visible than their male counterparts, and when they did appear were more likely to be presented in line with common gender stereotypes.

Chile In the modern era, Chile’s magazine industry has been strongly influenced by politics. Opposition to the military junta led by Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990) motivated a surge in publications, especially during the run up to the contentious 1988 plebiscite concerning military rule. Yet, since the restoration of democracy in 1990, the demand for political and “denunciatory” journalism has diminished. González‐Rodríguez (2008) notes that Chilean magazines dedicated to (high) culture and politics have largely disappeared. Weakening reader demand and reductions in advertising spending from the public sector remain prominent among the factors leading to this decline (Benavides and van Weezel 2013). Chile’s unique geography, with a territory stretching over 4000 km (2500 miles) from north to south, poses a challenge to the efficient distribution of print magazines and provision of

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internet services as well. The disappearance of a major distributor in 2012 compounded the problem (FIPP 2015). In 2018, three of the most popular magazines  –  Cosas, Paula, and QuePasa  –  stopped circulating. In 2007, Cosas (social life, culture, entertainment, fashion) had been the second‐most‐popular magazine, with 16.5% of the market share, trailing Caras (women’s, celebrity news) from Mexico’s Televisa, which had 20.4% of the market. Paula (6.9%, aimed at teenage girls and young women) had been in fourth place, and Qué Pasa (5.3%, focused on current affairs) in fifth; both were publications of Copesa. These four magazines, plus TV Grama, commanded 56% of advertising spending on magazines in 2007 (Benavides et  al. 2009). In Chile, supplements that circulate free of charge with the major newspapers have created stiff competition for magazines. This development, along with a steady decline in magazine readership since 2000 has created a brutal set of circumstances for the magazine sector.

Colombia Colombia is one of four independent nations that emerged from Spain’s Viceroyalty of New Granada early in the nineteenth century (the others being Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela). Earle (1997) notes that compared with other societies seeking independence, such as Mexico, New Granada had very low literacy rates; according to one estimate, only 3% of Colombian children attended primary school in 1835 (Safford 1976 cited in Earle 1997). This dynamic changed over time; Bonilla and Narváez Montoya (2008) report that more than 40% of Colombia’s population are potential audiences for independent magazines, and Arango Forero et al. (2009) note that magazine readership in Colombia surpasses that of newspapers. Notwithstanding this potential reach, however, the country’s largest magazine publisher, Publicaciones Semana, reaches only about 7% of the national audience. Arango Forero et  al. (2009) cite the Mexican publication TV y Novelas as the top‐circulation magazine, followed by Semana (a national newsmagazine), Soho (cronicas, interviews, trivia), Tú (youth) Cromos (current affairs), and Caras (entertainment). In 2013, magazines accounted for 6.5% of Colombia’s media ad spend, with business‐to‐business publications claiming 92% of that revenue (FIPP 2015). As in other regions, ownership in Colombia’s magazine sector is less concentrated than in other media industries (Bonilla and Narváez Montoya 2008; Holmes 2007).

Mexico As already noted, Mexico received the Americas’ first printing press, in 1536, and developed as a literary and philosophical center during the colonial period. During the twentieth century, a shift occurred toward more popular content, such as sensational news, romance, comics, telenovelas (soap operas), and other television content (Gutiérrez Rentería 2009). Since the 1930s the country’s mass media have been dominated by commercial enterprises such as Televisa; its print arm, Televisa Publishing and Digital, produces popular magazine titles such as Vanidades and TV y Novelas, which reach readers throughout the region and in the USA. Having their origins in film and radio, Televisa and its precursor companies have been keen on exporting content to international markets. In 2006, Televisa published 80 different magazine titles in 19 countries, with a total circulation of 127 million copies monthly (Gutiérrez Rentería 2009). We should note that Televisa has been particularly successful in television, especially in the USA (Wilkinson 2016), but magazines have long been part of the company’s integrated media mix. In 2013, magazines captured slightly less than 3% of Mexico’s media adshare (Estrategia EY 2015; FIPP 2015), and a 2014 study found that Mexican audiences spend an average of 37 minutes per day with magazines, which reach an estimated 41% of households (Estrategia EY 2015, pp. 5, 14). The Mexican media’s influence over Spanish speakers in the United States cannot be



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overstated, given that 63% of the US Hispanic/Latino population is of Mexican origin, and the long history of Mexican involvement in the US Spanish‐language media sector; further discussion follows below.

Venezuela Fox (1995) points out that “as late as 1935, 90 per cent of the Venezuelan population was illiterate, a situation shared by other, poorer countries of Central and South America” (p. 521). Significant gains were achieved in Venezuela during the twentieth century, with the literacy rate reaching 85% in 1981 and 97% in 2016.7 These increases are an outcome, in part, of the country’s energy wealth. As noted above, however, freedom of expression and the Venezuelan media sector have contracted significantly under the Chávez and Maduro administrations, causing hundreds of journalists to flee to other Latin American countries, North America, and Europe.

United States Although the principal focus of this chapter is Latin America, audiences for Spanish‐language and bilingual magazines in the USA are important participants in the hemispheric market and represent a substantial domestic market as well. Only Mexico had a larger number of Spanish speakers than the USA as this chapter went to print, and the USA was predicted to surpass Mexico and lead this category by 2050 (Sanchez 2015). Furthermore, the USA is the world’s wealthiest Spanish‐language media sector, with an estimated $1.7 trillion in spending power in 2018 surpassing the GDP of Spain at about $1.4 trillion8 (Morse 2018). As is the case in other niche and linguistic sectors, the lion’s share of research attention had been dedicated to newspapers and broadcasting. The first serially produced newspaper in the USA was published in Spanish in New Orleans, El Misisipí, beginning in 1808 (Kanellos 1993). Prior to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), in which Mexico ceded 525 000 square miles of territory to the USA following the Mexican‐American War (1846–1848), publications across Western North America were written in Spanish, and the language has endured in the region, alongside – and mixed with – English. Beginning in the 1980s, the so‐called Decade of the Hispanic, the US government, politicians, marketers, and media companies began devoting increased attention to Hispanics/Latino audiences and seeking ways to reach them effectively in both English and Spanish (Wilkinson 2016). Hispanic Business launched in 1979 and Hispanic – with a more general interest focus – in 1987; these two English‐language magazines closed in 2010 and 2014, respectively. Another prominent title, Vista (dual language, general interest) also ceased publication in 2014 when Cosmopolitan en Español was also replaced by an English‐language version, Cosmopolitan for Latinas. Two more popular titles in English, Glam Belleza Latina (fashion) and Parents Latina, launched shortly thereafter (Media Life 2015). When considering these magazine closures and launches, it is important to recall that a number of websites with similar emphases continue to offer comparable content, and that Hispanics/Latinos, who skew younger than the general US population, are avid users of the internet and mobile devices (Morse 2018). The relative youth (and spending habits) of Hispanics/Latinos led to an emphasis on the youth market by media companies and advertisers beginning in the mid‐2000s. But reaching out to media‐savvy younger consumers, many of whom have grown up “American” in the USA while eagerly retaining their cultural roots, can be risky business if the appeal is off kilter. A common strategy has been to offer bilingual content, something that younger audiences are familiar with through children’s television programming and children’s magazines, such as High Five Bilingüe. The increase in English‐language and bilingual media directed toward Hispanics/Latinos does not mean that magazine consumption in Spanish has fallen. Spanish‐language versions of

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popular counterparts in English, including People en Español and Selecciones del Reader’s Digest (often referred to simply as Selecciones), maintain steady readership, as do some entertainment‐ oriented titles discussed above, such as Vanidades and TV y Novelas.9 The increasing percentage of US Hispanics/Latinos born in the USA, 66% in 2015 – up from 60% in 2000, is associated with a decline in the percentage of Hispanics/Latinos living in urban areas who speak Spanish at home, from 78% in 2006 to 73% in 2015 (Flores 2017; Krogstad and Lopez 2017). Despite the intriguing dynamics of the industry and audiences, magazines are seldom included in industry analyses of US Hispanic/Latino media, such as those published by the Pew Research Center (Matsa 2015) or Statista.com, which includes five other media forms.10 Other media may generate more revenue, but do not enjoy magazines’ power to engage readers or maintain their interests over the long term and across generations. A vivid example of such longevity in both publishing and cultural practice is Lowrider, a Mexican American‐oriented auto and lifestyle magazine that was started by three university students in San Jose, California, in 1977; since 2007, it has been published by the owner of Motor Trend (Chappell 2012).

Conclusion This chapter has spanned a substantial period of history, from the sixteenth century to the present day, and a broad geosocial swath from the US Hispanic/Latino population to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America. Modern magazines are relatively recent manifestations of humankind’s efforts to record and impart information, processes that, in this region, date back to pre‐Columbian communication systems, including the Mayas’ codices (folding books written in hieroglyphic script on bark paper) and the Incas’ quipus (also known as “talking knots,” which conveyed information using string scripts). Political turmoil during various periods – such as resistance to colonial control from Europe, establishing new republics, resistance to military dictatorships, and contemporary leaders’ threats against the press – have stimulated print publications’ founding, and magnified their influence. Entertainment content entered the mix in the nineteenth century as parallel advances in communication technology and transportation enabled magazines’ mass distribution, and the public’s consumption of popular culture gained momentum. As the six country summaries indicate, popular culture and entertainment are prominent themes in magazines that are the most widely read across the region. This trend is likely to deepen as more consumers obtain access to digital communication technologies through which to engage mediated popular culture. If political, ideological, and religious differences have been at issue in the past, a topic of concern in the late twentieth and early twenty‐first centuries has been gender equity and women’s roles in society as conveyed through messages and representations appearing in media content, including magazines. Thus, numerous researchers have conducted discourse, textual, and content analyses to clarify how gender roles are defined and reinforced in general readership magazines, as well as those targeting girls/women or boys/men. As discussed above in relation to Brazil, Latin America has seen special attention paid to women’s magazines, past and present. For example, Torres Aguilar and Atilano Villegas (2015) analyze magazines directed toward women during Mexico’s Porfiriato period (1876–1911), finding that approaches to women’s education reflected the conflict between liberal and conservative forces at play since Mexico achieved independence in 1821. Córdoba (2018) applies structural semiotics to representations of esthetic surgery in the magazine Nueva Estética, noting that content often emphasizes women’s autonomy and empowerment; Franko et al. (2013) examined covers of Latina magazine from 1996 to 2011, concluding that a broader variety of body types were depicted over time with positive implications for women’s body image and health. Similar studies have been conducted across the region, and this thematic trend may be expected to continue in light of women’s increasing presence in the workforce, greater awareness of



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gender equity issues in many societies, growing concerns about media effects, and the global reverberations of #metoo and similar movements. Like other authors in this volume, we call for increased research attention to magazines in and across Latin American societies, including the US Hispanic/Latino sector. This scholarly focus should include examinations of the industry, such as publishers’ various responses to the digital challenge and innovative ways to generate revenue and command readers’ attention, but also on audiences in terms of media‐use habits, preferred content, and motivations for accessing it. Digital technologies generate ample data that could yield a deeper understanding of some topics (if used properly), but in light of traditional magazines’ declining readership and revenues, it is unlikely that such studies will be undertaken, in a sustained manner, in the foreseeable future.

Notes 1 We are grateful for assistance from Cristián Londoño Proaño (UANDES) and Daniel Jiménez (Texas Tech) in finding and collating information for specific countries. 2 An example in the USA was “Cosmo for Latinas Live,” a two‐day conference targeting millennial Latinas (Sebastian 2013). 3 “FIPP has more than 500 member companies, which includes 30 national associations, more than 350 media owners and more than 80 service providers to the industry and associated organizations, in more than 60 countries, all of whom use FIPP to find new business partners and gather information on potential markets.” (https://www.fipp.com/about‐fipp). 4 Additionally, an ad in Runners used thermochromic ink that reacted to body heat in order to indicate the type of shoe a runner required; an ad promoting a movie series employed ink with popcorn aroma; and an ad when dampened and wrapped around a beer bottle in a freezer, cut the cooling time in half. 5 http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/brazil‐population 6 This is the same year that Portugal’s regent prince Dom João arrived in Brazil as he fled Napoleon I’s occupation of Portugal. His son and grandson became Dom Pedro I and II. 7 https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/venezuela/literacy‐rate 8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal). 9 In 2017, Televisa Publishing and Digital, a major distributor of Spanish‐language magazines in the USA, changed its name to Televisa Brands Group. 10 https://www.statista.com/topics/1270/hispanic‐media

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32

Chinese Consumer Magazines Digital Transitions in an Evolving Cultural Economy Xiang Ren

Introduction Like many legacy media enterprises around the globe, China’s consumer magazine industry is facing a crisis due to the impact of the Internet and digital and mobile media. A several‐decade trend of growth in advertising spending on print magazines reversed itself in 2012, dropping by 6.6%. Print magazines’ ad revenues continue to decline (Cao and Zhai 2013), while advertising spending on digital media is increasing rapidly (CTR 2016; IBISWorld 2019). At the same time, subscriptions to China’s leading magazines have been plummeting for over a decade. For example, Stories (Gu Shi Hui), one of the country’s bestselling consumer magazines, sold 7.6 million copies at its peak, only to drop to its current circulation of 800 000. These developments forced some periodicals out of the marketplace. Since 2014, a growing number of popular magazines – including Ruili Fashion Pioneer (a leading domestic fashion magazine), New Science Fictions (Xin Ke Huan), One Reading (Yi Du), Self (Yueji), Femina (Yi Zhou), and Readers Original (Duzhe Yuanchuang Ban) – folded or announced they would cease their print editions. The crisis of consumer magazine publishing in China became further evident in the departures of several founding and chief editors, including Xiangfeng Yin of The First Financial Weekly (Diyi Caijing Zhoukann), Xincheng Feng of New Weekly (Xin Zhoukan), and Wei Miao in Life Week (Sanlian Shenghuo Zhoukan), some of whom joined digital media enterprises instead. Despite the digital disruption faced by China’s traditional publishing, some magazines managed to develop innovative models and strategies. This trend reflects a complex co‐evolution and convergence of emergent and established systems of magazine publishing. The cultural production and digital transition of Chinese consumer magazines is characterized by unique elements that do not fully mirror the changes in magazine publishing in the West. However, the value of these new and emerging magazine publishing models in China transcends geography. The lessons learned and the best practices developed by Chinese publishers could inform international magazine publishing communities seeking to redefine their business models, cultural roles, and relationship to audiences. This chapter reviews the digital strategies of Chinese magazines and discusses the changing culture and economy of consumer magazines. It begins with an overview of the regulations and history of Chinese consumer magazine publishing, from the country’s market reform to the recent digital disruption. This is followed by a section outlining three types of innovations adopted by Chinese magazine publishers dealing with the opportunities and challenges of digital The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

418 Ren publishing; these new strategies are illustrated with examples from the practice of some leading magazine titles. The conclusion summarizes the evolution of Chinese magazines and ventures into a discussion of their direction in the future.

State Regulation of Chinese Consumer Magazines Like other media industries in China, consumer magazine publishing is state‐owned and state‐ controlled. Currently, about 3000 consumer magazine titles, almost all in Chinese, are published and circulated. This number pales in comparison to the vast sea of periodicals published in the UK and the USA due to restrictions on journal publishing licenses enforced by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT). In China, publishers need such a license to edit and publish magazines, and only the central and regional bureaus of publication and press have the authority to allocate International Standard Serial Numbers (ISSN) and issue licenses accordingly. In practice, however, many more titles exist because many Chinese publishers use the same ISSN to publish several versions of the same publication – for example, turning monthly magazines into fortnightly or weekly editions. This approach effectively addresses the gap between the vast and diverse demand for magazine content and advertising and the restricted scope of publishing enforced by the regulators of China’s consumer magazine industry. Using these additional licenses, state‐owned publishers can collaborate with foreign companies, advertising agencies, and private publishing studios (gong zuo shi) in co‐publishing magazines. In some cases, the business of state‐owned publishers has degenerated into renting out publishing licenses and charging only management fees – without any involvement in the editing, production, and distribution of magazines.

A Short History of Consumer Magazine Publishing In the print age, Chinese consumer magazines enjoyed a vast scale of both subscription and advertising revenues. Despite tight government control, the industry has been dynamic, fast‐ growing, and fast‐evolving. The history of contemporary Chinese consumer magazines since the Cultural Revolution encompasses roughly four stages, which have often overlapped in time: (i) marketization; (ii) internationalization; (iii) privatization; and (iv) digitalization. Each of these stages will be detailed in the following paragraphs.

Marketization This stage started in the early 1980s, when the Chinese government reduced subsidies for state‐ owned and state‐run periodical publishers. Many poorly subsidized publishers – usually owned and supervised by social organizations, such as the Association of Females and the Association of Science and Technology – had to implement reforms and seek market revenues. The result was a transformation of the magazine publishing industry. Many magazines changed their titles and redefined their content areas and editorial style to target new readers. Publications previously focused on political, academic, and administrative issues metamorphosed into general‐interest magazines, covering popular science, culture, and everyday life. This transformation resulted in the birth of many top‐tier consumer magazine titles in China, including Readers (Duzhe), Family (Jiating), and Friends (Zhiyin). In those early years, the management and operation of consumer magazines lacked professionalism and efficiency. Many editors and managers knew little about commercial magazine publishing. Further, as China’s economic reform had just begun, domestic advertising demand



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was low, forcing consumer magazines to depend heavily on subscription and newsstand sales. Though the low prices of magazines encouraged subscriptions, publishers still struggled to achieve financial independence.

Internationalization Foreign magazines began entering the Chinese market in the late 1980s as part of the global expansion of multinational media corporations (Flew 2007). International magazine publishers had two major reasons to be interested in the Chinese market: (i) market saturation and falling revenues in the West; and (ii) the global market ambitions of their big brand advertisers (Moeran 2008). Foreign publishers were (and still are) not permitted to edit and publish magazines in China. Instead, they must collaborate with local publishers to operate publishing businesses. In the early days of the industry, this process was pioneered by several fashion magazines. The Shanghai Translation Publishing House and Hachette were the standard setters; they began co‐publishing Elle in 1988. In 2002, China’s publishing administrator officially approved the joint copyright agreement between Harper’s Bazaar and the Chinese Fashion Publishing Group, even though in practice publication had already occurred for several years. Last but not least, Conde´ Nast collaborated with China Pictorial Press to launch the Chinese version of Clothes and Beauty Vogue in 2005. Collaboration with leading international publishers has allowed Chinese magazines to modernize their business strategies and enjoy improvements in their editing, advertising, and commercial operations. The process of internationalization deeply re‐shaped the culture and economy of consumer magazine publishing in China. With financial support from advertisers, fashion magazines ushered a paradigm shift in consumer magazine publishing. Beautifully printed in full color and sold at unreasonably low prices, these magazines quickly attracted vast readership, leading to improved print quality, graphic design, and business operations for the whole magazine industry. Its priority appeared to be the promotion of global consumerism, in addition to other key functions, such as education, information, and entertainment.

Privatization By the 1990s, the Chinese economy grew rapidly, and the domestic advertising market was booming. This growth facilitated the privatization of consumer magazines. Some advertising agencies entered the industry by publishing consumer magazines that were financially sponsored or cross‐subsidized by advertisers who ranged from fashion retailers to makers of electronic goods. Some experienced editors of state‐owned magazines, who had an interest in more market‐ driven models than their publications would allow, launched their own studios. They rented publishing licenses and produced consumer magazines that appealed to various fan cultures, focusing on topics such as sports, Hollywood films, electronic games, and genre fiction. The commercial success of such private consumer magazines created localized “consumer society” undercurrents, stimulating public consumption both materially and culturally (Li 2012).

Digitization Around 2005, China’s publishing marketplace was shaken by a wave of electronic magazines produced on desktop computers. Excited by advantages such as interactivity, low production and distribution costs, and freedom from licensing, many advertising agencies, publishing studios, Internet start‐ups, social groups, and even creative individuals began publishing so‐called “original electronic magazines” (yuan chuang za zhi). Several large Web‐based platforms  –  including

420 Ren Zcom, Xplus, and POCO – mediated their production and publication. Although these platforms also reached out to leading print magazine titles, most traditional publishers at the time declined the opportunity to be published and distributed electronically. The electronic magazines represented an emergent medium that attracted investors and advertisers seeking an opportunity to create targeted and specialized digital publications and advertisements. However, desktop‐computer‐based electronic magazines did not achieve the commercial success that had been expected of them. In part, their lackluster performance was due to their failure to provide a level of enjoyment comparable to that experienced by audiences when reading glossy, full‐color print magazines. The pioneer electronic magazines also failed to provide high‐quality and engaging content, even though they had at their disposal various interactive tools and the vast opportunities presented by multi‐media journalism. As a result, they were unable to please advertisers, and lasted only a couple of years before the bubble created by venture capitals and exaggerated distribution numbers burst. Overall, this initial wave of electronic magazine publishing challenged, but did not disrupt, the traditional consumer magazine industry.

Digital Disruption The real disruption started in the age of the mobile Internet, particularly after the iPad’s launch in 2010. China is perhaps the world’s largest and most dynamic market for mobile Internet and mobile reading devices (Ren 2016). In the context of mobile publishing and reading, three major disruptive forces – digital content distribution, social media, and online advertising – emerged to challenge the established models of consumer magazines. The rise of digital platforms and Internet aggregators has given rise to the unbundling and re‐bundling of magazine content, well beyond the original cultural and economic boundaries mediated by print magazines. In mobile publishing and reading, magazine articles can be found virtually anywhere, including websites (optimized for mobile browsing), smartphones, iPads, and e‐readers. Content no longer exists as a digitized version of print; rather, articles are remixed and reorganized beyond the vessels of specific issues or publishers and integrated into various apps that range from digital magazine newsstands like Zinio to highly customizable news apps like Flipboard and Feedly. Readers prefer multiple magazine issues and content sources on a single device or app, with interactive functions, and – most importantly – convenience and quick access to all favored content, as well as sharing and social media functions (The Association of Magazine Media n.d.). Online platforms and aggregators thus have strong comparative advantages over print magazines in meeting readers’ demands. China’s Internet firewall and blockage of global Internet players, such as Google, has disabled many foreign digital reading apps. The domestic reading apps, usually inspired by or copying the overseas models, are prevalent in the digital aggregation, integration, and distribution of magazine content. They include the digital magazine newsstands (similar to Zinio) Longyuan and Dooland (dulan tianxia) and Flipboard‐like apps, such as Zaker and Netease Cloud Reading. All these options enable readers to access magazine content on an article‐to‐article basis, in highly customized ways, and across different magazines. Cross‐subsidized by venture capital and online advertising, most such platforms also manage to provide readers with free access to popular magazine articles. As a result, traditional magazine publishers are becoming simply content providers for “mega” magazine platforms. Even more profoundly disruptive is the fact that these apps have changed audiences’ reading habits, replaced their dependence on print magazines with reliance on digital platforms, and even reshaped their demands for information and entertainment. It is and it will probably remain extremely challenging for traditional publishers in China to diminish the ability of digital distributors to lock readers into their platforms.



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Popular Chinese social media platforms, such as WeChat and Weibo, also challenge the cultural role and commercial value of magazines in connecting readers into communities with common interests and shared identities. The most popular “big V” accounts (verified microbloggers) in Weibo have over 50 million followers, and the readership of the articles in WeChat’s top public accounts is nearly 100 000. Arguably, every “big V” account in Weibo or leading public account in WeChat is, by nature, a popular and influential magazine. They periodically publish focused content but are more responsive than traditional magazines to the latest news; they connect millions of people efficiently and interactively. The advertising revenues of Chinese social media platforms reached US$3.7 billion in 2016 (Buss 2016), though it is only a small part of the online advertising market. Booming digital content industries have become much more attractive for advertisers than the old‐school print and broadcasting media. It is estimated that 2017 digital advertising expenditure approximates US$50.3 billion, with 76.4% spent on mobile Internet advertising; by comparison, ad spending on traditional and print media is only US$35.7 billion (Perez 2017). Beyond advertising, social media platforms in China have found other ways to monetize digital content, most often through integration with e‐commerce. Many micro‐bloggers or social media account owners sell commodities directly to their followers, which further enhances their popularity gained through digital content. The increasingly closer ties between digital publishing and e‐commerce have further eroded the cultural and economic basis of consumer magazine publishing in China. The profound evolution of publishing models is driven by creative social networking users and the digital creative economy, resulting in a new system of digital publishing that has replaced digitized print publishing (Ren 2014). To survive in the new digital environment, traditional publishers continually seek “sustaining innovations” to maintain their role as intermediaries between content, readers, and advertisers (Christensen 2013). In the following sections, I will focus on three types of such strategies or models and will analyze them through case studies of leading magazine titles.

Convergence and “Omni‐Media” Models Henry Jenkins (2006) uses the term “convergence” to describe a transformation “from medium‐ specific content toward content that flows across multiple media channels, towards the increased interdependence of communications systems, toward multiple ways of accessing media content” (p. 243). Inspired by media convergence, the so‐called “omni‐media” is perhaps the most widely adopted model of digital magazine publishing in China. Many Chinese magazine publishers have developed relevant strategies, aiming to build multi‐channel, cross‐platform, and multimedia systems for distributing content, expanding readership, and increasing advertising capacity or revenues. Publishers believe the commercial value of their content and readership can be maximized through convergence. One example is Flower City (Hua Cheng), a leading literary magazine in China, which achieved both cultural and commercial success in the print age as a publication that marketed itself as offering “pure” literature to mass readers. However, its commercial viability and cultural clout were deeply eroded by digital media, manifesting in a continuing decline of subscription revenues. Flower City responded by launching multi‐platform and multimedia distribution. The publisher has licensed content to almost all major digital reading platforms, including Jingdong e‐Reading, Magazine Shop, Douban e‐Reading, Chinese CNKI, and BoKan. Flower City also uses Chinese e‐commerce platforms such as Taobao and Wechat e‐commerce to sell both electronic and print versions of magazines. This publisher‐called “print‐plus‐electronic” model has led to an increase in readership and revenues. However, the Flower City’s omni‐media strategy has not changed its overall publishing business models; it only combines traditional content production with digital distribution.

422 Ren A more ambitious approach was employed by the consumer magazine giant Readers (duzhe), the top bestselling consumer magazine title in China, currently with 8 million copies printed per issue (down from a record high of 10 million in 2006). Readers Magazine Group is a public company in the Chinese stock market, which trades shares from a variety of media businesses, including other magazine publishers. Encouraged by its top brand and strong financial capacity, Readers attempted to develop its own digital publishing and reading platforms from the very beginning. The company created specialized reading apps for smartphones and tablets, and integrated its websites, print magazines, and interactive functions to provide value‐added information services. Inspired by the success of Xiaomi and other Chinese smartphone giants, which developed an ecosystem of hardware combined with operating systems, Readers’ omni‐media strategy has also extended into hardware industries. The company hopes to use its bestselling magazine and big brand to attract loyal readers into such ecosystems and transform its print dominance into digital power. In 2012, Readers Group launched its own Android‐based 9.7‐in. tablet, named Happy Reading (Yuedu, same pronunciation of reading in Chinese). The tablet came with access to the archives of all Readers magazines in the past 30 years. In 2014, Readers Group also developed a double‐screen smartphone (like Yotaphone), with a normal full‐color LCD screen and an e‐ink screen. The company has also launched Kindle‐like e‐readers and other types of smartphones and tablets. For a magazine publisher, the Readers Group’s experiments were innovative and bold. The company’s radical expansion into the hardware industry reflected, in part, the magazine industry’s universal concerns about distribution dominance, media monopoly, and digital platform economy. However, there were also considerations unique to China. For example, as a leading state‐owned publisher, Readers was encouraged, supported, and even pushed by government bureaucrats to venture into digital upgrades and convergence; the potential of the proposed projects was judged not by their commercial viability, but by the scale and ambition shown by the company to the administrative institutions. However, a magazine publisher aiming to develop its business in electronic hardware, smartphone operating systems, and relevant IT industries faces obvious gaps of expertise, talent, and understanding. Unsurprisingly, Readers Group’s ambitious digital expansion was not commercially successful. Its new products had limited market impact because a consumer magazine brand and vast readership are far from enough to create comparative advantages over leading hardware corporations such Apple, Huawei, Xiaomi, and Samsung.

Social Media and Magazines: the Case of Life Week While the rise of social media has disrupted the established cultural roles and economic models of consumer magazines, as discussed earlier, there are also opportunities for them to leverage social media in order to achieve viability and sustainability in the digital publishing environment; the leading consumer magazine Life Week (Sanlilan Shenghuo Zhoukan) offers a good example. The predecessor of Life Week was Life Journal (shenghuo zhoukan), first published in the 1920s. The new version, re‐launched in 1995, had the ambitious goal of replicating the success of Time magazine in China. But soon the editors found a more suitable niche: a comprehensive news‐and‐culture weekly for middle‐class readers, as suggested by the motto “a magazine and the lifestyle it advocates.” Life Week also experimented with developing its own digital reading platforms, particularly an app called “lifeweeker.” As in the case of Readers, the magazine’s vast readership and print‐age supremacy did not translate easily into digital publishing success. Life Week then turned its focus to China’s dominant social media platform Weibo. Many of the magazine’s editors are active Weibo users, and have been deeply involved in the digital public sphere in China as opinion leaders or Internet celebrities. They have large numbers of followers attracted by their personal fame, expertise, and networks, as well as their professional identities as editors of one of China’s top magazines. Weibo thus provides unprecedented opportunity for the editors, readers, writers, and the



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magazine’s content to interact with each other. Life Week’s editors do not hold utilitarian attitudes toward Weibo by expecting immediate rewards in terms of subscriptions or revenues. Rather, they value and enjoy the exchange of ideas and engagement with Weibo users and their loyal readers. Life Week’s strategies in using WeChat, another Chinese dominant social media platform, are more directly relevant to publishing. Liu (2016) summarizes the evolution of Life Week’s WeChat publishing in three stages: Salon, Magazine, and “New” Medium. Based on a WeChat official public account, Life Week’s channel publishes both print magazine articles and born‐ digital original content. In other words, its WeChat account represents neither simple digitization of print content nor only a social media marketing tool; rather, it is an independent digital‐content platform operated by a team of professional editors. The magazine’s WeChat public account is different from the print editions, featuring more news reports, short articles, and topical discussions that suit the social media environment, but it manifests the same editorial style and appears intended for the same target readership. Life Week recently launched a new reading app called San Lian Zhong Du in both IOS and Android systems as a retrial of its previous unsuccessful experiment in new publishing and reading environments. The new‐generation app has three main functions: (i) to allow readers to purchase digital versions of magazine articles through micropayment, as well as read free content; (ii) to enable users to write and publish their own articles by applying for freelance contracts with the magazine; and (iii) to encourage readers to share their notes, highlights, and comments on the content they read with their friends on social media. Like many publishers and content providers in China, Life Week hopes to leverage its advantages in content, brand, and readership to build its own social media publishing platform, with control over distribution, users, and usage. Distribution dominance has been a key issue in both pre‐digital and digital‐content industries (Cunningham and Silver 2013). The competition for power and control is evolving particularly in the context of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2016), in which online mediators of communications become powerful players with the capacity and privilege of owning and controlling user data. Like publishers in the West, who struggle to put Facebook’s and Twitter’s power to distribute digital content to their own advantage, Chinese magazine publishers are seeking to establish their own “platform” businesses independent from social media giants.

From “Dual” to Mixed and Multiple Products As magazine business models tend to move from simplicity to complexity, the relationships between publishers, consumers, and advertisers are currently undergoing a radical shift in the balance of power (Holmes 2012). In China, consumer magazine publishers are beginning to rethink the traditional “dual‐product” framework, which called for selling content to readers and selling readers to advertisers, by either becoming “one product” (so‐called customer magazines) or multiple products (brand extensions). “Customer” magazines are publications focused on niche interests or are closely related to specific industries that no longer depend on selling content. Instead, they can provide free content to readers thanks to subsidies from the industries they serve. Numerous Chinese popular consumer magazines are now partially transforming into customer magazines. A typical example is Popular Cinema (Dazhong Dianying), first published in 1950, with a record of 9.5 million subscribers at its peak. Its market shares and cultural clout have declined rapidly in the past 20 years due to both competition from other magazines and digital disruptions. Popular Cinema now employs a combined business model as a consumer‐customer magazine. It still sells print versions to general readers and attracts advertisers who are mostly film producers; however, it is also distributed for free to the VIP members of over 200 Wanda cinemas and the guests of 30 Wanda five‐star hotels, with sponsorship from Wanda Group. They also build a 360° multi‐media platform based on free digital content including a movie news portal, digital reading app, and social media expansion.

424 Ren Popular Cinema is not unique in employing such a combined model. The rise of customer magazines or mixed consumer‐customer approaches, as well as the decline of consumer magazines with traditional dual products, is a universal trend. For example, in Australia, readership figures for print and digital supermarket custom magazines are approximately double the numbers for most popular consumer magazines (Roy Morgan Research 2017). This trend is transforming many publications’ editorial practices because the purpose of customer magazines is to “espouse the values, rituals, and stories that keep readers attached to” specific brands and products (Johinke 2017, p. 301; Dyson 2007). However, the original purpose of consumer magazines  –  to kindle demand, desire, and conspicuous consumption – remains relevant. Ballaster et al. (1991) observe: “The history of the development of the women’s magazine as a commodity is also the history of the construction of the woman as a consumer” (p. 47). Indeed, consumer magazines are an integral part of consumerism. In the digital age, such convergence is much deeper and more profound in China. Facilitated by digital technologies, social networks, and e‐commerce, a paradigm shift is occurring in extracting and exploiting magazines’ capacity to construct consumers and create demands. For other magazines, digital transformation centers around brand expansion. One example is Parents Must Read, a leading consumer magazine for young parents, which offers advice on how to raise a healthy and clever child between the ages of 0 and 12. It has established a commercial ecosystem, “turning its 1 million readers into 1 million users and consumers” (Li and Zhang 2016). The strategy started with the publication of a series of books and e‐books based on magazine articles. Due to market demand, the magazine also developed specialized reading apps, as well as WeChat and Weibo accounts, to distribute popular articles. As Parents Must Read has become a trusted and reliable source of information and guidance for its readers, who are mostly inexperienced young parents, their dependence provides significant commercial opportunities. The publishers organize offline forums, workshops, educational performances, and training sessions for both parents and children. Though not all these activities are commercial or for‐profit, they have effectively connected readers into a community with shared concerns and a strong sense of belonging, which is further enhanced through social media. This forms a strong basis for the magazine’s brand expansion via e‐commerce platforms, where they sell various children’s commodities, including educational materials, clothes, food, and tickets for entertainment events. As both commodities and cultural products, Chinese consumer magazines have found that brand expansions and/or partial transformation to customer magazines offer new opportunities to increase their commercial viability and financial sustainability. This is facilitated by network technologies, online advertising, and e‐commerce. On the other hand, the “the not‐entirely‐ separate interests” of advertisers, industries, and readers remain a critical concern, as “all kinds of contradictions emerge to affect their [magazines’] content” (Moeran 2008, p. 267). This echoes age‐old critiques of magazine as vehicles of consumerism, as well as the sometimes limited independence of magazine journalists.

Discussion and Conclusion Samir Husni, known as Mr. Magazine, has defined the magazine as an “experience” that engages the audience’s senses; he argues that, “Without the ink, the paper, the touch, the smell, the look, the taste, it will not be called a magazine” (Husni 2010). Digital magazine innovations, however, no longer engage most of these senses. The key issue now is not how to digitize the senses, but how to re‐define magazines’ cultural and economic role. Undeniably, China’s consumer magazines are developing in a unique political, economic, and cultural environment, in sharp contrast with magazine publishing in the West. State‐owned publishers enjoy a policy‐protected monopoly. Chinese magazines also benefit from a vast scale of



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readership, a booming advertising industry, and a rapidly growing economy at large. Last but not least, China has the world’s most dynamic and fastest growing digital media systems, which both disrupt and transform magazine publishing. However, the innovations developed by Chinese magazine publishers and their experiments – both successful and unsuccessful – are of global value because they not only address universal concerns related to digital opportunities and challenges, but also contribute to the academe’s and industry’s endeavor to redefine magazines by changing their cultural and economic roles. Johnson and Prijatel (1999) identify three major factors behind magazines’ success or failure: (i) a highly focused editorial philosophy; (ii) a clearly defined formula; and (iii) a thorough understanding of and connection with the audience. As illustrated by the case studies mentioned earlier, the digital innovations of Chinese magazines are still within the boundaries of this framework, but their cultural production and consumption, and business models are changing profoundly. First and foremost, magazines are no longer unique products because of a growing number of digital alternatives. Many economic and regulatory entry barriers to the magazine business are being removed, which encourages digital disruption from outside. For example, the online news app Flipboard defines itself as “a magazine for everyone,” whereby everyone can edit, curate, and publish his or her own magazines. In China, popular social media accounts are also by nature “magazines,” and even much more than “magazines” in the three aspects identified by Johnson and Prijatel. In short, digital publishing has expanded the scale and scope of consumer magazines. Chris Peters (2012) contends that space, speed, and convenience are critical factors to consider when we interrogate how audiences consume media across transmedia platforms. Through disruptive innovations, new forms of “magazines” create new values for readers and advertisers, and usher in more cost‐effective ways of production and marketing. Through multiple distribution channels, social media engagement, and e‐commerce, digital innovations enlarge the space of magazine communications. Digital publishing increases the diversity of content, the scale of readership, and the customizability of advertising; all these advantages help to meet the changing demands of both readers and advertisers in digital environments. Digital publishing enables readers to access content, advertisements, and online shops conveniently and instantly, outside the traditional limitations of space or time. However, digital magazine innovations have not changed the nature of magazines as platforms that rely on content to bring together people with shared interests and then exploit the commercial values of their reader communities. Just as David Abrahamson (1996) suggests, a magazine offers “specific information in a specific form that can be expected to appeal to a definable segment of readers” (p. 28). Though the forms of communication and the group interactions are diversified, upgraded, and transformed in the digital age, the nature of grouping people by their shared interest remains the same. Magazine readers, connected by culture, create knowledge and generate commercial values as groups (Hartley and Potts 2014). Thus, the current digital transformation is not the end of the magazine form but its rebirth. As the founding editor of Vogue’s Chinese edition has argued, a “magazine is nothing but a medium, and we should not be restricted by a specific medium. Rather, (print) magazine is only one of the many media and we should explore more” (Li and Zhang 2016). In history, magazines have “offered their readers a privileged space, or world, within which to construct and explore the … self” (Ballaster et al. 1991, p. 176). Taofen Zou, a reputable publisher and the founder of Life Journal, had a similar insight about a century ago: publishing a magazine is like inviting a couple of friends to chat and catch up every Sunday. While the digital evolution of Chinese magazines will continue, such “privileged spaces” will continue to exist regardless of medium or form. The future of the magazine industry depends on how well it recognizes the new opportunities associated with such privileged spaces and how effectively it exploits the commercial values of content and community, and advertising.

426 Ren

References Abrahamson, D. (1996). Magazine‐Made America: The Cultural Transformation of the Postwar Periodical. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton. Ballaster, R., Beetham, M., Frazer, E., and Hebron, S. (1991). Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Buss, S. (2016). Digital Advertising: Social Media. Hamburg: Statista. Cao, S. and Zhai, S. (2013). The advertising revenue continued to decline in the magazine and newspaper industries in the first half of 2013 (6 September). http://media.sohu.com/20130906/n386032272. shtml (accessed 26 November 2019). Christensen, C.M. (2013). The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. CTR (2016). 2015 Review of Chinese Advertising Expenditure. Beijing: CTR Market Research. Cunningham, S. and Silver, J. (2013). Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Dyson, L. (2007). Customer magazines: the rise of glossies as brand extensions. Journalism Studies 8 (4): 634–641. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700701412159. Flew, T. (2007). Understanding Global Media. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Hartley, J. and Potts, J. (2014). Cultural Science: A Natural History of Stories, Demes, Knowledge and Innovation. London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing. Holmes, T. (2012). Magazine Journalism. London, UK: Sage. Husni, S. (2010). So, what is a magazine, really? Read on…. https://mrmagazine.wordpress.com/2010/ 06/11/so‐what‐is‐a‐magazine‐really‐read‐on (accessed 11 July 2017). IBISWorld. (2019). Magazine and Periodical Publishing Industry in China  –  Market Research Report. https://www.ibisworld.com/china/market‐research‐reports/magazine‐periodical‐publishing‐ industry (accessed 26 September 2019). Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York, NY: New York University Press. Johinke, R. (2017). Get swiping! Journalism Studies 18 (3): 288–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X. 2015.1058181. Johnson, S. and Prijatel, P. (1999). The Magazine from Cover to Cover: Inside a Dynamic Industry. Chicago, IL: NTC. Li, S. (2012). A new generation of lifestyle magazine journalism in China. Journalism Practice 6 (1): 122–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2011.622901. Li, M. and Zhang, J. (2016). Strategy handbook: Must‐read for magazine transitions. http://www.bhzwy. com/mainpages/news_shuchu.aspx?newsid=3582&lesstypevalue=LE108 (accessed 10 July 2017). Liu, K. (2016). The evolution of WeChat operation in consumer magazines: the example of Life Week, 2012–2016. Science Technology & Publication 2016 (9): 112–115. Moeran, B. (2008). Economic and cultural production as structural paradox: the case of international fashion magazine publishing. International Review of Sociology 18 (2): 267–281. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/03906700802087944. Perez, B. (2017). Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent dominate China’s red‐hot digital advertising market. South China Morning Post (8 March). http://www.scmp.com/tech/china‐tech/article/2076802/alibaba‐ baidu‐tencent‐dominate‐chinas‐red‐hot‐digital‐advertising (accessed on 12 June 2017). Peters, C. (2012). Journalism to go: the changing spaces of news consumption. Journalism Studies 13 (5– 6): 695–705. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2012.662405. Ren, X. (2014). Creative users, social networking, and new models of publishing. Cultural Science Journal 7 (1): 58–67. Ren, X. (2016). Between sustaining and disruptive innovation: China’s digital publishing industry in the age of mobile internet. In: Handbook of Cultural and Creative Industries in China (ed. M. Keane), 377–395. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing. Roy Morgan Research. (2017). Australian magazine readership, 12 months to March 2017. http://www. roymorgan.com/industries/media/readership/magazine‐readership (accessed 22 May 2017). Srnicek, N. (2016). Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity Press. The Association of Magazine Media. (n.d.). Magazine media readers and tablets. https://asme.magazine. org/insights‐resources/research‐publications/guides‐studies/magazine‐media‐readers‐and‐tablets (accessed 18 June 2017).

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Indian Magazines Revitalized in Response to Demand for Long‐form Storytelling Savyasaachi Jain and Usha Raman

Introduction In the 1980s, the imagination of the Indian newsmagazine veered between the slick, very US‐ inspired India Today, with a focus on current affairs, and the older, more eclectic The Illustrated Weekly of India, published by the Times of India group. There were others, in between and on either side  –  Sunday, the belligerent Probe, the decidedly anti‐Congress Surya  –  soon to be joined by many more as liberalization ushered in a boom in consumer products accompanied by a growth in advertising budgets. Vinod Mehta, maverick editor and founder of Outlook, quips in his eminently readable autobiography, Lucknow Boy, that in the late 1980s to mid‐1990s, “India Today enjoyed the status the United States did after the fall of the Soviet Union – a superpower in a unipolar world” (Mehta 2011, p. 159). But, as Mehta surveyed the Indian magazine scene at that time, in preparation for the launch of Outlook, he also found that India Today was a “fatigued newsmagazine,” and the absence of competition had allowed it “to get away with journalistic murder” (p. 161). It was this space that slowly began to be filled with many variants on the standard newsmagazine – beginning with Outlook, which, Mehta decided, would be as far from the model set by India Today as they could get, starting with the red border! And then, early in the new ­millennium, came The Caravan, a monthly that set itself apart from the crowd in multiple ways. Like Outlook, it shunned comparison to the existing heavyweights, preferring instead to style itself as a magazine of narrative journalism, one that would consciously and smartly combine the democratic duty of solid reportage with a writing style based on in-depth reportage and analysis that offered reading pleasure (Jose 2009).

Fitting into a Complex Media Landscape Magazines occupy a curious niche in contemporary Indian journalism; they are vitally present, yet discursively marginal – in scholarship, in the bookstore, in the public imagination. One of the only recent scholarly commentaries on magazines in India also notes that “English language Indian news magazines … have somehow fallen through the cracks of academic scrutiny” (Parameswaran et al. 2019, p. 73). On the one hand, magazines offer a quiet and contemplative space and, on the other, an intense and rigorous culture of storytelling that other media forms The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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have been unable to undertake in recent times. Newsmagazines serve a vital function in democratic deliberation, breaking and pursuing major stories that other mainstream have perhaps found too sensitive – stories that seek to hold the government to account or expose unsavory aspects of the media itself, for instance. Freelance journalist Dilip D’Souza, writing in the early part of the millennium, bemoans the relative absence of solid investigative reporting in the mainstream media: “… media pay too little attention, dig too infrequently, and rarely deep enough … stories are hardly followed beyond initial reports” (D’Souza 2005, p. 68). It is this gap that newsmagazines have tended to fill, unburdened as they are with the same pressures of time and a punishing daily news cycle, compounded by the demands of digital media consumption. As a product, the Indian magazine today seems to be sustaining itself in legacy formats while also finding space and readership in digital formats. As a form, magazine style journalism has staked a very visible claim in the mainstream newspaper, with more long‐form reporting appearing in weekend supplements and as online extras. At the same time, the fortunes of the magazine have been on a roller coaster in recent times. They rose through the first decade of the twenty‐ first century, when magazines kept pace with a rapidly expanding Indian media landscape. In the second decade, they fell steadily behind the rest of the media. However, as the 2010s draw to an end, there are renewed signs of life, with methodological changes in readership surveys revealing that their reach had been grossly underestimated for several years. This chapter explores the persistence of magazine journalism as a packaged product and a form of storytelling in twenty‐first‐century India, attempting to locate it in a cultural and socio‐political context of media production and consumption.

Some Downs but Many Ups The Indian magazine has in many senses been the neglected stepchild in a media landscape that is among the most vibrant and energetic in the world. India is the world’s largest newspaper market, having overtaken China in 2010 (Kilman 2011) and the second largest television market after China, with nearly 200 million television households being served by 900 channels. It is the fastest growing large economy, but media expansion has consistently outstripped gross domestic product (GDP) growth by several percentage points since the beginning of the century. In 2017, Indian media grew by more than 12.6% and analysts expect it to keep growing at a similar rate over the next few years (Ernst and Young 2017, p. 11). Differentials exist, of course – in 2016, the television industry grew by more than 11% and digital media by 29%, but the print industry as a whole lagged behind at 6.3% (KPMG 2017, p. 2). Indian newspapers continue to expand as they reap the dividends of technology, increasing literacy, and higher buying power in rural and semi‐rural areas, but magazines were seen to have faltered in recent years under the challenges of digitalization and competition from newer, flashier, and more energetic media. These include web sites like scroll.in and firstpost.in as well as those with a decidedly ideological positioning such as newsminute.in and thewire.in, all of which in terms of style are more like magazines than daily newspapers. Within the print industry, magazines have been overshadowed in terms of public profile, if not in terms of sheer numbers, by the aggressive growth of daily newspapers. In the six years between 2010–2011 and 2016– 2017, 6375 new titles and editions of daily newspapers were registered (Registrar of Newspapers for India 2017). The number of periodicals launched during this period was more than four times this figure, but daily newspapers occupied much greater mindspace within the media industries because of frenetic activity, price wars, and innovative technology‐driven strategies such as hyperlocalization. For example, The Times of India grew from 12 to 33 editions across the country between 2010 and 2014, and some newspapers in Indian languages now have dozens of editions, with pages customized to relatively small geographical areas.



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Figures from the body that enumerates Indian publications, the Registrar of Newspapers for India (RNI), reveal that newsmagazines are by far the most important genre within magazines. RNI classifies magazines in 24 genres, ranging from news and current affairs to sport, women’s magazines, literary and culture, films, science and technology, and the arts. More than 90% of all magazines (and more than 98% of all weeklies) are categorized under news and current affairs, followed distantly by social welfare, education, literary and culture, and medicine and health, in that order (Registrar of Newspapers for India 2017, p. 445). Some women’s titles, such as Vanitha in Malayalam, and Grah Lakshmi and Meri Saheli (both in Hindi), rank highly in terms of circulation, but this is not a genre that is expanding in numbers. Sports magazines, on the other hand, have been almost completely wiped out by television and the internet. In the mid‐2000s, magazines were growing at 12–14% annually on the back of economic expansion and liberalized regulations that permitted foreign investment up to 26% in Indian magazines and Indian editions of foreign magazines, and 100% for scientific and technical magazines (PricewaterhouseCoopers 2007, 2008). Several international titles, including People, Forbes, Fortune, Vogue, Time Out, Lonely Planet, and a host of niche magazines entered the Indian market. However, this period of rapid growth ended as the decade drew to a close. Magazines struggled to cope with digital media, the financial crisis of 2008 and the rapid growth of newspapers, which had expanded into rural areas and grabbed a share of the advertising for luxury goods as they adopted four‐color printing and glossy supplements. While magazines continued to grow, the rest of the industry grew far faster, with the result that their visibility and importance declined. Industry estimates of their share in the print industry as a whole fell from a sizable 8% in 2005 to 6% in 2010 (KPMG 2011, p. 39) and further to 4.4% in 2016 (KPMG 2017, p. 104). In 2016, figures suggested that magazines had stopped growing and started shrinking (KPMG 2017, p. 90). During this period, Marie Claire, Geo, People, and Lonely Planet stopped publishing, and in 2015, the multi‐edition newsmagazine India Today shut down its editions in the southern Indian languages of Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. All the same, it is perhaps too early to write off the Indian magazine for several reasons – the sheer enthusiasm of magazine publishers, a sharp upward revision in the estimated reach of magazines in 2018, and the new strategies for survival they have adopted. The first of these, the enthusiasm of magazine publishers, is perhaps best illustrated by the number of new magazines launched every year. According to the Registrar of Newspapers for India (2017), 10 508 new weeklies entered the market in the six years between 2010–2011 and 2016–2017, taking the total number of registered weeklies from 27 321 to 37 829. Over the same period, the number of dailies rose from 10 205 to 16 580; tri‐ and bi‐weeklies increased from 394 to 413; and those with other periodicities jumped from 44 302 to 59 998. These figures, of course, include only magazines in print formats, not those that are exclusively digital. Weeklies and monthlies are the most popular formats across genre and language, accounting for nearly two‐thirds of all registered publications. Of the 26 language categories recorded by the Registrar of Newspapers for India, only eight saw no new launches in 2016– 2017. Hindi, India’s most popular language, saw the launch of 684 weeklies, 129 fortnightlies, 672 monthlies, 65 quarterlies, seven annuals, and 35 “others.” Other important regional languages were also active in keeping with their relative sizes: Marathi added 231 new periodicals, Gujarati – 158; Kannada – 147, Telugu – 138, and Tamil – 131. English, a language that one in eight Indians speaks as their first, second, or third language, did not lag behind, with 42 new weeklies, 16 fortnightlies, 112 monthlies, 22 quarterlies, 3 annuals, and 30 “others” (Registrar of Newspapers for India 2017, p. 23). These launches do not include digital formats that are only available online but, even as they proliferate, it is evident that the market for printed magazines has not collapsed, at least in the view of their publishers. The second reason for optimism – revised figures for magazine readership – is significant for its implications for how they are viewed financially. In the beginning of 2018, the Indian Readership

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Survey (IRS), the benchmark for advertisers, released its figures for 2017 using a revised m ­ ethodology. The recalibration showed that the readership for magazines had been grossly underestimated under the previous methodology – between the 2014 and the 2017 readership surveys, the number of readers who had read the last issue of a magazine almost doubled, from 40 to 78 million. While only 3% of rural adults and 7% of urban adults were magazine readers in IRS 2014, by 2017 these numbers had increased to 5% and 12%, respectively. Of course, we must keep in mind that there are a range of motivations for reading magazines and therefore various styles and levels of magazine readership, including readers who read deeply and consistently, those who read to fill time, and those who flip through and skim or scan (e.g. Bonner and Roberts 2017; Towers 1986). Nevertheless, these figures underlined the fact that magazine readership was not as dismal as had been earlier thought, a factor that will be reflected in the flow of advertising. India Today, a weekly newsmagazine in English, was shown to have 1.63 million readers in the 2014 readership survey, but under the revised methodology this showed a fivefold jump to 7.99 million readers in 2017. This is comparable to the world’s highest circulated quality newspaper in English, The Times of India, which has 13.05 million readers. Interestingly, the top‐ranking English edition of India Today is closely followed by another newsmagazine, India Today’s Hindi edition, and then magazines in Hindi and Malayalam. This preference for English is peculiar to the magazine market, for Indian languages are far more popular in television and newspapers – The Times of India, for instance, is outranked by 10 newspapers in Hindu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Telugu, led by the Hindi Dainik Jagran’s, which has 70 million readers across its 37 regional editions (Media Research Users Council 2014). It is also worth noting that the top two magazines are newsmagazines, as it has been commonly accepted for almost a decade that “general interest” magazines are in decline and only niche magazines with higher cover prices had a sustainable business model (see, for instance, KPMG 2013, p. 52). In the 2017 rankings, the magazines in third and fifth places are Hindi “general knowledge” magazines aimed at students and those appearing for competitive examinations, while the fourth and sixth spots go to women’s magazines in Malayalam and Hindi. In fact, Indians who are reading for competitive advantage in preparation for national and state‐ level examinations (to enter the bureaucracy or institutions of higher education) appear to be a major target for newsmagazines in English and Hindi, as noted by The Caravan’s editor Vinod Jose, who described this group as a key part of what he called the “pop intelligentsia” (Jose 2009). The need to keep up with current events and to understand how arguments built around news developments drives this consumption. Overall, the top 20 include six women’s magazines, four sports magazines, two children’s magazines, and a film magazine. The third reason for optimism is that magazine publishers have made progress in adapting their strategy to meet the challenges of a digital world even as they wait for advertisers to realize their worth. They have modified their production practices, made themselves available on different platforms, and diversified their revenue streams. Magazines have successfully moved from the rigidity of periodic printed formats to online offerings. The websites of newsmagazines, for instance, have expanded their remit to include daily news items that would not have found their way to a print edition in this form, and have learnt to publish their exclusive output online as it is readied in an “anytime‐anywhere” approach (KPMG 2016 , p. 77). The Caravan for instance has regular web exclusives under the banner “Vantage” while even a more academically inclined publication like the Economic & Political Weekly introduced an online‐only section on its web site in 2016 for timely commentary and discussion. Most of the major news magazines are available in tablet‐ and mobile‐friendly forms through aggregated platforms, such as Magster, and several, including The Caravan, The Week, and India Today, offer digital subscriptions for mobile and tablet readers, as well as content available through smartphone apps. Most magazines have invested in digital content, e‐magazine formats, video and live streaming, and have established a strong social media presence. They increasingly sell combined subscriptions for print and online versions. Major newsmagazines have also established high‐profile



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events in the form of national and regional conferences that feature domestic and international leaders and experts from a variety of domains ranging from politics to economics and social activism to the arts. India Today, for instance, hosts the annual India Today Conclave, a two‐day ticketed (or by‐invitation only) event, which lists as sponsors such Indian industrial heavyweights as the Aditya Birla Group and Bajaj (India Today 2018). The Outlook Speakout, hosted by Outlook magazine since 2017, is billed as “a platform which brings together achievers who have made a difference by pushing the envelope of excellence in their chosen fields” (Outlook 2018). While these may not contribute directly to readership or circulation of the printed product, these events keep the magazine brand alive in popular consciousness and serve to draw in advertising and to some extent, editorial content. This also mirrors the global trend among media houses to find new ways to monetize their brands and achieve visibility, a strategy that has long been used by magazines in the fashion and business segments, and now becoming popular among general interest publications as well (The New Yorker’s annual week‐long festival is a big crowd puller, but it is not clear whether and how this feeds into subscriptions). Magazines are acutely conscious of rising prosperity in smaller cities and rural areas. They reach the more prosperous classes and groups in every community, and though they continue to have a higher urban readership, they are also increasingly focusing on the untapped populations of semi‐urban and rural settings (EY 2018). This is reflected not only in distribution patterns, but also in the diversity of coverage, which moves away from the Delhi‐centric focus of much of English mainstream media.

A Little History The history of magazine publishing in India is intimately tied to the growth of print journalism not only in English but in regional languages as well. In fact, it would be difficult to separate the daily and periodical press until perhaps the mid‐nineteenth century, by which time newspapers like The Times of India and Bombay Samachar had already established themselves, and the trajectory thereafter is closely tied to the nationalist movement. The first printing press arrived in India with the Portuguese in 1556 and was largely used for the printing of religious literature by Jesuit missionaries based in Goa on the western coast of peninsular India (Vilanilam 2005, p. 51). The first printed newspaper in English dates back to 1780, during the colonial period, when an Englishman, James Augustus Hicky, launched the weekly Bengal Gazette, also known as the Calcutta General Advertiser, in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Hicky’s Gazette, described as a “witty and scurrilous newspaper” (Parthasarathy 1997, p. 19), lasted less than two years. Hicky was sued for defamation by the Governor‐General of Bengal, Warren Hastings, fined, imprisoned, and subsequently deported. However, within a few years, Calcutta had four weeklies and a monthly and in the next half century there were nearly 50 publications in different parts of the country. The first newspaper in an Indian language, Digdarshan (World Vision), was launched in 1818 by missionaries and it was soon followed by others in various languages. Newspapers in colonial, pre‐1947 India displayed three strong, persistent trends – those of resistance to oppressive legal and governmental regimes, furtherance of social reform campaigns, and a strong tradition of political activism. Each of these has persisted in different forms, emerging as watchdog journalism, development journalism, participation in the nation‐building project, and the use of newspapers for mobilization and activism during the freedom struggle. Several contemporary newspaper titles have been in existence for 150 years or more but they have seldom, if ever, experienced the growth that they have enjoyed in recent years. The first half of the 1990s was an inflection point for Indian media. If one were to conceive of phases of Indian media, there is no question that this period was the beginning of a new and distinct phase that continues to the present time. This phase represents a far‐reaching qualitative

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change, driven by a sustained and rapid quantitative change. This phase is simply described here as the phase of explosive growth. The markers of the phases of Indian journalism proposed here are: i.  The formative phase, extending from the first newspaper in 1780–1919, encompassing social and spiritual as well as political concerns. The earliest magazine was the Oriental Magazine; or, Calcutta Amusement, being a universal repository of knowledge, instruction, and entertainment. It was launched in 1785 by John Hay but survived for only about a year. Others soon followed, including numerous missionary publications that sought to promote Christianity and Indian publications that aimed to serve as a cultural and social counterweight. One of India’s best‐known magazines, The Illustrated Weekly of India, which survived for a little over a century, was launched in 1880. ii.  The nationalist phase, from 1919 to the attainment of Indian independence in 1947, marked most prominently by anti‐colonial, pro‐independence activism. Numerous political leaders including the Father of the Nation, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, were editors of newspapers and magazines. Gandhi called the weekly Harijan a “viewspaper,” describing a campaigning characteristic that cuts across many of the newspapers and magazines of this era. iii.  The nation‐building phase from 1947 to the end of the Emergency in 1977, marked most prominently by concerns of development, governance, and secularism. During this period, as the focus shifted away from the Independence struggle, a wide variety of magazines were published to cater to varied interests, including Eve’s Weekly (1947), Dharmayug (1950), Filmfare (1952), Current Events (1955), Seminar (1959), and Sportstar (1978). iv.  The aggressive journalism phase from 1977 to the mid‐1990s, marked most prominently by a spirit of activism, investigative journalism, and an assertion of the media’s role in demanding accountability. Sunday from the Ananda Bazar Patrika group and India Today were notable for their role in this regard. v.  The phase of explosive growth, a substantive disjuncture from the past in numerous dimensions, including practices, structures, and norms. This phase began with economic liberalization in the early to mid‐1990s and has shaped today’s media system. It has also created a mediascape that is intensely crowded, competitive, and commercialized, within which publications and news channels jostle for audiences with increasingly sensational coverage and questionable business practices such as clandestine product placement and paid political news. This review considers the culture of news magazines – specifically, English language publications – in the two most recent phases outlined above, subsequent to the lifting of the Emergency (a 21‐month period between 1975 and 1977 when the Indira Gandhi‐led Congress government, citing threats to internal security, clamped down on civil rights and suspended press freedoms), through the initiation of economic liberalization, to the first two decades of the millennium. The feisty spirit of the nationalist movement that imbued much of journalism in the decades after independence transitioned into a conscious effort to support the project of nation‐building, and magazines of the pre‐Emergency era tended to focus less on politics and more on society and culture, leaving the hard‐hitting political muckraking (what there was of it) to the daily newspapers or the opinion‐heavy weekly tabloids such as Blitz, Current, and, in later years, the Sunday Observer. All this changed after the Emergency, when a new and aggressive form of journalism began to populate the political news magazine, which allowed for longer stories requiring more depth, detail, and editorial independence. Parameswaran et  al. also note that “English language newspapers became voices to be reckoned with – both in terms of the number of magazines and the role they played – during the late 1970s, in the aftermath of the Emergency” (2019, p. 75). One possible explanation for this is the influx into English journalism of a cadre



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of professionally trained young men and women, combined with a hunger for high‐quality reportage among a public disillusioned with government and with the recent loss of civil liberties. While at this point newspapers were still doing much of the investigative reporting (notably, unearthing corruption in high places and uncovering deep‐rooted social problems such as human trafficking), magazines were beginning to invest in long‐form narratives that gave readers a sense of the historical and sociological roots of contemporary problems. In this account, India Today is seen as a landmark for Indian magazine publishing, along with other general interest magazines like Sunday and “society” magazines like Savvy, Debonair, and (of course) Society (Kohli‐Khandekar 2013a). Both India Today and Sunday offered much more than the political fare that was the staple of newspapers, providing in addition a mix of culture, lifestyle, and broader social commentary. In addition, they were printed in color, making them much more attractive to advertisers. As detailed in the previous section, the period of liberalization saw the fortunes of several newsmagazines rise and fall with the fluctuations in advertising revenue, and despite the shakeout and demise of some, the few that have survived have established themselves firmly as part of the media landscape. Among those that survive in hard copy include Outlook, India Today (with four Indian language editions apart from English) and The Week. The Caravan, an English language monthly that describes itself as “a journal of politics and culture,” is described in the case study that follows. The magazine is one of those that has gained prominence among the urban elites, both young liberals as well as older progressives who perhaps yearn for the aggressive journalism of the 1970s and 1980s. Its brand of journalism has nudged open a market for more literary and narrative long‐form writing.

A Case Study of the Indian Magazine’s Intrepid New Face: The Caravan In 2009, Delhi Press, one of India’s oldest media houses, with a portfolio favoring an audience of mostly Hindi‐speaking middle class women and children, revived The Caravan, a monthly English niche magazine that in 1935 had been its first publication. Four years later, in 2013, the media house acquired Motoring, expanding its portfolio yet again. The business newspaper Mint proclaimed its skepticism in a story headlined “As magazines dwindle, Delhi Press seeks to add more” (Bansal 2013). But even with The Caravan, Delhi Press seemed to have sensed something about the market – and the appetite – for magazines that had been eluding many others. Editor Ananth Nath told Mint that he wanted a magazine that would combine the characteristics of his own favorite American publications – The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Mother Jones – even though it did not seem to make business sense at the time. Unlike other magazine publishers in India, which tend to have a small clutch of closely related brands in a regional language and English (such as The Week from Malayala Manorama) or a flagship publication produced in multiple languages (India Today from Living Media India Private Limited), or feeding off the success of a large newspaper (The Hindu’s Frontline), Delhi Press’s strategy is to have a large and diverse magazine portfolio. Media business analyst Vanita Kohli Khandekar notes that Delhi Press is the only company to depend on magazines for their “bread and butter” (Kohli‐Khandekar 2013b). With The Caravan, this has translated into a very specific editorial direction that aims at a “discerning reader” who is looking for stories that go beyond the newsmagazine staple of summarizing and analyzing political events. In an 11‐minute video (available on YouTube) that tells the story of The Caravan, Anant Nath says that by combining high quality reportage and storytelling, the magazine was trying to fill a “space that was missing in Indian journalism.” In less than a decade, the magazine has carved out a niche for itself in India’s media landscape, its presence measurable not so much in numbers (a recent estimate pegs circulation at a little over 50 000) as in influence among opinion leaders. In his vision document, Jose (2009)

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described the magazine as appealing to “the cosmopolitan reader based in Manhattan as much as the Indian attending a literary festival in Jaipur.” Given the growing numbers of urban Indians whose preferred language of communication is English, Jose says that it has not been difficult to gain a readership, despite the absence of any high‐profile marketing. The Caravan’s critical success may be attributed to both journalistic process and product. Boasting of an extremely sharp editorial staff, who work intensively with contributors, The Caravan prides itself on its long‐form, narrative journalism which both Nath and Jose repeatedly compare with the The New Yorker and The Atlantic, differentiating it from other Indian newsweeklies, which they are very definitely not competing with. In his introduction to The Caravan’s Book of Profiles, Jose refers to this editorial process: “The intellectual and creative engagement of writer and editor is one of the many beautiful things about long‐form journalism, and it is the dictum of The Caravan’s editing philosophy” (Jose 2017, p. xxii). The process has not been easy to sustain and finding the right kind of people has been a challenge, says Jose. “Most Indian journalism schools do not offer the kind of training we would like our editorial staff to have – someone who can assume the roles of reporter, writer and intellectual.” However, for many young journalism students, the Caravan newsroom has become an aspirational space, one that offers the possibility of a different kind of journalism. Jose describes the magazine as a “post Niira Radia institution,”1 alluding to the scandal that exposed a web of power‐brokering between politicians, big corporates, and journalists, and put Indian journalism under the ethical scanner. According to Jose, this has meant that The Caravan journalists take ethical issues “very seriously,” including avoiding all socializing with potential sources in politics and business, and constantly brainstorming on possible ­conflicts of interest. The Caravan’s continued presence in the Indian magazine space is a signal that there is room for publications that offer something beyond the usual news fare, which can provide substance with style and sophistication, and offer it in a package that includes a broad range of topics: politics, culture, society. Unlike the Western magazines it is seeking to emulate, however, The Caravan has been relatively slow on the digital uptake. At the time of writing, while it does have an online‐first and online‐only section (Vantage), the frequency of new stories is still low, and the magazine has not done much to use the potential of digital multi‐media storytelling to augment its content. “It’s a problem of resources,” admits Jose, “There’s lots of potential to develop new kinds of storytelling formats … but for now, the print story comes first.”

The Magazine in Indian Life Like elsewhere in the world, Indians get their magazines in one of several ways: via mail or courier if one is a subscriber, delivered by the newspaper vendor, or at the newsstand. Some get it from a neighborhood circulating library (Gowalla 2017) or as part of a magazine club where members (most often formed by an informal group of neighbors, friends, or workplace colleagues) share subscriptions to a bouquet of publications serving a variety of interests from literary to news to sports to cinema and culture. The order in which households (or individuals in an office group, for instance) received their copy  –  to be held for no more than a day or two – could be alphabetical or numerical (based on address), which meant that getting a copy on the day it appeared on the stands was an often‐contested privilege. Some magazines were more likely to have loyal subscribers than others; Reader’s Digest was one of those that used aggressive marketing tactics to capture and retain its readership, and, according to some commentators, having a line of issues on one’s bookstand was considered “a sign of an educated household” (Desai 2018, para. 2). The circulating library, a fast‐disappearing private version of the public library, has varying business models. Some charge a monthly membership that allows access to a specified number



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of books and magazines, with individual items loaned at a daily rate. More expensive magazines thus had a higher rate than low‐priced ones. Others charge a percentage of the cover price for each day the magazine is held, or may have a no‐limit policy for a higher monthly fee (Agarwal 2015). Some entrepreneurs have tried a modern, networked version of the circulating library. Just Books, with branches in several cities across South India, offers a similar subscription model based on the number of books and magazines one would like to borrow. For middle‐class households, particularly in smaller cities and towns, the circulating library provides a way to access a variety of reading materials without the often prohibitive expense of a subscription, particularly to glossy international magazines like Time, Life, and Newsweek, as well as less expensive but still unaffordable publications like [now defunct] The Illustrated Weekly of India or Reader’s Digest, and current news and current affairs periodicals ranging from international brands like The Economist to Indian publications like Outlook, India Today, and The Caravan. The pooled membership fees allow such libraries to maintain a large collection of periodicals, with multiple copies of the more popular magazines, to serve their clientele. Like the publicly funded reading rooms in some parts of southern India, these libraries were also a space for discussion and exchange of views on contemporary politics and other sociocultural matters, thus sustaining the larger ethos of magazine consumption. Anecdotal reports and occasional news stories in city supplements suggest that the lending library is mostly on its way out, despite some valiant efforts to keep them going for those readers who would like to read a variety of magazines but simply can’t afford them (Agarwal 2015). By and large, news and current affairs magazines seem to depend on subscriptions and to a lesser extent, stand sales, even though the circulation models described above have contributed to sustaining readership culture. In 2016, Chaudhry remarked that “[a] number of magazines look vulnerable because they haven’t figured out how to stay relevant in a digital news cycle, as do some smaller newspapers” (para. 32). Indeed, for magazines like The Caravan, described in the preceding case study, subscribers are increasingly moving to digital, a form that promises to extend readership across distance and time, as with newer magazines like The Madras Courier, or niche magazines like Thumb Print, an online magazine that focuses on stories from the north‐ eastern states of India.

A Case Study of The Madras Courier: two Centuries and Not Quite Out Hidden in the musty archives of the British Library are copies of a weekly publication covering arts, politics, and culture, a kind of precursor to The Illustrated Weekly of India – but this one emanating from the Madras Presidency of the late 1700s rather than the more sophisticated streets of Bombay. For The Madras Courier, it has been an unlikely journey from crumbling cellulose to the digital rebirth (https://madrascourier.com). It begins in a small town in Andhra Pradesh and a game of cricket where, in addition to fielding catches and swinging a bat, a father and son traded trivia. “My Dad would deliver these tidbits of history about the Indian press, which he had a fascination for, and he told me about this weekly newspaper called The Madras Courier,” says Shrenik Rao,2 who revived the publication in October 2016, partly because his search for high‐quality “subjective narratives that followed stories over time” came up short. He had heard about The Illustrated Weekly of India, another defunct magazine, and was keen to do something on those lines. “The Madras Courier seemed a perfect fit.” The paper had ceased publication in the early 1800s but represented the mix of politics, culture, and social commentary with the sort of historical perspective he wanted. He was also convinced that there would be a market. “There’s an audience out there  –  millions of Indians who share a certain identity, who are looking for something that connects the contemporary news cycle to the past.” At the time, it was the idea

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that gripped him. “Questions of a business model came later,” says Rao, who spent some time looking at two business models of what he calls “great journalism” – the old‐school Financial Times (of London) and Vice, once of new media’s successes. “I looked at what made them successful, and also considered what would be manageable for me,” he explains. “It’s current affairs meets history … we look at news as a continuum of human history. There are hundreds of newspapers reporting the same thing, so, I thought, why would a reader come to us for news? It’s tedious to focus on breaking news.” The Madras Courier puts out one story every weekday and closes with a weekend poetry section – a nod to the original publication, which in its time featured readers’ contributions. “We choose stories that have a longer shelf life,” says Rao, who as a documentary filmmaker is used to thinking with a longer lens. The Madras Courier was adjudged the best digital news start‐up of 2018 by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and, according to Rao, the readership is not only growing, but growing loyally. Rao notes that around 70% of readers polled said they would support us, and many of the 170 000 current readers have already begun subscribing. The magazine is published by a core team of three, drawing on a wide network of contributors located across the globe. “I’m convinced that people are hungry for good material and are willing to pay.”

The Form Has Its Function The magazine as a journalistic genre has distinguished itself from the newspaper on the basis of both periodicity and style. The Indian newsmagazine, too, has similarly set itself apart from newspapers in terms of the range of issues that it deals with and the way in which it approaches storytelling. As newspapers have streamlined their design and content in an effort to retain readers and draw in younger audiences, they have, by and large, made their stories shorter and simpler, and turned special sections into image‐driven marketing vehicles that focus more on lifestyle and entertainment than on issues of public interest (Rao and Johal 2006). A few newspapers, such as The Hindu and Mint, do regular long‐form stories that recall the style of a magazine, featuring in‐depth reporting and contextual detail. This suggests that there continues to be an appetite for deeper stories among the news reading public. Magazines have in the new millennium become the space for a more interrogative, reflective kind of journalism, as well as providing the space and resources for investigative deep dives. It is interesting that both the magazines profiled here mentioned The New Yorker as a journalistic model they would like to emulate, in terms of combining literary flair with rigorous reporting – something that newspapers find it difficult to provide, given the many constraints they operate under, such as diminishing human resources, competition from digital, wandering attention spans, reducing advertising revenue, and political and corporate pressure (Ninan 2018). Magazines have also become spaces where process is increasingly questioned, from The Caravan’s attempts to consciously diversify its newsroom with representation from Dalits, women, and other minorities, or its practice of rigorous fact‐checking. While some large English newsmagazines are still owned by corporate groups with diverse business interests, the presence of even a single Caravan or the multiple digital outlets (scroll.in, thewire.in, among news websites, and several digital‐only magazines) makes it possible for readers to have access to independent and relatively unbiased reportage. “Process” stories, which take several weeks or even months to produce, are practically impossible within a daily newspaper framework, but magazines are increasingly willing to invest in the long‐haul for important stories. Vinod Jose, editor of The Caravan, remarks that some stories take up to a year to research and write.3 In order to keep up with these “incursions” from both digital platforms and critically popular magazines, some newspapers have delineated space for magazine‐like stories, in‐depth long‐form pieces that appear once a week either in the main paper or in the Sunday supplement. The Hindu in 2017 introduced a feature called “Ground Zero,” a single long‐form magazine‐style piece



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which appears on Saturdays, while Mint offers a daily long read that combines in‐depth reporting and data analysis to tell stories ranging from explainers to analyses of current issues. Indian magazines have also been quicker to combine global standards of presentation and packaging with on‐the‐ground local reporting, a trend that media scholar Shakuntala Rao calls “glocalization” of journalism. This has allowed them to take on a more aggressive position on controversial issues which, to a large extent, newspapers have abdicated, given their dependence on vulnerable and often politically compromised stringers in non‐metropolitan areas. Independent journalists such as Swati Chaturvedi, who won the 2018 Press Freedom for Courage Award from Reporters without Borders for her investigation into the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s troll army, have found space in magazines (Kumar et al. 2018), and so has Neha Dixit, whose five‐part series on trafficking of tribal girls was published in Outlook in 2016 (Dixit 2016). It increasingly appears that magazines have become a significant space for democratic dissent – a space that was earlier held primarily by newspapers. Despite the disappearance of general‐interest, family magazines such as The Illustrated Weekly of India, one can still discern a culture of magazine readership in a variety of pockets of media consumption, whether in the redesigned and increasingly advertising‐padded supplements of the daily newspaper, or in the pages of the few extant print newsmagazines in the country, or in the long‐form tabs of online media.

Not the Final Word Indian audiences still appear to have an appetite for the kind of in‐depth storytelling that magazines provide, and the packaging of such material along with shorter, sharper pieces makes for a reading experience that can be enjoyed over time. This is perhaps no different from the rest of the world, where we find two distinct trends in text media consumption, whether it is on legacy forms (print) or online: on the one hand, there is a demand for shorter, more immediate news delivery combined with easily digestible analysis. On the other, there is a demand for high‐ quality, in‐depth stories that make sense of the world and open it up in different ways. Growing literacy, and an increasingly involved citizenry, make it likely that magazine journalism as an informational genre will continue to survive in the Indian market – whether in print or in other forms.

Notes 1 Taped conversations between lobbyist/entrepreneur Niira Radia and several high‐ranking politicians, business leaders, and journalists revealed the scale and intensity at which lobbying was done. The transcripts were published first by Open magazine and later excerpted in other media. A summary of what came to be known as “India’s own Watergate” can be found in an explainer by Akanksha Kumar (2018) in The Quint. 2 Personal interview with Shrenik Rao, 18 December 2018. 3 Personal interview, 10 December 2018.

References Agarwal, S. (2015). Lending a reading hand. Outlook (2 November). https://www.outlookindia.com/ magazine/story/lending‐a‐reading‐hand/295638 (accessed 27 March 2019). Bansal, S. (2013). As magazines dwindle, Delhi Press seeks to add more. LiveMint. https://www.livemint. com/Consumer/78YQTesQtr28UUC18SQI9J/As‐magazines‐dwindle‐Delhi‐Press‐seeks‐to‐add‐ more.html (accessed 27 March 2019).

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Bonner, E. and Roberts, C. (2017). Millennials and the future of magazines: how the generation of digital natives will determine whether print magazines survive. Journal of Magazine & New Media Research 17 (2). https:// aejmcmagazine.arizona.edu/Journal/Winter2017/BonnerRoberts.pdf (accessed March 29, 2019). Chaudhry, L. (2016). Can the digital revolution save Indian journalism? Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/special_report/india_digital_revolution_startups_scoopwhoop_wire_times.php (accessed 27 March 2019). Desai, S. (2018). The magazine in its prime. The Times of India. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ blogs/Citycitybangbang/the‐magazine‐in‐its‐prime (accessed 27 March 2019). Dixit, N. (2016). Operation #BetiUthao. Outlook. https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/ operation‐betiuthao/297626 (accessed 27 March 2019). D’Souza, D. (2005). Investigative journalism: those who expose us. In: Practising Journalism: Values, Constraints, Implications (ed. N. Rajan), 63–71. New Delhi: Sage. Ernst & Young (2017). Digital Inflection Point: Indian Media and Entertainment. New Delhi: Ernst & Young LLP in collaboration with Federation of Indian chambers of Commerce and Industry. Gowalla, R. (2017). Revisiting Bangalore’s circulating libraries. The Times of India (5 June). https:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/revisiting‐bengalurus‐circulating‐libraries/ articleshow/58985494.cms (accessed 27 March 2019). India Today (2018). India Today Conclave 2018, Mumbai (9–10 March 2018). http://conclave.intoday. in/2018 (accessed 27 March 2019). Jose, V.K. (2009). The Caravan vision document. https://issuu.com/pupulbisht26/docs/pupul_bisht_ dipdoc_for_issuu/48. (accessed March 26, 2019). Jose, V.K. (2017). Introduction. In: The Caravan’s Book of Profiles (ed. S. Nair), xvii–xxvii. New Delhi: Penguin India. Kilman, L. (2011). World press trends: newspapers still reach more than internet. World Association of Newspapers and Newspaper Publishers. http://www.wan‐ifra.org/press‐releases/2011/10/12/ world‐press‐trends‐newspapers‐still‐reach‐more‐than‐internet (accessed 27 March 2019). Kohli‐Khandekar, V. (2013a). The Indian Media Business, 4e. New Delhi: Sage. Kohli‐Khandekar, V. (2013b). Delhi Press’s bold gamble. Business Standard. https://www.business‐standard. com/article/companies/delhi‐press‐s‐bold‐gamble‐113050901036_1.html (accessed 27 March 2019). KPMG (2011). Hitting the high notes: FICCI‐KPMG Indian Media and Entertainment Report 2011. Mumbai: KPMG. KPMG (2013). The power of a billion: realizing the Indian dream: FICCI‐KPMG Indian Media and Entertainment Report 2013. Mumbai: KPMG. KPMG (2016). The future: now streaming: KPMG India‐FICCI Indian Media and Entertainment Industry Report 2016. Mumbai: KPMG. KPMG (2017). Media for the masses: the promise unfolds: KPMG India‐FICCI Indian Media and Entertainment Industry Report 2017. Mumbai: KPMG. Kumar, A. (2018). Radia tapes: how one woman’s influence peddling led to a snake pit. The Quint. https:// www.thequint.com/explainers/what‐are‐niira‐radia‐tapes‐explained (accessed 26 March 2019). Kumar, R., Bhatia, G., Apoorvanand and Roy, N. (2018). India: pursuing the truth in the face of intolerance. PEN International. https://pen‐international.org/app/uploads/PEN‐Int‐India‐Report‐2018. pdf (accessed 27 March 2019). Media Research Users Council (2014). Indian Readership Survey. Mumbai: Media Research Users http:// mruc.net/sites/default/files/IRS%202014%20Topline%20Findings_0.pdf (accessed 27 March 2019). Mehta, V. (2011). Lucknow Boy: A Memoir. New Delhi: Penguin India. Ninan, S. (2018). 2001–2018: What The Hoot’s long haul captured. The Hoot. http://asu.thehoot.org/media‐ watch/media‐practice/2001‐2018what‐the‐hoots‐long‐haul‐captured‐10779 (accessed 27 March 2019). Outlook (2018). Outlook Speakout. http://speakout.outlookindia.com (accessed 27 March 2019). Parameswaran, R., Chitrapu, S., and Verghese, R.S. (2019). An incomplete journalism Parivar: the story of India’s missing news magazine industry. In: Indian Journalism in a New Era: Changes, Challenges, and Perspectives (ed. S. Rao), 73–92. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Parthasarathy, R. (1997). Journalism in India: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 4e. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers. PricewaterhouseCoopers (2007). The Indian Entertainment and Media Industry: A Growth Story Unfolds. New Delhi: Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers.



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PricewaterhouseCoopers (2008). The Indian Entertainment and Media Industry: Sustaining Growth. New Delhi: Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry in collaboration with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Rao, S. and Johal, N.S. (2006). Ethics and news making in the changing Indian Mediascape. Journal of Mass Media Ethics 21 (4): 286–303. Registrar of Newspapers for India (2017). Press in India 2016–17. New Delhi: RNI. Towers, W.M. (1986). Uses and gratifications of magazine readers: a cross‐media comparison. Mass Communication Review 13 (1): 44–51. Vilanilam, J.V. (2005). Mass Communication in India: A Sociological Perspective. New Delhi: Sage.

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From Grit to Glitz Magazine Markets and Ideologies in Post‐Communist Europe and Asia Miglena Sternadori

Introduction The ex‐communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus are a murky territory in the minds of most outsiders. Inextricably linked to its Cold War legacy, the region remains a part of a “much maligned Other” (Szpunar 2012, p. 15). A crossroads of cultures and empires, it has been recently ravished by corruption (Wallace and Latcheva 2006), authoritarianism (Eke and Kuzio 2000), and rightwing populism (Rydgren 2011). It is the birthplace of overeducated mail‐order brides willing to marry provincial cowboys (Osipovich 2005). It is a land of much‐hated, yet romanticized gypsies (Barany 2002), of murderous gangsters aligned with elites (Von Lampe 2008), of uncultured nouveaux riches driving luxury cars (Sampson 1994), of fast‐aging youths with fatalistic beliefs (Wardle et al. 2004), of dumpster‐ diving elderly (Plekhanov 2014), of power‐hungry ex‐communist cadres (Rona‐Tas 1994), of patriarchal politicians (Verdery 1994), and of sketchy investors mired in offshore mysteries (Gugler et al. 2014). Despite these stereotypes – which mirror reality more often than not – the post‐communist nation‐states in Europe and Asia represent a complex mix of cultural and linguistic identities. Jakubowicz (2007) defines the post‐communist region as currently consisting of 29 countries. These include the Central European countries (Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia); the former Soviet republics (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia); Mongolia, a Soviet ex‐satellite; the nation‐states that emerged after Yugoslavia’s disintegration (Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia‐Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Slovenia), and the Balkan countries (Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania). This discussion of the 29 countries will acknowledge their past membership in now‐fractured entities  –  the USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia – which matter because their media management practices influenced the post‐communist magazine industries in newly formed states. Virtually all the countries also share a history of belonging to monarchal empires that dissolved around the end of World War I. The Balkan countries were in the Ottoman Empire; Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia  –  in the Austro‐Hungarian Empire; Russia, Poland, the Caucasus, and Central Asia

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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t­ erritories – in the Russian Empire; and the Baltics were a part of the Swedish Empire until their nineteenth‐century capture by the Russian Empire. This chapter begins by outlining the pre‐communist existence of magazines in the region, followed by a summary of the planned and underground production of magazines under communism. The final section covers the post‐communist era, which saw an initial influx of foreign capital and explosion of Western‐style magazines, followed by a reduction of titles and circulations after 2008 and concentration of magazine ownership within oligarchic structures. The chapter’s unifying focus is on the functions and uses of the magazine form across the region and throughout time. How have various entities  –  political groups, communist states, dissident groups, and contemporary oligarchs – used the magazine form? What sociocultural meanings have been created through magazine content? What Western influences have shaped magazines in the region? These were the guiding questions that determined the inclusion of specific examples and academic studies in the chapter. This effort to outline magazine markets and histories in post‐communist countries has some limitations. The reviewed studies, in English, Russian, or Bulgarian, were identified by searching Google Scholar and Academic Search Premier for “magazines” and “periodicals,” in combination with each country’s name. However, not all searches returned relevant results (e.g. virtually no magazine‐related study mentions Azerbaijan and Tajikistan). Further complicating the search was some scholars’ tendency to use the words “magazines” and “newspapers” interchangeably to reference weekly or fortnightly tabloid‐sized publications on newsprint stock (e.g. Spahic ́‐Šiljak 2008). Last but not least, a significant proportion of the identified literature focuses on women’s magazines; studies of news magazines, niche periodicals, and the magazine industry in general are rarer. Like in the West, women’s magazines in the region have been widely read and have played an important role in the gendered socialization of girls and women. Of about 135 scholarly articles and book chapters identified by the searches (which included the former USSR, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia), 53 analyzed magazines for women or girls. Despite these limitations, the following sections broadly demarcate the sociocultural role played by magazines in the territories of what are currently post‐ communist countries in Europe and Asia.

Pre‐Communist Period The early history of magazines in the post‐communist region is sparsely researched. The evidence suggests that, at least in Central and Eastern Europe, the genre was about a century behind developments in the West, with magazines starting to gain popularity as tools of instruction, information, persuasion, satire, and entertainment among educated elites in the second half of the eighteenth century. Some of the first magazines emerged in the Baltic region, which was dominated by Protestants and Catholics and therefore had higher literacy rates than Christian Orthodox areas, which showed “hostility to education” (Mironov 1991, p. 248). The first Estonian‐language magazine, a general‐interest publication with a Latvian translation, appeared in 1766 (Ellefson 2011). In Russia, several satirical magazines existed during Catherine the Great’s reign (1762–1796), including one she herself directed (Brooks 2013). As only 7% of European Russia’s population was literate in 1797 (Mironov 1991), these publications’ readership must have been limited to the aristocracy and the educated class. In the mid‐nineteenth century, Russian magazines called “street sheets” emerged, followed by those offering political commentary and literary excerpts (Brooks 2013). In Romania, the first magazine, Dacia Literară (Dacia was an ancient kingdom on the territory of modern Romania), appeared in 1840 (Rosentzveig 2015), followed by the newspaper supplement Muzeu Literaru (Literary Museum) in 1851, and others focusing on Romanian literature, history, and folklore (Dosuleanu 2012a). In Serbia, the mid‐nineteenth century saw the launch of the first women’s magazine,

442 Sternadori Zenski Vospitatelj (Women’s Educator), which taught women to be “proper wives, mothers, and housekeepers” (Vujonovic 2009, p. 53). In the second half of the nineteenth century, magazine content in the region showed increasing awareness of national and foreign cultures. Sophisticated art and literary periodicals proliferated among Russian elites obsessed with artistic trends in England as a way of understanding their own culture (Vyazova 2005). The first Croatian‐language women’s magazine, Parizka Moda (Parisian Fashion), appearing in 1885, also had its gaze turned to the West; its editors, however, saw its production as a patriotic way to displace the previously popular foreign‐language fashion magazines (Vujonovic 2009). Czech social magazines of the time were interested in the South Slavs, publishing sociopolitical updates and ethnographic accounts about the traditions of Slovenians, Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Bosnians, Macedonians, and Bulgarians (Valka 2011). In the second half of the nineteenth century, more nationalistic and/or politically oriented magazines started to gain prominence. Basis, the magazine of the Ukrainian national movement, emerged in 1861 (Chupanova 2016). Several Czech women’s magazines, such as Zenske Listy (Women’s Pages), which launched in 1876 and remained in circulation until 1926 (Huebner 2016), promulgated the notion of “women’s emancipation for the benefit of the nation,” linking feminism and nationalism, as was fairly typical in the Central European region at the time (Malećková 2004, p. 167). In Poland, Bluszcz (Ivy) magazine, launched in 1865 and published through the early twentieth century, informed its readers, who were primarily landowning women, about “the legal and political gains of Western European women” (Lorence‐Kot and Winiarz 2004, p. 215). In Russia, the reformist populist magazine Russian Wealth made waves by debating political freedoms (Blokhin and Soloviev 2017), and by the new century, some Russian editors were truly wielding the pen as a sword. In 1905–1907, a slew of left‐leaning Russian magazines critical of the tsarist authorities, such as Sekira (Double‐headed Axe), Gudok (Whistle), Zhupel (Bugbear), Shtyk (Bayonet), and Karikaturnyi listok gazety gazet (Caricature Sheet of the Newspaper of Newspapers) carried such satirical punch that the police often confiscated them, unless they had already sold out (Brooks 2013). In Romania, the early 1900s saw the launch of both fervently xenophobic and anti‐Semitic magazines, such as Paza ţării (The Guard of the Country) and Revista naţiunei (The Nation Magazine), and ones promoting Jewish minority interests, such as Veghetorul (The Watcher) and Informatorul (The Informant) (Dosuleanu 2012b). No scholarship seems to exist on magazines in the region during World War I. Some may have ceased publication, as did the Russian Rabotnitsa (Working Woman), which was first launched in 1914 and reappeared later as a prominent Soviet magazine (Attwood 2002). But the interwar period, when sophisticated artistic and literary magazines regained importance, has attracted much scholarly attention. In Poland during the 1920s and 1930s, literary, artistic, and architectural magazines, including Zwrotnica (The Switch) and Blok (Block) as well as the Polish‐French L’Art Contemporain – Sztuka Współczesna (Modern Art), were a part of a European network of avant‐ garde publications, sharing articles and reproductions (Wenderski 2015). Balkan artists and writers also published several interwar magazines welcoming Western influences and embracing cosmopolitanism and avant‐garde art, including Vezni (Scales) and Plamuk (Flame) in Bulgaria and Zenit (Zenith) in Croatia and Serbia (Genova 2018). In Czechoslovakia, a newly formed nation‐state after World War I, women’s magazines such as Moderni divka (Modern Girl) and Eva covered contemporary fashion, literature, and art (Huebner 2016). Avant‐garde influences were, however, short‐lived in the newly minted Soviet Union, where the Bolsheviks had started attacking bourgeois influences and using mass propaganda to create loyal Soviet citizens (Abramova 2018). The World War II era represents another gap in the literature, but what followed has been extensively studied. For most countries in the region (except for the ones already in the Soviet Union, which gained numerous “socialist republics” after the 1917 communist revolution), the war ended with a transition to communist rule. For already existing media markets, the change



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The first issue of the Bulgarian interwar magazine Plamuk (Flame), appearing on 15 January 1924, featured an article about the work of the Bulgarian painter Ivan Bojadzhiev, accompanied by a reproduction of his painting titled “Mood.” Source: https://bgmodernism.com.

meant closure of existing media outlets, state censorship, planned control of circulations, and the complete elimination of advertising for some years – until the regimes decided it was important to inform citizens about various new goods, produced – of course – by state enterprises (Hollander 1967). By contrast, in places like Central Asia, where the highest measured literacy rate in 1915 was 12.3% (Allworth 1994), the arrival of communism was the primary force that ushered in mass media, including magazines, as channels of state propaganda. The following section traces the development and functions of communist magazines, with an emphasis on Soviet magazines, which often served as the model for other periodicals in the region and were deliberately emulated by communist magazine editors to ensure ideological correctness.

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Communist Period The primary characteristic of magazines in the Soviet Union and most other communist countries in the region was that they were, first and foremost, ideological tools. The earliest Soviet magazines were so‐called “mass political” journals  –  Plamya (Flame), Proletarskaya Kultura (Proletarian Culture), and Molodoi Kommunist (Young Communist) – appearing shortly after the 1917 revolution (Hollander 1967). Others in the 1920s included the general‐interest Ogonyok (Little Flame), the satirical Krokodil (Crocodile), the literary Oktyabr (October) and Novy Mir (New World), the popular‐science Nauka i Zhizn (Science and Life) and Tekhnika Molodyozhi (Technology for Youth), and the health‐focused Fizkultura i Sport (Hollander 1967). Within a few decades, the Soviet magazine market showed some signs of thawing. Although Soviet education pushed Russian as the official language throughout the Union, some magazines in “minority languages” appeared in the 1950s, soon followed by a few publications containing translations of selected foreign literary and journalistic works (Hollander 1967, p. 51).

The first issue of Rabotnitsa (Working Woman) as an organ of the women’s department of the Russian Communist Party appeared in January 1923. Source: www.workerspower.co.uk/2014/03/100th‐anniversary‐of‐rabotnitsa‐ time‐to‐recreate‐its‐success

The ideological purpose of Soviet and other communist magazines meant their content – usually, the written text that directly or indirectly conveyed the Communist Party’s ideals  –  was



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privileged over the esthetics of form, including color, imagery, design, and paper quality. In the Soviet Union, this trend was exacerbated by a shortage of professional designers and illustrators (Romanenko 2012) as well as by the “appalling privations of the Stalin era” (Attwood 2002, p. 160). Despite a “turn of culture toward visuality” after the 1950s (Vikulina 2019, p. 288), in terms of appearance most magazines still fell short of their Western counterparts. In the mid‐ 1960s, over 90% of Soviet magazines were published on newsprint stock, with layouts and design reflecting a “gap created by ideological restrictions on art” (Hollander 1967, p. 55). Any images and illustrations printed in the Soviet Union and its satellites had to abide by the principles of socialist realism; only in former Yugoslavia did visual communication in magazines include avant‐ garde, modernist, and postmodern art, as exemplified by the Zagreb journal Arhitektura, which was founded in 1947 and was still publishing in the early twenty‐first century (Žunic ́ and Vukic ́ 2015). Attractiveness was of little import. As Goscilo (2000) explains, “[t]he ideology fueling the Soviet art of simulacra publicly valorized moral purity and civic probity, while downplaying beauty and anathematizing luxury as the immoral frivolities of a consumerist culture” (p. 16). Visual communication increased during the so‐called “late socialism,” when group images of Party cadres applauding the Leader  –  “like a curtain made up of clapping hands in an infinite pattern” – could take up to six pages in general‐interest, women’s, and photography magazines (Vikulina 2019, p. 300). Still, the emphasis on images of aging, lethargic men was consistent with the Soviet “puritanical criteria equating beauty with moral turpitude” (Goscilo 2000, p. 43). Exceptions existed. In the Soviet Union, they included the richly illustrated USSR in Construction (1930–1941), with Russian, English, French, German, and Spanish editions, which “served as the Soviet showcase towards the West” (Pitkänen 2017, p. 1), but was also delivered to Soviet elites (Romanenko 2012). Another luxurious Soviet magazine for foreigners was Sputnik (Fellow Traveler), launched in 1966 to compete with Western media and sold in 59 countries (Hollander 1967). Despite most communist magazines’ esthetic limitations, these publications had an air of luxury goods for large swathes of the population. For several decades, due to paper shortages, Soviet magazine subscriptions were given only to factories and libraries (Romanenko 2012). In the case of Ogonyok, “neighbors, co‐workers, friends, share their copies; library copies are worn to shreds” (Wayne 1956, p. 315). Gulyás (2004) notes a similar situation in Central Europe. An exception was Yugoslavia’s publishing market, which allowed elements of market economy (Žunic ́ and Vukic ́ 2015) and where, therefore, unprofitable magazines were not allowed to survive (Senjkovic ́ 2011). An interesting phenomenon reflecting the lack of resources to produce professional magazines was the publication of handwritten magazines in the Soviet Union. In the Siberian city Omsk, the 1922–1923 magazine Rabfakovets (Workers’ School Student) was handwritten, manually bound, and duplicated through a colotype process (Abramova 2018). Underground literary magazines in the 1920s were also sometimes handwritten, following a tradition of handwritten magazines that had been “widespread in pre‐revolutionary Russia” (Abramova 2018, p. 158). The Party apparatus soon discouraged handwritten publications  –  whether underground or ideologically correct – in favor of magazines printed under the Party’s control (Abramova 2018). But the World War II period, when Soviet magazine titles and circulations were cut by half (Hollander 1967), resurrected the tradition of handwritten magazines in some places. This is illustrated by a collection of handwritten Belarusian periodicals created by anti‐Nazi resistance fighters known as partisans (Bespalaya 2012). The first such magazine, People’s Avenger, appeared in February 1942. The magazines were notebooks filled with descriptions of combat actions, first‐person reminiscences, short stories, drawings of battles and landscapes, political and combat cartoons, and photos. Antisocial behavior, such as drunkenness and fights, was reported and rebuked. Once each issue had been passed around, care was taken to ensure that it never fell into Nazi hands due to the inclusion of sensitive information (e.g. names of peasants willing to hide partisans). Though the contents were “unusually multifaceted” (p. 196), the magazines still

446 Sternadori served as small‐scale Communist Party organs, usually edited by each brigade’s Party secretary and conveying stern communist ideology – for example, shaming partisans who had extra blankets or coats, and encouraging them to share with comrades (Bespalaya 2012). Magazines for the civilian population were also closely aligned with Party dogma, even when they overtly appeared to promote entertainment or professional development. Hollander (1967) classifies Soviet magazines in 12 categories: official Party organs, ideological/theoretical, literary, trade/professional, focused on health/sports, focused on popular science, targeting a population subset (e.g. women), satirical, for foreign distribution, digests/translations, scholarly, and general‐interest. But even leisure periodicals had ideological purposes. For example, the illustrated Soviet travel magazine Vokrug Sveta (Around the World) promoted mostly domestic tourism as “the late Stalin regime nourished ignorance about foreign countries in order to advance its own xenophobic interpretation of world events” (Gorsuch 2003, p. 760). References to alcohol and sex were notably absent from Soviet magazines (Wayne 1956), but “late‐socialism” magazines in the more Westernized communist countries (i.e. Yugoslavia, Poland) sometimes reported positively on elements of Western politics and popular culture (Jankowski 2016; Senjkovic ́ 2011) and even discussed sensitive subjects like contraception (Ignaciuk 2015; Senjkovic ́ 2011). Soviet magazines for women were especially ideological, created to deliver Soviet gender policy to every corner of the new communist empire. In Armenia, for example, the magazine Hayastani Ashkatavoruhi (Armenian Woman Worker), was launched in 1924 to shape the New Soviet Armenian woman, who was considered “more ‘backward’ than her Russian sister” (Muradyan 2017, p. 52). Armenian women were encouraged to follow the examples set by Russian Soviet women in their professional and personal lives. The women’s magazines distributed across the Union included Rabotnitsa (Working Woman), “accountable directly to the Central Committee of the Communist Party” (Talaver 2017, p. 19), and Krestianka (Peasant Woman), “a bastion of prudish and practical domesticity” (Goscilo 2000, p. 25). Fashion magazines, such as Modeli Sezona (Fashions of the Seasons), existed but were intended only for communist elites (Bartlett 2006). Soviet mass women’s magazines actively promoted the notion that a communist woman’s duty was to both bear children and participate in the workforce – and if she was going to try to manage this “double burden,” it was up to her to coax her husband into helping with chores (Attwood 2002). To advertise women’s emancipation, the magazines often depicted them in various roles previously reserved for men  –  miners, pilots, truck drivers  –  but at times also pushed a pronatalist agenda that encouraged women to provide “honorable sons” and depicted abortion as a procedure perilous to women’s health (Onoprienko 2008, p. 52). Following “typical Soviet models,” expectations of multifaceted femininity echoed across the region – for example, in the Romanian periodicals Dolgozó No˝ (Working Woman) and Femeia (Iringo 2017, p. 13). Some scholars, however, have argued that communist women’s magazines reflected genuine concerns about women’s well‐being: for example, “communist leaders [in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia] … used women’s magazines as a forum to discuss openly the changing ideals of masculinity and femininity” (Mead and Ghodsee 2017, p. 17), and Soviet women’s magazines were conduits of “state socialist feminism,” whose editors often attempted to influence government policies affecting women (Talaver 2017, p. 34). Magazines deviating from the communist agenda were distributed secretly. Some were consumer glossies smuggled from abroad (Madroane 2010). Others were self‐published or printed in the West. For example, even though Poland had decriminalized same‐sex acts in 1932 (before the advent of communism), the Polish magazine for gay men Byuletin/Etap had to be published in Vienna from 1983 to 1987 (Szulc 2017). Some dissident groups took the risk to self‐publish until they were discovered. This was the case for the almanac Zhenschina i Rossiya (Woman and Russia), launched by a Soviet women’s rights group in 1979, which saw only 10 copies printed of its first issue but was later partially republished by the French feminist magazine Des femmes en mouvements (Talaver 2017). Woman and Russia’s editorial board members,



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expelled from the Soviet Union, ended up being featured on the cover of Ms. magazine as oppressed Soviet feminist heroes (Talaver 2017). Other dissident Soviet magazines included the religious 37; Maria, an essentialist and religious‐conservative women’s magazine; and Rossianka, a continuation of the earlier Woman and Russia magazine project (Talaver 2017).

Post‐1989 The peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the collapse of communist governments soon thereafter, ushered in an influx of mass media choices – including magazines – that seemed incredible to the region’s audiences, who had long taken scarcity for granted. For example, the number of magazine titles published in Russia increased almost three times from 1992 (the year after the Soviet Union’s disintegration) to 2008 – from 2664 to 6698 – and the total annual circulation of all Russian magazines nearly doubled during the same period, from 900 million to 1.6 billion copies (Federal State Statistics Service 2010). Similar patterns emerged in other post‐communist countries, but the abundance of titles did not necessarily make the magazine form more widely accessible in the region than it had been under communism. If publishers chose to use expensive paper, high‐resolution images, and the expertise of professional graphic designers, post‐communist magazines were still luxury items, just like in the old communist days: “put on display on coffee tables, signifying [their] owners’ sense of style and aspiration” and shared among friends and family (Keremidchieva 2015). The changes in magazines’ appearance and content were more striking than the variety of new titles in the region. Communist magazines had been text‐heavy and full of grainy photos, but post‐1989 magazines boasted Western‐style layouts and high‐quality, full‐page images – “a decisive transition from an overwhelmingly verbal to a predominantly visual culture” (Goscilo 2000, p. 20). The new magazines also ushered in a new style of language, overusing English loan words, alphanumerics (“girl 2 girl”), superlatives, intensifiers, and abbreviations (Fratila and Parlog 2010). These changes were more than cosmetic. Magazines’ focus shifted from the old emphasis on reality – as illustrated by the once‐commonly used phrase “obraz zhizni” (image of life) in Soviet magazines – to fantasy, as denoted by a new preference for the English word “lifestyle” (Goscilo 2000, p. 22). Even respected magazines became unrecognizable: the Russian Ogonyok “shed its former identity of journalism’s conscience to join the countless Russian magazines highlighting externals oriented toward spectatorship rather than thoughtful analysis” (Goscilo 2000, p. 22). Magazines’ embrace of consumerist content disseminated the “twinned values” of beauty and wealth by promoting goods and services unattainable to most people (Goscilo 2000, p. 17). The “fantasy universe of stylish well‐being” portrayed, for example, by 1990s Russian magazines grossly contradicted the country’s reality of rising mortality, unemployment, alcoholism, and organized crime (Goscilo 2000, p. 22). The 1990s post‐communist magazines also seemed confused about some Western concepts (many still are), such as ideal masculinity – comically presenting it “as a paradoxical composite of macho, crime‐friendly tough, fabulously wealthy sybarite, and self‐confident, glamorous man of the world” (Goscilo 2000, p. 34). Women, previously comrades, were demoted to men’s “desirable luxuries” (p. 29) – though perhaps a bit more appreciated than some of their Western counterparts, as illustrated by an article titled “How to bring a woman to the peak of pleasure with just your lips” in the Russian men’s magazine Supermen (Goscilo 2000, p. 27). On the positive side, the post‐communist era allowed the emergence of independent magazines that amplified a variety of new voices. Such was the role of periodicals launched to serve ethnic communities, such as the Turkish minority in Bulgaria (Fatková 2012). And while the new consumer magazines seemed shallow to the intelligentsia (Bartlett 2006), other magazines offered them investigative and provocative content that could not have existed under communism.

448 Sternadori In Bosnia, for example, two such magazines that emerged in the 1990s were Reporter (now Novi Reporter), the most credible print publication in the country as of 2002, and Dani (Taylor and Napoli 2003). Post‐communist Mongolia boasted the arrival of the investigative magazine Il Tovchoo, the sports weeklies Mongoliin Sport and Sportiin Medee, and the environmental monthlies Bodi Guruus and Baigali (Matusiak and Munkhmandakh 2009). In the 1990s, state‐owned magazines throughout the region were expected to face privatization, but many did not. For example, the popular Bulgarian magazine Paraleli (Parallels) continued to be published by the state‐owned Bulgarian Telegraph Agency until it folded in 2010. In Turkmenistan, all newspapers and magazines were state‐owned as of 2002 (Atayeva 2002), and in Ukraine, about half of all newspapers and magazines remained state‐owned as of 2006 (Ryabinska 2011). Most privately owned magazines were either launched within various media empires or joined them later. The primary business of such empires was, and is, often unrelated to media. Hungary’s Postabank owned several newspapers and magazines throughout the 1990s (Gulyás 1999), and Gazprom Media Holding, a subsidiary of Russia’s Gazprom (a state‐dominated natural gas company), currently controls lifestyle magazines such as Karavan Istoriy (Caravan of History) and the TV guide Sem Dney (Seven Days), along with many newspapers and TV outlets (Tokbaeva 2017). Even previously independent magazines have succumbed to the concentration of media ownership. In Ukraine, the popular Korrespondent magazine was sold in 2011 by its American owner to the oligarch (and former president of Ukraine) Petro Poroshenko (Ryabinska 2011), who later sold it to another Ukrainian oligarch known for trading in natural gas. In Russia, urban lifestyle magazines are often owned by publishers with other major businesses, who use the periodicals for self‐promotion (Medvedeva 2015). Foreign investment in post‐communist magazines was also notable in the 1990s. In Central Europe, magazine markets “were actually the first media markets to have seen foreign investment,” which then mushroomed exponentially (Gulyás 2004, p. 112). For example, Gulyás reports that foreign ownership in the Hungarian weekly women’s magazines market rose from 60% in 1996 to over 90% in 2002, and in the Czech Republic foreign ownership in the weekly magazine market reached 85% by the late 1990s. The investors were primarily Western European publishers, including Axel Springer, Bauer Verlag, Bertelsmann, and Burda (Germany), VNU (the Netherlands/U.S.), and Sanoma (Finland). Some of these also operate in other post‐ communist countries, outside of Central Europe. For example, Axel Springer and Burda have a presence in the Russian magazine market (Tokbaeva 2017), and Sanoma holds magazine investments in Bulgaria, Romania, and Russia (Hannula 2005; Tokbaeva 2017). However, foreign investors are increasingly driven out. In Russia, the causes include “growing state control of the media and hostility towards the West” and “an increase in a conservative brand of cultural nationalism in the state‐run media” (Porteous 2017, p. 181). Similar patterns are evident elsewhere. Poland, for example, has announced plans to “repolonize” foreign‐owned media, including Newsweek Polska, a news magazine critical of the government (Reporters Without Borders 2017). In recent years, the post‐1989 mushrooming of magazine titles, circulations, and advertising revenues has abated. It was even reversed after 2010, when post‐communist markets experienced the worst effects of the 2008 global recession and some Western investors withdrew (Kurambayev 2017; Tsankova 2013). In Bulgaria, total magazine circulations dropped by over 10% in both 2011 and 2012, and some titles, such as the local editions of FHM and Penthouse, folded (Tsankova 2013). But even as the effects of the crisis have faded away, many post‐communist magazines continue to look like the poor cousins of their Western counterparts – printed on low‐quality paper and with low‐quality ink so they can curb their prices and maintain their circulations (e.g. Mikashavidze 2010). In Russia, despite the continued presence of some glossies, a 2011 report noted that magazines with “high production costs” are unlikely to succeed (Medvedeva 2015, pp. 4–5). Some urban magazine publishers in the region have therefore



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followed global trends by transitioning existing titles to the web, launching new ones only in digital editions, and using social media to distribute content and interact with readers (Ratilainen 2018). Simultaneously, the growing post‐communist fashion blogosphere is usurping many of the functions of fashion magazines, as Tomiuc and Stan (2015) note in the case of Romania.

Conclusion The magazine form has a long history of creative uses and ideological abuses in the 29 countries with a communist past in Europe and Asia. High‐quality magazines remain rare – or a luxury for those who cannot afford the costs of gloss paper and the labor of trained journalists, designers, and photographers. However, the transition to digital platforms, long underway in the West, has also begun in the post‐communist region, offering hopes that the magazine form will at last reach and connect more readers who seek in‐depth information, self‐improvement, and specialized knowledge.

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Case Study: Culinary Magazines in Oceania and Australia Lyn Barnes

Introduction Food is emotionally resonant; it is a symbol of our deepest social ties and a powerful marker of identity (Guptill et al. 2013, p. 162).

While some argue that magazines are simply another delivery form, Columbia University’s Professor Victor Navasky considers magazines to be an art form (Navasky and Cornog 2012). Cathie Black, the former chair of Hearst Magazines, takes this thinking to another level and views magazines as offering “a respite, a retreat, a place to be yourself, to be inspired and develop creative ideas” (Sumner 2010, p. 223). What these two definitions suggest is that people need time – and money – to enjoy a magazine. Thus, magazines can reflect the economic – and sometimes political – position in the magazine publishing sector. Culinary magazines can also be an early indicator of change in these areas. Magazines provide a window onto what people think and buy (Cox and Mowatt 2014). They showcase popular consumer goods and services, thereby reflecting the state of the industries they cover on their pages. They also capture how the production and consumption of food changes, and the increasing range and varieties of products. As Parasecoli (2008) established, food is pervasive. It can be a marker of power, cultural capital, class, gender, ethnicity, and religion. As someone who has written and edited food titles in New Zealand, I want to explore a range of roles played by Australasian culinary magazines in the emergent post‐war gastronomic environments in New Zealand and Australia – environments in which national tastes in each country became radically internationalized and cosmopolitan post‐1970 (Day 2012). This chapter begins with an outline of the history of food magazines in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand; then shows how food links us to our ethnic past (Aotearoa is New Zealand’s Maori name, now commonly used). I explore the food histories of both countries, which began from blank culinary slates because of their European history (Veart 2008, p. 296). I then address the language used in conjunction with food and look at how recipes featured in magazines.

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

454 Barnes Historically, Australians and New Zealanders have been prolific consumers of magazines. Not only have both countries produced hundreds of their own titles through the decades, but they have also imported many more magazines.

Year

Published in New Zealand

Imported from Australia

Imported from UK

Impor ted from USA

Imported from rest of world

TOTAL

2015

233

566

1125

444

17

2385

2017

246

510

1158

372

6

2286

Source: Adapted from the New Zealand Audit Bureau of Circulations (2017).

Food Heritage: Bland and Boring Most of the settlers to Australia and later to New Zealand in the late 1700s and early 1800s came from Europe. Although separated by only three hours by air, the Antipodean countries have a distinctively different food history because of the types of immigrants. Australia’s White Australian Policy restricted Asians (in particular Chinese), Africans, and Pacific Islanders. Since the 1880s, a steady stream of Lebanese have moved to Australia; however, it was the Italians and Greeks, who arrived in the 1950s, who had the greatest influence on Australian taste buds, pioneering the development of the Australian café and restaurant scene (Alexakis and Janiszewski 2016; Haden 2009). After the Vietnam War – and changes to the immigration policy – Vietnamese, Cambodians, Thais, and Malaysians also arrived (Haden 2009). Australia’s gastronomic diversity is greater than New Zealand’s, which did not sustain the same numbers of immigrants over the years (Haden 2009). More Pacific Islanders than Asians or Europeans migrated to New Zealand. More recently, Asian immigrants have added to the country’s diversity, including Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Because of its European heritage, historian David Burton described New Zealand food as “bland, austere, and colorless” (Burton 2009, p. 19). Australia and New Zealand tried to maintain their European links for many decades (Burton 1982). However, the aspirations of a social class structure that came with British heritage were impractical in colonial New Zealand, mainly because there were no servants and the basic conditions made it impossible. Dining etiquette from the United Kingdom had to give way to more practical approaches. For example, most rural properties had thriving vegetable gardens, but their kitchens were characterized by overcooked meat and vegetables mainly because of the inability to adjust the temperature of wood‐burning ovens (Veart 2008). Since the 1930s, as continental immigrants arrived, including many from the Balkans, New Zealanders borrowed and adapted ideas that eventually blurred into their own recipes (Burton 1982). Recipes such as Spanish cream and Hungarian goulash appeared in the Edmonds Cookery Book, an iconic title launched in 1908 that remains the best‐selling book in the country (Ministry for Culture and Heritage 2015). Influences also came from Polish refugees and wartime visitors, such as American troops, who helped to change the earlier dispassion for “foreign muck.” This was the term used by Maud Basham – better known as Aunt Daisy from her radio cooking shows in New Zealand spanning over three decades (1932–1963). She refused to consider that foreign food could ever be superior to locally produced fare (Symons 2010). Globalization created a chasm (Simpson 1999) that separated New Zealand’s current food culture from the conservative British‐based food traditions of earlier generations. Simpson attributed this to the influence of magazines, newspapers, and books constantly sharing recipes for international dishes. However, it took until this new century before New Zealanders and Australians began to acknowledge and appreciate their own food cultures. And it wasn’t until 2017 that Maori food



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became more mainstream in New Zealand, using more than token ingredients – and without translating the names of products and dishes into English (Knight 2017).

History of Food in Magazines Traditionally, recipes were relegated to the pages of women’s magazines, such as the English Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping and were often instructional in regard to health and wellbeing. Later, women’s magazines such as Woman’s Day and Family Circle began to feature food. Woman’s Day, which included six pages of recipes, was originally launched in the UK as a giveaway by a grocery chain in 1937 (Sumner 2010). Woman’s Day launched its Australian edition in 1953. Meanwhile, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, first published in 1932, was well established as the favorite for recipes (Lynch 2002). The economies in both countries began to boom after World War II – Australia from its minerals and New Zealand from its agriculture. Alongside increased prosperity, consumerism and individualism were also on the rise, as was leisure time (Sumner 2010). National confidence also increased as the countries renounced their austere backgrounds and culinary desolation (Day 2012). The growing availability and affordability of air travel in the mid‐1960s “set the foundations for the acceleration of the global food aesthetic” (Day 2012, p. 19). It became a rite of passage for young Kiwis (the vernacular term for New Zealanders) to undertake their overseas experience (OE), resulting in exposure to new tastes and new cultures. “As people became more interested in more topics, places, pursuits and issues, then they needed more magazines to report on those interests” (Sumner 2010, p. 5). In time, food was recognized in its own right as an important subject for a magazine, and food‐focused periodicals became one of the key influences in the lives of culinary aficionados (Parasecoli 2008). The titles engendered greater consumer activity while presenting useful information for readers. Culinary magazines achieved a status of their own at the time as they introduced readers to information regarding “gourmet” foods and wines, along with innovative ideas about dining, food presentation, and hospitality. Anything European began to be equated with sophistication, and home‐grown lost its desirability. Magazines, as a window into the life of leisure, shared a symbiotic relationship with other forms of communication. For example, radio, movies, and television would often “whet the appetite for new sources of information that magazines provided” (Sumner 2010, p. 5); and vice versa: magazines started publishing television listings in the 1990s. For example, New Zealand Woman’s Weekly would promote a new series by international food writers, such as Rick Stein, which would, in turn, create an opportunity for culinary titles to do more in‐depth follow‐up articles about his food and places he had visited, thus introducing new gourmet experiences and flavors. Food and its history, hospitality, travel, and lifestyle increasingly became part of a package and a subtle conduit to social and cultural change, encouraging the trend toward long lunches and dining in restaurants (Leach 2008). However, other crucial ingredients were needed for the mix to be successful.

Synchronicity: Technology, Globalization, and Astute Editors It was the result of concurrent forces that saw culinary magazines from “down under” take center stage as premium products by the early part of the twenty‐first century. For example, New Zealand’s Cuisine won the title of world’s best food magazine at the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards in 2007. The following paragraphs chronicle the stages that led to this success. Rapidly changing technology in the 1970s helped boost magazine production and reduce costs. The shift from laying out and pasting up every individual page before sending it for

456 Barnes manual typesetting using hot metal saved hours of time. Both typesetting and printing were soon replaced by computer software and desktop publishing. This meant almost anyone could produce a magazine from their home office. Such changes were not only more cost effective, but also allowed increasing flexibility with production schedules and greater control over the final look of a magazine (Cox and Mowatt 2014). There were also changes in the political economy of magazine publishing, reflective of the falling cost for paper, printing, and color reproduction (Abrahamson 2007). Changes in production technology allowed small runs of magazines, leading to the emergence of more specialized periodicals. Because of these successes, advertisers were keen to buy magazine space to promote new products from around the world. Newspapers, slow to introduce color print, soon lost advertisers to glossy magazines, whose increased advertising revenues made them cheaper for consumers, which was a win‐win for magazine production. Consequently, the growth of magazine publishing boosted the status of the platform (Sumner 2010). However, the magic ingredient was innovative editors and publishers, prepared to take the risk to produce quality magazines that were world‐class in their look and feel (Sumner 2010). Some editors employed art directors and encouraged the luxury of white space on top‐quality glossy paper, using double‐page spreads for a single dish. As the former editor of Australian Gourmet Traveller and the Australian edition of Vogue Entertaining Guide Carolyn Lockhart pointed out, “magazines at the time, such as Australian Women’s Weekly, would put an entire meal spread on a table in one image. It was not appetizing. “When I went to Gourmet Traveller, it was very black, with heavy type and food re‐created from overseas travel stories usually from upmarket hotel kitchens. We photographed food in an entirely different way, often using fashion photographers,” explained Lockhart (Carolyn Lockhart, email message to author, 5 October 2017). Food photography in the 1990s became an art form. Stylists were employed to set up images, and with the use of close‐ups and natural light, food became irresistible. Some felt things went too far (Veart 2008): “From the late 1990s the photography gets in close for the ‘gastroporn’ shot, in which the dish, all glistening with residue, becomes a culinary scopophiliac’s delight” (p. 311). Others considered food writing as representing lightweight entertainment rather than being educational (O’Neill 2003); food and recipes were so removed from real life that they could not be used except as a vicarious experience. O’Neill suggested that reading a magazine about food had become a form of escapism into a fantasy world and that readers were not serious cooks. The high visual appeal was initially meant to appeal to affluent white readers with disposable incomes (Day 2012). These were the people who could afford to go fishing, dine out, and travel. Therefore, these prestigious publications attracted advertisements for luxury cars and other aspirational items. As premium products, some culinary titles also became collectors’ items for readers aspiring to greater status. For example, feedback from Cuisine readers in New Zealand indicated that they tried only four recipes per issue but they had proudly kept every issue since publication began in 1986 (Julie Dalzell, former editor/publisher, email message to author, 22 December 2017). American mass media company Conde Nast, which produced Vogue, House & Garden, and Vanity Fair, became the first publisher in Australia to exploit the concept of class (Sumner 2010). This meant eliminating the snob factor, by deflating the culinary discourse that had been pervasive, for example, the use of ingredients and cooking terms that readers were assumed to know. To boost circulation while respecting current, well‐educated readers, editors aimed to include both recipes that challenged serious cooks and recipes for the novice. “Publishers of these gourmet serials are smart; they know about the ‘food porn’ junkies, but they are wise enough to recognize the needs of the modern cook by offering quick dishes, tips on improving one’s cooking skills and relevant product reviews” (Wilson 2003, p. 65). Internationally, magazine publishers were well ahead of their time in listening to what readers wanted; something that newspaper publishers learned the hard way (Johnson and Prijatel 1999,



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p. 7). Readership was very important for feedback. Editors relied on reader contributions and regularly surveyed readers to ensure they were meeting their needs. They foresaw the benefits of involving the reader. The details of this special relationship are addressed in the following section on the language of food. Australia began producing specialized culinary titles in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was not until the 1970s that New Zealand began its own. Gastronomic, social, and cultural milestones were explored and captured within the pages of these periodicals (Bliss and Joseph 2012). One example was changing readers’ attitudes to eating what is in season. Specialty food magazines began reviewing restaurants, and people began to accrue social capital if they ate in highly rated fine‐dining establishments. Another major social change was the strong link that evolved between food and wine. Before these food titles appeared and drinking wine became an acceptable social practice, there had been a disconnect  –  food was eaten at home; drinking was done at the “pub” (Veart 2008, p. 207).

Culinary Titles Down Under Australian Wines & Foods (1954–1960) was the first culinary‐focused publication in Australia, marking a “revolutionary moment in Australian culinary publishing” (Brien 2016, n.p.). The Australian Gourmet Magazine, launched in 1968, had various names before becoming Australian Gourmet Traveller in 1988. Magazines owned by global publishers tended to follow standardized formats and were less likely to reflect local food. Epicurean (1968–1996), the official bi‐monthly magazine of the Wine and Food Society of Australia, was unusual because it emphasized its artistic, eclectic covers more than the content. Cuisine magazine (1986–ongoing), New Zealand’s first culinary‐focused publication, evolved from the New Zealand Wine Guide, which was initially published in 1982. Julie Dalzell, Cuisine’s first editor, was also the publisher and owner until 2001. The magazine declared with great pride that it was a New Zealand‐centric magazine that would celebrate all that was Kiwi, and openly challenged European‐based perceptions on the status and quality of European food (Day 2012). New Zealanders rejected the concept of nouvelle cuisine as such small offerings offended their sense of proportions (Burton 2009). Instead, they assimilated and adapted recipes, blending styles, methods, and ingredients from around the world to produce “fusion cooking.” Rather than promoting a European‐style Christmas, Cuisine celebrated food within the traditional New Zealand summer: beach, boat, bach [holiday home] (Day 2012). The title, launched during a buoyant economy, daringly introduced wine tastings. This was before the domestic wine industry was well established and in advance of realizing its export potential. Along with winning several international awards, the publisher undertook a clever marketing strategy – introducing distinctive covers designed by an advertising agency and controversial billboards – to double sales. By 1999, each bi‐monthly issue was selling 80 000 copies. This number equaled sales of Australian Gourmet Traveller, a remarkable feat, given Australia had a population of 20 million compared to New Zealand’s four million. Cuisine and Gourmet Traveller re‐orientated the pleasure of eating around local food. Through profiles of producers, Antipodeans began to appreciate the quality of their homegrown food once more, accelerating their burgeoning national cultures that recognized their indigenous and multicultural ethnic backgrounds. Roquefort cheese gave way to lemon myrtle chèvre in Australia, and Kiwis began celebrating “Kiwi kai” (Maori for food), in particular the abundance of readily available seafood (kai moana). Kiwis embraced the “back to nature‐home‐ grown” trend and “food and health,” as they had always been proud gardeners (Leach 2008). Food featured in magazines became about being at home – proclaiming pride in being Kiwi – and celebrated freshness, flavor, and diversity.

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The Language of Food Food culture has been described as the ensemble of shared knowledge, attitudes, and practices that people bring to selecting, preparing, and eating food (Brien 2016). It is a product of interactions among people and is therefore created, shaped, and sustained through communication. Magazines enforce a mode of discourse among their audience members (Holmes and Nice 2012). The language of food becomes exclusive: being part of the game (Bourdieu 1984) or a select community, it was important to use the correct language; for example, one must know their béchamel sauce from their béarnaise and the various wine styles. The mode of discourse used in food magazines perpetuates group membership and builds trust within that community (Williamson et al. 2009). Special‐interest magazines, therefore, “have a special role in their readers’ lives, constructing a community or affinity group in which the readers feel they are members” (Abrahamson 2007, p. 148). They also require the editors to be one step ahead of their readers, leading rather than following, by knowing what their readers need and want, constantly reinforcing that relationship, and “creating a bond of trust with their readerships” (Holmes 2007, p. xii). Zelizer (1997) described this as a “local mode of interpretation” (1997, p. 409), explaining that “the local mode of discourse fosters an initial ‘tightness’ of the interpretive community” (p. 407) and maintains collective boundaries (p. 404). Maintaining group membership requires frequent contact. Since the turn of the century, Australasian culinary magazines have seen both subtle and substantial changes. The biggest has been increased competition. Whereas Gourmet Traveller dominated in Australia, and Cuisine in New Zealand, particularly in the 1990s, their positions have been threatened by a plethora of new domestic titles that have appeared since 2005. Dish, launched in 2004, tackled Cuisine head‐on in the premium food magazine segment (Day 2012). In 2017, circulation figures for both stood at around 25 000 issues (The New Zealand Audit Bureau of Circulations 2017). In Australia, new premium titles such as Delicious (2002) challenged Gourmet Traveller. Some newcomers, such as MasterChef Magazine (May 2010– November 2012), did not last long, and others, such as Taste magazine’s Australian edition, launched in 2013, moved from print to online. Supermarkets reintroduced their own glossy but cheaper food titles into checkout lanes. Then the formidable, compact Healthy Food Guide, was launched in New Zealand in 2005, knocking sales for Cuisine by targeting the guilt factor in eating. But it, too, appears to have peaked: in 2011 sales reached 50 000 copies per issue, but in 2017, that figure had dropped to under 38 000. The recession of 2007 saw a downturn in advertising revenue, which seriously affected all magazine production. Home and lifestyle titles, which Sumner (2010) refers to as shelter magazines, were the hardest hit. Many smaller titles produced from home offices ceased to exist, and magazines began to shrink in size. For example, Cuisine, which averaged 240 pages at its peak, dropped to half its size because of a lack of advertising content. At the same time as culinary magazines aimed to appeal to a wider audience rather than only the food elite, food became “folded into celebrity culture” (Costello 2013, n.p.). Donna Hay magazine in Australia was one of the first celebrity food titles to appear in 2001. Donna Hay, a former food stylist, had worked for other titles before editing her magazine and writing her own cookbooks. Wilson (2003) proposes that people were becoming infatuated with food by the turn of the century. “We have taken food beyond the mere necessity it provides for survival and elevated it to the status of a pop culture icon” (2003, p. 49). Culinary titles gave a public face to chefs – and the rise of the celebrity status of chefs and food producers is confirmation of this. The glamor and associated cultural capital of gourmet food had been tarnished as people in general became more aware of major issues, such as of global warming and climate change (O’Neill 2003).



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Costello (2013) contends that food has become more about security and survival, physically and emotionally, because of concerns about obesity, genetics, food supply, and production. O’Neill argues that reading gourmet food writing made people feel safe as it offered a form of fantasy reassurance: “… people entered an alternate reality where the cooking is slow and leisurely and imbued with a comforting glamour” (2003, p. 45). Johnston and Baumann (2007), who examined gourmet food journalism to understand how some foods were legitimized as high‐status cultural signals, argued terms such as “authentic” or “exotic” had become frames for inclusivity, which legitimized and further reproduced the status distinctions that Bourdieu (1984) originally discussed. For example, authenticity is endorsed by food magazines with words such as quality, honest, simple, natural, handmade, organic, and heirloom; all these terms suggest that whatever is referred to as “authentic” food is morally superior to mass‐produced products. Culinary stratification is, therefore, still endorsed through its discourse. Johnston and Baumann suggest the “decline in the legitimacy of snobbish and the rise in meritocracy (whether real or imagined) encourages more of an inclusive cultural ethos” (Johnston and Baumann 2007, p. 169). So, although the words and terms may be different, food titles still have considerable power to influence social and cultural change.

Change of Diet The outcome has been a swing back to a more instructional‐nutritional approach in the women’s magazines, away from the gourmet focus. O’Neill (2003) proposed that readers lost confidence in food writers who seemed to have sold out to promoting food‐related businesses. Instead, readers became “hungry for solid reportage, fearless analysis, independent opinion and knowledgeable interpreters and guides” (O’Neill 2003, p. 45). She argued that readers wanted food writers they could trust to interpret the available scientific data – a conclusion that would support the rapid rise in the sales of New Zealand’s compact A5 title, Healthy Food Guide, which employs writers with recognized credentials, such as nutritionists or those with similar science backgrounds. Another trend has emerged in New Zealand food writing: Nadia, the eponymously named title, was launched in New Zealand in 2016. Within a year it won the NZ Magazine Publishers Association’s award for Magazine of the Year. Nadia is named after the inaugural winner of the television competition Masterchef NZ, Nadia Lim, a dietitian with Malaysian heritage. In 2016, she was rated the third most influential New Zealander, becoming a household name with her home‐delivery service including recipes and fresh ingredients, “Food in a Bag.” According to Bauer NZ managing director, Brendon Hill (interview, May 15, 2016), Nadia symbolizes the current holistic approach to food of “healthy living, home cooking, honest values, wellness and genuineness,” or new terms of inclusivity in New Zealand food titles. The award judges felt the “innovative new entry ticks all of the boxes. Launching a magazine around a single influential individual is a bold move – but one that is rapidly paying off. Full marks for editorial vision, journalistic craft and a smart business and distribution model.”

Conclusion Despite the success of Nadia, food magazine publishers in Australia and New Zealand are becoming more cautious, suggesting it is likely that more titles will go online to reduce production costs or will be sold, especially as computer search engines make it easy to source recipes at the touch of a button. Glossy titles are still expensive to produce, particularly since the advertising content in print publications has decreased. As this chapter was being completed, Fairfax Media sold Cuisine magazine to senior staff (Read 2016), ending an era for a publication that

460 Barnes became a culinary icon and changed the eating habits of thousands of Kiwis. Culinary titles like these, therefore, provide not only a window to assess the political economy of magazine publishing but serve as social and cultural bellwethers. Although the form and format of these magazines have changed, their social and cultural functions remain the same and the complex cultural and social transformations can be captured on their pages.

References Abrahamson, D. (2007). Magazine exceptionalism: the concept, the criteria, the challenge. Journalism Studies 8 (4): 667–670. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616700701412225. Alexakis, E. and Janiszewski, L. (2016). Greek Cafés and Milk Bars of Australia. Braddon, ACT, Australia: Halstead Press. Bliss, S. and Joseph, F. (2012). Communicating through food: an analysis of the design of the covers of Cuisine magazine as they relate to the development of gastronomic identity in New Zealand. In: International Conference on Designing Food and Designing for Food (eds. F. Zampollo and C. Smith), 315–336. London, UK. (accessed 1 April 2019). http://ifooddesign.org/wp‐content/ uploads/2015/11/ICDFDFF‐2012‐conference‐proceedings.pdf. Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brien, D.L. (2016). Bringing a taste of abroad to Australian readers: Australian wines and food quarterly 1956–1960. M/C Journal 19 (5). (accessed 1 April 2019). http://journal.media‐culture.org.au/ index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1145. Burton, D. (1982). Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Food and Cookery. Wellington, New Zealand: A. H. & A. W. Reed. Burton, D. (2009). David Burton’s New Zealand Food and Cookery. Auckland, New Zealand: David Bateman. Costello, M. (2013). Reading the senses: writing about food and wine. M/C Journal 16 (3) http://journal. media‐culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/651 (accessed 1 April 2019). Cox, H. and Mowatt, S. (2014). Revolutions from Grub St: A History of Magazine Publishing in Britain. London, UK: Oxford University Press. Day, P. (2012). To What Degree do Trends in the Representation of Food in New Zealand Consumer Magazines Reflect Postmodern Themes? Research paper presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the postgraduate diploma in media studies, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand. Guptill, A.E., Copelton, D.A., and Lucal, B. (2013). Food & Society: Principles and Paradoxes. Cambridge, England: Polity. Haden, R. (2009). Food Culture of the Pacific Islands. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press. Holmes, T. (2007). Mapping the magazine. Journalism Studies 8 (4): 510–521. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 14616700701411714. Holmes, T. and Nice, L. (2012). Magazine Journalism. London: Sage. Johnson, S. and Prijatel, P. (1999). The Magazine from Cover to Cover: Inside a Dynamic Industry. Lincolnwood, Ill: NTC Publication Group. Johnston, J. and Baumann, S. (2007). Democracy vs distinctive: a study of omnivorousness in gourmet food writing. American Journal of Sociology 113 (1): 165–204. Knight, K. (2017). Ka pai kai! Maori food comes of age. NZ Herald(21 October). www.nzherald.co.nz/ lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=11934250. Leach, H. (2008). The Pavlova Story: A Slice of New Zealand’s Culinary History. Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press. Lynch, J. (2002). The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly: 70 Years from Pavlovas to Prime Ministers. Auckland, New Zealand: Random House. Ministry for Culture and Heritage. (2015). Edmonds cookery book. https://nzhistory.govt.nz/media/ photo/edmonds‐cookbook (accessed 1 April 2019). Navasky, V. and Cornog, E. (2012). The Art of Making Magazines. New York: Columbia University Press.



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O’Neill, M. (2003). Food porn. Columbia Journalism Review 42 (3): 38–45. www.cjr.org. Parasecoli, F. (2008). Bite me: Food in Popular Culture. Oxford, UK: Berg. Read, E. (2016). Fairfax sells Cuisine magazine to senior staff. Stuff (22 December). www.stuff.co.nz/ business/100122701/fairfax‐sells‐cuisine‐magazine‐to‐senior‐staff (accessed 20 January 2018). Simpson, T. (1999). A Distant Feast: The Origins of New Zealand’s Cuisine. Auckland, New Zealand: Godwit. Sumner, D.E. (2010). The Magazine Century: American Magazines since 1900, Mediating American History Series. New York: Peter Lang. Symons, M. (2010). Cooking on a dias: from Aunt Daisy to Daish. In: From Kai to Kiwi Kitchen: New Zealand Culinary Traditions and Cookbooks (ed. H. Leach), 161–183. Dunedin, New Zealand: Otago University Press. The New Zealand Audit Bureau of Circulations. (2017). ABC Magazine Circulation Audit Key Dates. http://magazine.abc.org.nz//audit.html (accessed 1 April 2019). Veart, D. (2008). First Catch your Weka. Auckland, New Zealand: Auckland University Press. Williamson, D., Tregidga, H., Harris, C., and Keen, C. (2009). The working engines of distinction: discourse for main course in restaurant reviews. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management 16 (1): 55–61. Wilson, T.L. (2003). Tasty selections: an evaluation of gourmet food magazines. Journal of Agricultural & Food Information 5 (2): 49–66. https://doi.org/10.1300/J108v05n02_06. Zelizer, B. (1997). Journalists as interpretive communities. In: Social Meanings of News (ed. D. Berkowitz), 401–419. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

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Case Study: The Bulgarian Woman as a “Free and Happy Individual” A Cultural Analysis of a Bulgarian Magazine’s Covers over Seven Decades Elza Ibrosheva and Maria Stover Introduction This study documents the cultural history of the Bulgarian magazine Zhenata Dnes (Woman Today), and analyzes its role as both a source of communist propaganda and an exclusive forum in which its female editors and writers had the opportunity to question and possibly alter the narrowly contrived notions of gender relations and identities prescribed by communist ideologies. In this complex interplay between state‐controlled messaging and the Bulgarian Communist Party’s perfunctory effort to give women a participatory voice in building the so‐called “socialist project” (the region’s communist‐era imagined ideal of a prosperous society), Zhenata Dnes – Bulgaria’s longest existing magazine – exemplifies what were once the Eastern bloc’s intricate, frequently subversive interactions between inefficient economic systems and antiquated funding mechanisms, between stagnant regulatory codes and evolving cultural identities, and between national political cultures and globalized consumption.

History of Magazines in the Eastern Bloc Magazines have contributed to the engendering of a national mass culture in the USA while also serving as vehicles for advertising messages and, often, as agents of consumption (see Weiss chapter 13). In the communist East, however, magazines served a markedly different and indisputably ideological function (see Sternadori in this volume). For example, consumption under Eastern Europe’s communist regimes was promoted only within the limits of their planned economies, making advertising a rather quaint and ideologically discredited term. As Tolstikova (2007) points out, “the expression ‘Soviet advertising’ appears to be an oxymoron (p. 42).” Since the state was responsible for the production of consumer goods, the need to build brand recognition and loyalty was unjustified and, therefore, seen as irrational and wasteful. Advertising, when present, always originated from state entities and served to promote the development of a certain socialist aesthetic and the cultivation of a “measured” and “controlled” consumption meant to benefit both the producers and the consumers of goods (Ibroscheva 2012). Government advertising was, therefore, seen as a vehicle to educate men and women about their proper roles in the idealized communist future; such advertising both promoted consumption aligned with the state’s goals and offered prescriptive gender norms (Ibroscheva 2013). The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



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Despite the limited advertising content, magazine publishing was a thriving enterprise in the Eastern bloc, recognized as a means for educating and uplifting the masses and, as such, fully funded by state subsidies (Tolstikova 2004). Bulgaria’s pre‐1989 magazines were diverse in their content and varied in their thematic focus. The best‐liked magazines were general‐interest, as in the examples of Антени (Antennae) and Паралели (Parallels, a publication of the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency), as well as periodicals focused on popular science, such as Космос (Cosmos), technology (Радио Телевизия Електроника/ Radio, TV, Electronics), fashion (Лада/Lada and Божур/ Peony), history and politics (Отечество/ Homeland); and literature, such as Факел (Torch). Because of the state‐supported funding model, magazines were available for purchase at public news kiosks at reasonable prices; yet, to ensure that production costs were covered and to guarantee a minimum number of readers, magazines were also sold by subscription, which was often semi‐mandatory and administered via the school system. The state mechanisms of controlled production and mandatory subscription, however, often backfired, and as Taylor (2006) pointed out, led to a chronic “high demand, low supply” situation, creating a strong readership culture in which readers often handed magazines they had already read to friends or family members. Among the array of Bulgarian magazines, women’s magazines and their offspring, fashion magazines, stood out as especially popular. Zhenata Dnes, Bulgaria’s first magazine dedicated to women, had the second largest circulation in the country, topped only by the Communist Party’s organ, a daily newspaper called Работническо Дело (Workers’ Deed). This by‐women‐for‐women periodical functioned as a hybrid type of magazine; it was both a Party‐agenda‐driven outlet encouraging women’s political support for the regime and a legitimate arena for popular culture news and discussion of women’s issues (Stoichkova 2009). As such, it often threaded a fine line between portraying an aspirational, communist‐style femininity and women’s individualistic desires for self‐expression, self‐actualization, and self‐determination. We captured glimpses of this underlying tension by analyzing the covers of every issue of the magazine in its 73 years of publication. The method of this study was a critical textual analysis of all the covers of Zhenata Dnes, from its founding in 1945 to the present time. As Tolstikova (2004) observes, “close historical reading of women’s magazines helps to understand the placement and significance of discourses about womanhood and femininity” (p. 131). The objectives of this study were: (i) to document the development of this flagship women’s publication; (ii) to understand its role within various historical periods; and (iii) to place it within the larger context of political and ideological developments relating to Bulgaria and Eastern Europe. Both authors took copious notes and reached an agreement on the emergent themes. In addition, the authors used biographical essays and interviews to gain a better understanding of the importance of key figures in the magazine’s history and evolution over time. The choice of a qualitative research method was intended to set the stage for an in‐depth discussion of the transformation of the magazine’s publishing practices and changes to its core staff over time, allowing us to paint a nuanced picture of the magazine’s cultural history. This is the first scholarly attempt to examine in depth the 70‐year history of this Bulgarian women’s publication. It is also an attempt to move past rigid assumptions that communist‐day publications were nothing more than vehicles for Party propaganda and to add to the growing body of research that sheds light on the complex inner workings of various organizations as well as individual actors during communism.

Zhenata Dnes During the Communist Period: 1944–1989 With the de facto establishment of a communist regime in Bulgaria on 9 September 1944, the status of women received immediate attention. Bulgarian women gained the right to vote, to be elected to office, and to be considered equal to men in every respect following the adoption of

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a law calling for the “equalization of the rights of people of both sexes,” a Soviet‐style equivalent to the failed Equal Rights Amendment in the USA that establishes equality for men and women in all areas of social, economic, and political life. The official view of the status of women in a communist society idealized them as a progressive force that played a special role in the creation of the “new person” in the process of building the “socialist style of life” (Stoichkova 2009). In a speech to the Bulgarian National Union in 1946, the General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Georgi Dimitrov, talked about the “woman‐person,” “woman‐comrade,” and “woman‐mother” (Stoichkova 2009). These descriptions embodied the Party’s views of women at the time, conceptualizing their roles during communism primarily within the duality of mother and worker. The function of this choice of words was twofold. On the one hand, it made the communist policy of gender emancipation look markedly superior compared to gender relations in the West, where women struggled not only to enter the workforce and redefine their roles outside the home, but also to compete for equal wages and equal job opportunities with men who already dominated the labor market and held the most coveted jobs. On the other hand, women’s dual roles as mothers and workers served the regime’s pronatalist and economic goals – by both procreating and working outside the home under the veil of gender equality, women were an essential force in strengthening the competitive economic advantage of the communist order; over time, their labor contribution became increasingly necessary to offset the economic realities of the postwar period and, later on, the inefficiencies of Bulgaria’s planned economy. The image of the woman who conscientiously attends to both her domestic and workplace responsibilities was not to be understood as a model imposed from above, however, but as one she actively sought and embraced as a sign of progress and as a step outside the “dark ages” of Christian Orthodox patriarchy and traditional gender roles, which did little, if anything, to advance the social and political positioning of women prior to the communist regime. Following the Marxist vision of the economic roots of the oppression of women, the Communist Party often blamed capitalism and the unequal distribution of wealth for disadvantaging women in their ability to be independent market players as well as for their lack of progress and opportunities outside the home. In this narrative, the culturally entrenched and still dominant patriarchal gender norms receiving only a tangential mention. Not surprisingly, women’s publications played a vital role in the creation of an idealized “image of the socialist woman.” She was supposed to transcend old‐fashioned ideas of gender without even acknowledging the continued existence of a traditional, gendered division of labor within the home. This was the climate in which the first issue of Zhenata Dnes hit the presses in October 1945. An official publication of what would later become the Committee of Bulgarian Women, it featured 24 pages and a circulation of 20 000 (Ghodsee 2014). The magazine’s own narrative of its history (Dimova 2005) states its main goal was to help “the Bulgarian woman be a free and happy individual.” A major underlying assumption, however, seemed to be that a woman’s freedom required a man’s presence. The first cover featured a three‐color illustration by a prominent male artist, Boris Angelushev, representing a peasant woman and a female factory worker looking into the distance (presumably, the future), in the typical‐for‐the‐time Soviet art style known as “socialist realism.” The masthead, in red lowercase letters, took secondary position to the daring headline, which encapsulated the main idea of the illustration: “Their path is the same!” The cover of the second issue communicated a similar understanding about women’s place next to men. It featured another duotone illustration, this time of a man and a woman with similar postures and expressions on their faces, accompanied by the following headline: “Equal in rights, equal in building” (of the socialist future). The third (December) issue showcased a collage prominently displaying the French flag with the words, in French, “For peace and democracy, women of the world unite,” thus linking the “socialist project” to the ideals of the French Revolution. Surrounding the message were the smiling faces of racially diverse proletariat women, presumably from different parts of the world.



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The second full year of the publication, 1946, continued the ideological and artistic imperatives that could be discerned in the first three issues. This was the year Bulgaria officially became a People’s Republic and famed revolutionary Georgi Dimitrov began his tenure as Secretary General of the Bulgarian Communist Party. The cover illustrations from this year for the first time portrayed individual women and continued featuring diverse groups of women. They featured, for example, a smiling woman in a traditional folk costume holding a Bulgarian flag in celebration of May Day, a collage of women engaged in different work‐related tasks in celebration of International Women’s Day (March 8), and an illustration of a woman manually harvesting wheat in the fall. To counterbalance all the portrayals of women outside the home, the January cover displayed a painting of a peasant woman standing next to a cradle and lovingly holding a baby. No headline or caption accompanied the illustration, thus implying the obviousness of women’s most important function: procreation. By 1949, as communists consolidated their power, Zhenata Dnes lengthened its stride and delineated its identity. The masthead added a red, communist‐style star between the words “woman” and “today.” The font used for the word “woman” became cursive and feminine, while the second part of the title, the word “today,” transitioned to bold, sturdy letters. The covers from this year closely resembled Soviet posters, featuring portraits of the Party’s Secretary General Georgi Dimitrov after his death in July of that year and of Stalin in the November– December issue. No blurbs or slogans appeared on the magazine’s 1949 covers, and the masthead appeared at the bottom, creating space for the dominant images – mostly of powerful men. In a similar pattern to previous years, the March 1949 cover celebrated International Women’s Day by featuring an illustration of mother with two young children, this time with smokestacks visible through her window that were intended to underscore the rapid industrialization of the country. The April 1950 issue showcased a design makeover, evident mostly in the style of the masthead. The red star disappeared, and the illustrations gave way to colorful photographs. Between 1951 and 1955, the masthead was shrunk to the size of a small red rectangle, thus opening space for full‐cover visuals. Notable became the magazine’s effort to celebrate the day‐to‐day work contributions of individual, ordinary women during this period of rapid industrialization, modeled after the Soviet Union’s template of accelerated modernization (Baeva and Troebst 2007). We see black and white photographs of smiling women driving tractors, working in textile factories, operating industrial‐sized lathes, wearing white lab coats, or flying airplanes. As Ibroscheva (2013) noted, during this early period of the communist regime, women were rarely featured with any emphasis on their individual appearance. When they were seen rather than heard (metaphorically, through interviews or columns), they were featured wearing their uniforms, concealing their figures, and suppressing any physical signs of femininity. The only exceptions were illustrations signaling a science‐driven approach to demystifying the female body, which accompanied some articles within the magazine. The 1950s also showcased the first cover images of children being socialized in what is said to be the “socialist way of life.” One of the covers, for example, showed two girls diligently watering a potted plant, with a caption promising advancement “through work socialization toward socialism.” Another cover displayed two school‐aged boys and a girl “studying hard,” emulating their mothers’ hard work. Educating and informing were seen as the two primary roles of the press during this time, and Zhenata Dnes fulfilled them diligently. After a period of silent de‐Stalinization (1953–1955) and the appointment of Todor Zhivkov, a man with anti‐Stalinist credentials, as first secretary of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party in 1954, the messages on the Zhenata Dnes covers visibly toned down their ideological stance. This was a time when Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev denounced Stalinist policies and the cult of personality. Therefore, instead of hard‐working, heroic‐looking women and portraits of Communist Party leaders, the covers started featuring more pictures of smiling girls, ordinary women, or “deserving” female figures like politicians or astronauts. It was around

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this point, in the mid‐1950s, that pictures of Party leaders disappeared from the covers of Zhenata Dnes altogether. Another noticeable change on the covers of the magazine was the reduced attention to prominently celebrating every single communist holiday, whether it was 8 March, May Day, 9 September (the day the Soviet Army entered Bulgaria toward the end of World War II, in 1944), or the October Revolution. Perhaps foreshadowing the pronatalist efforts of the Party in the decades to come, the covers started to depict women in a more feminine and non‐ideological light. In this vein, the cover of the March 1956 issue skipped the once‐predictable, socialist “poster style” illustration of international women in favor of a rather neutral picture of a smiling woman holding flowers in what appears to be a hothouse, or, in other words, a neutral setting. The 1958 March issue featured a painting of a young woman combing her hair, which became a prelude to a new “art” trend for the magazine. The timing of this transition was also notable because it closely coincided with the April Plenum of the Bulgarian Communist Party, known as Bulgaria’s gateway to liberalization of political and cultural life. As a result of the April Plenum, the stronghold on the arts and intellectual life was released, serving to solidify Zhivkov’s position as the country’s unchallenged leader (Johnson et  al. 2014). But by 1964, after Krushchev’s removal from power and the resulting return to ideological orthodoxy, that reformist facade mostly faded away. In line with the “art” trend, this period initiated the practice of featuring prominently Bulgarian and Soviet paintings, sculptures, films, and plays. This was not surprising since art was seen as a tool to educate and inspire the masses – glorifying the goals of communism by ubiquitously featuring heroic subjects embodying the “socialist struggle for progress.” Great efforts were made by the communist regime to popularize and increase access to such cultural institutions as cinema, theater, books, and galleries (Baeva and Troebst 2007). This is the time when Bulgaria experienced a gradual opening to the rest of the world and provided a select few with the opportunity to compare the Socialist and Western styles of life. The 1960s and 1970s marked the height of such art‐inspired covers, featuring communist achievements in music, ballet, painting, or wood carving. Heavy emphasis was also given to folk costumes, jewelry, and decor – reflecting the Party’s move toward boosting Bulgaria’s national pride and a respect for Bulgaria’s cultural roots. It was not unusual for covers from this time period to feature, for example, a close‐up photograph of a young woman wearing traditional‐ style jewelry from the nineteenth century. In 1965, the appointment of a new editor‐in‐chief, Sonia Bakish, ushered in what the official historical narrative of the magazine has called a “departure from its ideological frame” and a “sharp change in the message” with the goal of representing the “real and unthankful state of the woman‐worker” (Dimova 2005, para. 8). Bakish had been a member of the editorial collective of Zhenata Dnes since 1958. She remained politically active throughout her entire life, joining a leading opposition group that contributed to the fall of the Communist government (Langowski 2017). She was also the wife of Stanko Todorov (Chary 2011), Bulgaria’s longest‐ serving prime minister (1971–1981) and later one of the top‐level Communists who toppled the regime in 1989 (The Associated Press 1996). Bakish’s determination to make the magazine relevant to Bulgarian women resulted in hiring new editorial staff and the production of content that dared to point out the deficiencies of the communist system (Ghodsee 2014). From that point on, Zhenata Dnes has been credited with being one of the few publications capable of providing a realistic analysis of Bulgaria’s communist society by veiling its criticisms in Marxist‐Leninist thought (Ghodsee 2014). By demonstrating her loyalty to the system, Bakish was able to create a fairly open forum to discuss women’s problems. For example, Bakish ran a series of articles about women’s problems in the late 1960s by using a quote from Lenin that read: “The best way to celebrate the anniversary of a great revolution is to concentrate attention on its unsolved problems” (Ghodsee 2014, p. 548). Placing her criticisms of the status quo within Leninist ideology helped Bakish to neutralize any negative consequences. Not



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surprisingly, this was the time when the magazine reached its apogee, with a 1967 circulation of 300 000 issues in Bulgarian and 70 000 in Russian (Lipcheva‐Pranzhieva 2012), although some sources suggest that at some point the circulation stood at 500000 for Bulgaria and 150 000 for Russia (Dimova 2005). By 1968, it was apparent that women had been fully integrated into the workforce, but the price was a drastically declining birth rate (Ghodsee 2014). To correct the problem, the Bulgarian Communist Party officially declared reproduction as the primary function of women and took measures to restrict the right to abortion, which had been granted to women during communism (Sternadori 2013). As Sternadori (2013) points out: “Motherhood under communism was encouraged not for its perceived benefits to individual happiness and emotional growth, but because a high birth rate meant more workers, more party members, and more potential future soldiers” (p. 151). To aid the birth rate, the Party also started offering cash incentives for second and third children as well as extended paid maternity leaves, and made a switch from a six‐ to a five‐day workweek (Sternadori 2013). The change in Party policy was aptly reflected in the covers from the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this time period, Zhenata Dnes began to portray women who were more in touch with their femininity. The covers of the magazine showed women who were not only working hard to build the socialist future but were also enjoying leisurely activities or life outside their work duties. For the first time, the hard‐working Bulgarian women were shown toasting on the occasion of a holiday, wearing skiing outfits, or comfortably relaxing at the beach. While the covers rarely included images of men, the October 1965 cover featured a picture of a soldier and a woman touching hands in a modest embrace, which could be interpreted as very much in line with the Party’s pronatalist policies at the time. The inside pages from this period closely paralleled the covers, with expanded coverage of fashion and cosmetics, and what Lipcheva‐Pranzhieva (2012) called “the pure vanity of the beautiful” (para. 37). In a paradoxical fashion, this was also the time when the magazine’s leadership managed to negotiate a major advance for the status of women in Bulgaria’s communist society. Since the magazine was a de facto publication of the Committee of Bulgarian Women, and its editors served on the committee’s editorial board, it is important to point out their contribution to the so‐called Enhancing the Role of Women in the Building of a Developed Socialist Society order issued by the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party in March 1973 (Sharkova 2011). Although men and women had been declared equal in 1944, the reality pointed to a so‐called “double burden” of paid and care work (or a second shift) for women. Zhenata Dnes addressed this problem in the July 1967 issue, in an article titled “Let’s abolish the second shift!” The article presented results from a national survey indicating that women spent five hours a day doing household work. Recognizing that women were “a lot busier than men,” the adoption of the principle of “motherhood as a social function” became a central goal for the Committee of Bulgarian Women, which then diplomatically managed to translate it into a Party decision with far‐reaching effects for all Bulgarian women (Ghodsee 2014). Specifically, the order “authorized massive budget expenditures to expand state support for women” (Ghodsee, p. 554) while simultaneously banning abortion (against the objections of the Committee of Bulgarian Women) for married women with fewer than two children. Motherhood thus became a link between the public and the private, blurring the boundaries between the two. The bold stance of Zhenata Dnes eventually earned the wrath of Todor Zhivkov, who instead of a celebratory note for the magazine’s 25 anniversary sent a rather stern letter calling the publication “bourgeois” and “lacking a class position” (Dimova 2005, para. 13). The letter referred to the magazine’s editorial staff at that time as “yellow‐press,” “catalysts of ideological diversion,” and “feminist” (Interview with Zhenata Dnes’s editor‐in‐chief 2010). Its main editor, Sonia Bakish, refused to publish the letter, which appeared in print only after her retirement in 1980. In Bulgaria, print publications were subject to special oversight by a subcommittee of the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party (Ghodsee 2014). During Bakish’s tenure

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as editor of Zhenata Dnes, the magazine received several citations by this censorship subcommittee but suffered minimal consequences, presumably due to Bakish’s status as the spouse of a high‐ranking Party official (Ghodsee 2014). Following Bakish’s departure, in the 1980s the magazine underwent changes in its editorial staff, which transformed both its look and its political expression. The covers from this period featured a new masthead, with an acronym instead of its full title, and a return to a more pronounced ideological stance. Yet, its popularity remained high, primarily because the magazine continued to address issues relevant to female readers (Dimova 2005). The issues from 1981 to 1986, in particular, looked more politicized, with covers showing a 9 September parade, Soviet women cosmonauts, and even a cover with a poster style art for 8 March that harked back to the 1950s. Covers featuring women working hard in factories also returned in the 1980s. During this period, the earlier artistic covers or breathtaking landscapes were replaced by colorful photographs with thematic blurbs focusing primarily on family issues: the magic of childhood, the college family, the questions of the teenage years, and school as children’s “second home.” Discussions about how to navigate motherhood continued to occupy a central position on the covers of the magazine until the late 1980s. The process of perestroika, initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev after 1985, eventually forced the Communist Party to adopt economic reforms and a “new model of socialism” by 1987 (Dimova 2005). In this time of uncertainty and ideological ambiguity, the magazine took a safe approach by often featuring young children on its covers, possibly as a reminder that children are the future. Out of the 12 covers for 1988, half featured pictures of children and none made any ideological connections to socialist holidays or personalities. This remained the magazine’s safe approach in following years as well. Zhenata Dnes chose to feature art during the tumultuous years of 1989 and 1990, and even after that as the country began transitioning from 45 years of communism to a free market and democracy.

Zhenata Dnes in the Post‐Communist Years: 1990‐Present Not surprisingly, the fall of communism brought uncertainty to Zhenata Dnes as state‐sponsored paper supplies were depleted and mandatory subscriptions disappeared. The year 1990 was ridden with political and financial turmoil for the publication and its editorial staff, which was cut from 36 to 13 (interview with Sylva Zakarian 2009). In 1990, Zhenata Dnes temporarily switched to a tabloid format and cheap newspaper stock; yet, 114 000 people chose to renew their subscriptions that year  –  a clear indication of the dedicated following the magazine had managed to build throughout the decades of its existence (interview with Sylva Zakarian 2009). In the 1990s, what used to be forced celebrations of communist holidays were replaced by more subtle ways of recognizing new holidays – for example, an image of a baby pram with a Bulgarian flag sticking out of it to commemorate Bulgaria’s liberation from Ottoman rule, which is celebrated on 3 March (March 1990 cover). The July 1991 cover became iconic of the changes that had taken place; it featured a happy couple lying on the ground in an intimate, almost sensual, embrace – an image that would have been unthinkable in earlier times. Yet, it was the September 1991 issue that served as a harbinger of the new era. Featuring Milena, a popular female rock star, who in the mid‐1980s took a rebellious stand against the communist regime and was quickly labeled an “outsider,”1 the cover was a clear indication of the changing times. During the early 1990s, the magazine formally severed ties with its political arm (then called the Union of Bulgarian Women), and in 1996 it fell under the private ownership of two entrepreneurial sociologists, Kancho Stoichev and Andrei Raychev. For two years, the magazine switched four editors‐in‐chief, with only one remaining member of the old editorial staff still working at the magazine (interview with Sylva Zakarian 2009).



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With the abolishment of state subsidies and mandatory subscriptions, the magazine had to adopt creative approaches to promote its brand in an effort to survive Bulgaria’s turbulent publishing market in the 1990s. In retrospect, some of these attempts seem in poor taste. The covers received a Western‐style makeover, featuring closeups of models and beauty queens as well as promotional offers for free gifts (such as a lipstick or a book) that the readers received with the purchase of each issue. The country’s young market economy also necessitated the appearance of large advertisements or sponsorship announcements on the magazine’s covers. On its path to finding a new identity, Zhenata Dnes threaded between the provocative and the pragmatic. For example, the June 1992 cover featured a picture of a naked model, covered in beach sand and showing a nipple, accompanied by such suggestive blurbs as “Marcello: the everlasting lover” or “Never awakened by a man” (referring to sexual awakening). The main teaser on the December 1993 cover read “The naked female body,” reinforcing a shift toward openly exploring female sexuality and intimate relationships. As the blurbs increased in size, so did the attention to Western fashion as well as local (primarily female) celebrities, and the supernatural. Thus, 1994 brought readers articles about Givenchy, Thierry Mugler, alleged attacks by UFOs, cohabitation without marriage, and new fashion trends. The covers of Zhenata Dnes from this time period began to closely resemble the front pages of Western tabloid publications. In 1997, however, Zhenata Dnes underwent a design transformation, and a new stylish masthead has since adorned the magazine’s cover. The publication continues to feature suggestive teasers on topics such as “home striptease,” “goodlookingmen.bg,” and “erotic cuisine,” similar to Western readers’ expectations of the covers of Cosmopolitan magazine (which does have a Bulgarian edition). The promotional messages on the covers began to shrink in size, replaced by images and teasers showcasing prominent female actors, singers, politicians, or athletes. Covers have also occasionally featured powerful eligible bachelors or male celebrities with their families. In fact, for a period in the early 2000s, the magazine placed just as much emphasis on successful men as it did on women. A noticeable trend in the past 15 years is that Zhenata Dnes has increasingly covered the lives of Bulgarian celebrities, regardless of their gender. More recently, the magazine began emulating global trends in women’s mass‐market magazines by dedicating stories and covers to Western celebrities, such as Kate Winslet or Dakota Johnson. Inside the magazine pages, articles began to frequently feature trends in dieting, exercising, plastic surgery, thus veering into a world of indulgent and private self‐care. Daskalova (2000) has described the publication’s new overarching message in the following way: “Beauty is a woman’s most valuable asset, and every woman should try to make herself sexually attractive to men” (p. 349). Zhenata Dnes nowadays promotes the construction of a highly commodified feminine identity that is primarily concerned with care for the self (thanks to a myriad of products by well‐meaning advertisers) and much less with women’s contributions to social progress and the public sphere. Berry (2004) has noted that this global trend creates new forms of consumption and identity, with images “portraying the new woman’ and depicting new social freedoms associated with rising patterns of consumption” (p. 137). The tendency to focus on consumption and the advertising that normalizes it has defined media outlets in Bulgaria’s post‐communist transition, and magazines are no exception. This growth can be explained by the desire of the new media entrepreneurs’ relentless pursuit of profits. It also creates a sense of uncomfortable irony. Daskalova (2000) captures this irony in an  anecdote that conveys the strange contradictions of the transition period: in the early 1990s, Bulgaria’s only female member of the cabinet served as the Minister of Culture (Elka Konstantinova), she was also the mother of the publisher of the pornographic magazine Friday Night. Numerous magazines, including Western titles such as Cosmopolitan, Grazia, Elle, Playboy, and Rolling Stone, entered Bulgaria’s emerging media market and became the source of formidable

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competition, with their glossy covers, polished ads, and syndicated advice columns. Zhenata Dnes continued to promote its unique stance and, in October 2006, the magazine published a collector’s edition in celebration of its 60th anniversary, noting six decades of original content for Bulgarian women. Yet, the magazine circulation dropped to 12 000 by 2010 and its “salt of the earth” experience of being a woman in Bulgaria has gradually evolved from a mostly collectivist definition of women as mothers and workers to an individualistic taxonomy of the inhabitants of a consumerist paradise. The magazine’s covers and content are far removed from both Marxist and Western‐style feminism; the periodical now views women’s agency as based almost exclusively on an illusionary power that revolves around attracting men and outshining other women. Despite the challenges it faces, Zhenata Dnes continues to publish and provide content to generations of Bulgarian women. In an interview from 2010, the then‐editor‐in‐chief Mira Badzheva observed that the legacy of the magazine is its history, and the formula for the longevity of this publication could be found in its original motto from the 1940s – to help “the Bulgarian woman be a free and happy individual” – which mostly transcends ideology (Dimova 2005, para. 6).

Conclusion Documenting the development of this flagship women’s publication was important because it allowed a close examination of the discourses about women and femininity in this Eastern European country. The study also contributes to the literature by shedding light on the shifting roles of a women’s magazine through various historical periods in a country that has not received much scholarly attention. Tracing the development of Zhenata Dnes through the decades also allowed us to explore larger political and ideological developments in Bulgaria. What started as a Party magazine to educate and socialize women into the new “socialist life,” under the leadership of a fearless editor, became a site for questioning women’s double burden and advancing legislation that recognized motherhood as a social function. In a paradoxical way, the cultural analysis of Zhenata Dnes reveals that the publication appears to have been closer to feminist ideals during Bulgaria’s communist regime than it is in its current form. In fact, a growing body of literature points to a strand of “communist feminism” (Ghodsee 2014; Langowski 2017), as part of which women’s organizations were able to bring tangible advances for women within the constraints of the communist framework, contradicting assumptions that they were nothing more than Party pawns: Western feminists generally think of the women in these organisations as dupes of the men in the Communist party. But imagine what their legacy would be if these women activists had been branded as the “closeted dissidents” who fought for women’s rights against the established male authority in the Communist Party.” (Langowski 2017, para. 16)

The cultural history of Zhenata Dnes thus serves as a powerful reminder that, even under an authoritarian regime, a women’s magazine can be at the center of women’s lives by offering readers both empowering and ideologically programmatic ways of performing a variety of public and private personas and identities that women could choose to follow, negotiate, or criticize.

Note 1 To learn more about Milena’s status as the voice of rebellion, see http://bnr.bg/en/post/100099527/ milena‐slavova‐25‐years‐on‐stage.



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References Baeva, I. and Troebst, S. (eds.) (2007). Vademecum Contemporary History Bulgaria. A Guide to Archives, Research Institutions, Libraries, Associations, Museums and Sites of Memory. Stiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED‐Diktatur. https://www.bundesstiftung‐aufarbeitung.de/uploads/pdf_publikationen/vade_ bul.pdf. Berry, D. (2004). Is popular culture subversive in Romania? An assessment of teenage girls and women’s magazines. Slovo 16 (2): 131–142. Chary, F.B. (2011). The History of Bulgaria. ABC‐CLIO. Daskalova, K. (2000). Women’s problems, women’s discourses in post‐communist Bulgaria. In: Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics and Everyday Life After Communism (eds. S. Gal and G. Kligman), 331–380. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dimova, Mila. 2005. Zhenata Dnes: 60 Years of Vanity. Sega. http://old.segabg.com/article.php?id= 3931(accessed 25 February 2019). Ghodsee, K. (2014). Pressuring the politburo: the Committee of the Bulgarian women’s movement and state socialist feminism. Slavic Review 73 (3): 538–562. Ibroscheva, E. (2012). The unbearable lightness of advertising: culture, media and the rise of advertising in socialist Bulgaria. Consumption, Markets and Culture 16 (3): 290–310. Ibroscheva, E. (2013). Advertising and Post‐Socialism: Women, Media and Femininity in the Balkans. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Interview with Mira Badzheva, Zhenata Dnes’s Editor‐in‐Chief (YouTube video, in Bulgarian)2010. Accessed February 25, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQe1LnyzcJk. Interview with Sylva Zakarian (in Bulgarian). 2009. Accessed February 25, 2019. http://printguide.info/ pomoshtnik/silva‐zakaryan‐bolkan‐media‐grup,295.html. Johnson, E., Walker, D., and Gray, D. (2014). Historical Dictionary of Marxism, 2e. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Langowski, Judith. 2017. “The History of Communist Feminism: An Interview with Kristen Ghodsee.” Political Critique. Accessed February 25, 2019. http://politicalcritique.org/world/2017/interview‐with‐ kristen‐ghodsee‐feminism‐eastern‐europe‐west Lipcheva‐Pranzhieva, L. (2012). Women of socialism and the readership of Zhenata Dnes: 1960–1970. LiterNet 3 (148) https://liternet.bg/publish4/llipcheva/zhenata‐dnes.htm. Sharkova, S. (2011). The socialist woman between the public and the private (1967–1973): visions, contradictions, and political actions during the socialism in Bulgaria. Godishnik na Sofiiskiya Universitet “St. Kliment Ohridski,” Filisofski Fakultet, Kniga Sotsiologiya 103: 61–80. https://research.uni‐sofia.bg/ bitstream/10506/474/1/Savina%20Sharkova_THE%20SOCIALIST%20WOMAN.pdf (accessed 25 February 2019). Sternadori, M. (2013). Heroines under control: unexpected portrayals of women in the official newspaper of the Bulgarian Communist Party, 1944–1989. Women’s Studies in Communication 36 (2): 142–166. Stoichkova, T. (2009). Women in socialist Bulgaria: images and politics. Notabene 12. http://notabene‐ bg.org/read.php?id=124. Taylor, K. (2006). Let’s Twist Again: Youth and Leisure in Socialist Bulgaria. LIT Verlag Münster. The Associated Press. (1996). Stanko Todorov, 76, ex‐Premier of Bulgaria. The New York Times. https:// www.nytimes.com/1996/12/20/world/stanko‐todorov‐76‐ex‐premier‐of‐bulgaria.html (accessed 25 February 2019). Tolstikova, N. (2004). Rabotnitsa: the paradoxical success of a soviet women’s magazine. Journalism History 30 (3): 131–140. Tolstikova, N. (2007). Early soviet advertising: we have to extract the stinking bourgeois elements. Journalism History 33 (1): 42–50.

Index

AARP The Magazine 235–236 Abrahamson, David  4, 61, 65–72 Accent  96, 101 Adbusters (and the eponymous magazine)  171 ad tech  105, 113, 116 advertising  125–126, 138–139, 142–143, 148–149, 151, 403–405, 408–410, 413–416 affordances 13–15 African‐American/Black magazines  146–152, 174, 282 agenda building theory  58–59 agenda setting theory  52, 57–61 aging 235–237 Aitken, Robert  310 al‐Awlaki, Anwar  384, 385, 391, 392 Al Fatat (TheYoung Girl) 220 algorithms 114–116 al‐Qaeda  384–386, 390 al‐Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)  384, 388, 390, 391 alternative media  94 Amateur Photographer 322 American Baby 235 The American Magazine 42 The American Magazine and Monthly Chronicle for the British Colonies 281 American Society of Magazine Editors  151, 352 analytics  67–9, 112 Ananda Vikatan 334 Anis al‐Janis (The Intimate Companion) 220 Another Escape 96 anti‐caste literature  334 Anxy  92, 94, 97 Apartamento  92, 97, 101

Aperture 322–323 Appiah, K. Anthony  88 Arena  93, 217 Argentina (magazines in)  403, 404, 406–409, 413, 415 Armenia (magazines in)  440, 446 Artforum  264, 267–268, 271 artificial intelligence  116 L’Artiste 264 artists’ advertisements  268–269 artists’ magazines  264–275 Art‐Rit 269–70 Aspen  266–267, 273 The Atlantic  66, 106, 110, 372, 373, 391, 433, 434 atomization (of content)  146, 151 attention  24, 31 economy of  31 edge of  21 audiences  4, 129–130, 313–316 affluent  220, 248, 309, 313–316, 456 of B2B media  129 in Latin America  403, 405, 406, 408–413, 415 local 307–318 low‐income  309, 313 niche  69, 405, 409 reached through social media  12, 32, 109, 246, 379, 423 resonance with  396, 398 urban  56, 149, 245, 248, 309, 311, 313, 315–316, 318, 408, 431, 433, 448 aura (of celebrities)  207 Australia  148, 202, 233

The Handbook of Magazine Studies, First Edition. Edited by Miglena Sternadori and Tim Holmes. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Index 473 magazines in  36, 46–7, 72–3, 88, 103, 111, 157, 198, 219, 228, 230, 270, 285, 424, 453–60 Australian Gourmet Traveller 456–458 Austria (magazines in)  138, 219, 348 authenticity  200, 202 Avalanche  269–270, 272 avantgarde  442, 445 Azerbaijan (magazines in)  315, 440–441 Baby Talk 235 Bakish, Sonia  466–468 Bandura, Albert  55–56 Barthes, Roland  266–267 Basham, Maud  454 behavioral targeting  115 Belarus (magazines in)  440, 445 Benjamin, Walter  265 Benji Knewman  92, 94, 97 Better Homes & Gardens  106, 167, 169, 226 Bitch  192, 216 Black Ballad 395–397 Black Beauty 394–395 Black Hair 394–395 Black journalists, UK  394–398 BlackLivesMatter movement  181, 183 Black (African‐American) middle class, United States 146–148 Black nationalism  150 Black (African‐American) newspapers, United States 147–148 The Blind Man 265 Blitz India 432 UK  93, 328 blogs  96, 98–9, 142, 180, 193, 205, 285–6, 295, 318, 421, 449 Bloom’s taxonomy  282–284 bodily capital  85–87 body image  41, 55, 228, 412 Bon Appetit 288 Boneshaker 96 Bosnia (magazines in)  440, 448 Bourdieu, Pierre  97, 298, 323, 458–459 Branching Out 219 brand journalism  143 brands  313, 405, 406 Bravo! 230 Brazil (magazines in)  230, 270, 287, 403–409, 412–415 Breathe 288 Brinkhurst‐Cuff, Charlie  393, 395–398 British Society of Magazine Editors  365 Broccoli  95, 98 Bulgaria (magazines in)  440, 442, 446–8, 463, 465–7, 470 Burrell, Gibson  80–81

business of data collection  114, 131 intelligence  128, 131 journalism  128, 308 of magazines  95, 155, 157, 404, 406, 407, 410, 411, 413, 415 models  5, 26, 69, 72, 93, 95, 106–108, 116, 120, 127, 130, 142, 150–151, 155, 158–159, 309, 412 press 120–131 business‐to‐business (B2B) media (magazines)  10, 12, 120–131, 138 business‐to‐customer (B2C) magazines  12, 138 BUST 217 Bustle 181 Canada (magazines in)  138, 170–1, 219, 234, 236–7, 269, 307, 315, 361 Capricho  287 Car and Driver  167, 173, 377 The Caravan  427, 430, 433–436 Caretas 407 cartoons  8, 346–349, 352, 354 categories of magazines  168–175 celebrity magazines  198–212 Cereal  3, 96 Le Charivari 347 Charlie Hebdo  20, 345, 354 Chatelaine  219, 360 children’s periodicals  8, 56, 176, 227, 286–288, 411, 430 Chile (magazines in)  403–407, 409, 410, 413, 414 Chimurenga 274–275 China (magazines in)  175–176, 417–425 circulation  136–139, 142–143, 406, 408–410 city and regional magazines  307–309 Civil Rights era  149, 152 class  14, 21–24, 26, 28, 31, 38, 40, 56, 86–87, 97, 100, 146–152, 171, 173, 182, 185, 193, 214–217, 220–221, 228, 231, 233–234, 263, 269–270, 282, 284, 286–287, 301, 307, 312–313, 316, 325, 335, 347, 389, 395, 403, 422, 431, 433, 435, 441, 453–454, 456, 467 classism  181, 192 Cleo  22, 358 clickbait 109 Collier’s 372 Colombia (magazines in)  403, 407, 410, 414, 415 communist feminism  447, 467–470 Computers and Automation 7 conceptual art  266–269, 272 Condé Nast, Inc. 78, 82–89, 116, 154–155, 181–182, 193, 315, 318, 456 connectivity (provided by magazines)  14–16, 129–131

474 Index conservation magazines  285 consumerism  159, 166–178, 248–249, 312, 424, 447 consumer lifestyles  55, 165–178, 248–259 consumer magazines  53–4, 56, 126, 130, 170, 180–8, 187–93, 325, 417–25, 447 consumers  403, 405, 406, 409, 411, 412, 415 consumption  165–178, 312 conspicuous  6, 148, 186, 424 Contemporary Photographer 323–324 continuing education credits and units  281 convergence 421–423 de Cordova, Richard  200 corporate communication  136, 142–143 corporate publishing  141, 143 CosmoGirl  175, 182, 230 Cosmopolitan  37, 154, 172–173, 175, 181, 183, 232, 234, 243, 250, 255, 257, 288, 359–365, 411, 469 Cosmopolitan for Latinas 411 county magazines  316 covermount gifts  288 covers  42–43, 57, 60–1, 66–7, 168–9, 184, 236, 241–2, 267, 269, 281, 295, 313, 326, 351–2, 397, 412, 457, 462–3, 465–70 Creative Camera  322–4, 327, 329–330 creativity encouraged by magazine content  245, 302 in magazine production  12, 68, 87, 94–95, 100–101, 125, 252, 259, 329, 406 Cricket 227 critical studies  37 Croatia (magazines in)  440, 442 Croissant 220 cross‐platform publishing  42, 102, 106–107, 111, 136, 157, 245, 249, 313, 335, 365–366, 420–421, 423, 425, 430 cultural economy  417 cultural industries  78 cultural studies  39–40 Curry 97 Curve 175 customer magazines  136–143, 160, 423–424 Czech Republic/Czechoslovakia (magazines in)  270, 440, 442, 446 Dalit literature  334, 336–337 Dalzell, Julie  456–457 Day, Corinne  322, 329, 331 Dazed & Confused (now Dazed)  20, 93, 95 Death Cab for Cutie  24, 28, 33 Delayed Gratification  98, 99 Denmark (magazines in)  93, 270 depictions of see also class, gender; LGBTQ; mental health; race, sexuality age 190–191 aging 235–237 asexual and aromantic people  188–189

authority figures  349 bisexuals 186–187 breastfeeding 233 celebrity mothers  41, 233 consent  185, 187, 189, 191–192 death 237 diet  236, 242, 244–245, 248–259, 459, 469 domestic violence  59, 283, 360, 364 environmental issues  370–375 the female body  29, 39, 268, 469 see also sexualization foreign people and lands  40, 42, 350, 446 gay men  182, 184–186, 188, 190, 361, 446 hedonism 249 historical events  43 intersex people  189 lesbians  186, 216–217 mothers/motherhood  233, 287, 465, 467 poly and kink communities  189 queer people  188, 191–192 rape culture  187, 189–192 see also consent relationships between genders and classes  14 sex/sexual relations  183, 230, 232, 469 see also consent; sexual scripts; sexuality transgender people  84, 184–188, 218 women as consumers  29, 172 women in the public sphere  325, 362, 463–465 workers 327 design  12–13, 42, 92–94, 98, 99, 137, 248–249, 257–258, 269–270, 301–302, 323, 325–326, 328–329, 445, 447, 457, 465, 469 see also layout Details  84–85, 88, 89, 235, 380 diaspora magazines  280–281, 313 didacticism (as a function of magazines)  279–281, 286 digital culture 271–273 disruption  107, 112, 420 media  404, 405, 407, 412, 413 publishing  421–422, 425 digitization/digitalization  130–131, 142, 245, 307, 418–420, 423, 428 disinformation  69–71, 374 disintermediation  105, 111–112 display advertising  108 diversity  37, 43, 65–66, 130, 309, 316–317, 393–398, 454, 457 as good for business  66 of ideas and viewpoints  39, 431 of magazine types and formats  128, 330, 425 racial and ethnic  152, 181, 408–409 sexual  184–185, 188–189, 192–193 Doctor Who Magazine  294, 297, 299–304 do‐it‐yourself (DIY)/handyman magazines  170 Ebony 146–152 The Ecologist  170, 370, 375 The Economist  9–10, 113, 378, 435

Index 475 editors as advocates  362–363, 442, 446, 462, 465–468 as carriers of social capital  316 in communication with readers  286–287, 296, 300, 345, 398, 406, 422–423, 457–458 in communication with content contributors  323–324, 335, 371, 398 as gatekeepers  60–61, 180, 183, 245 as guardians and promoters of ideology  386–387, 443 roles  157, 297, 314 in tension with power structures  302–303, 314, 465–468 as visionaries  52, 157, 313–314, 329, 359, 371–373, 395–396, 419, 432, 442, 455–456 education  8, 26, 84, 109, 124, 128, 148–9, 166, 168, 172, 180, 190, 215, 219, 229, 278–90, 295, 314, 316, 337–9, 346, 362–3, 409, 412, 419, 429, 441, 444 edutainment  278, 282, 286 effects of advertising  125–126 of B2B magazines  126 of breastfeeding depictions in parenting magazines  233 of customer magazines  141 of digital speed on attention  99 of exclusion and marginalization  398 of gender representations on tweens  228 of magazine editorial content  41 of magazine instruction  278, 284–286 of magazines on identity and socialization 55–56 of mass media  23, 41, 52, 54–55 of newsmagazines on public agendas  57–59 Egypt (magazines in)  56, 176–177, 220 Elbow Grease 96 Elle  154, 217, 234, 243, 365–366, 408, 419, 469 Émigré 93 engagement  405, 412, 413 Entertainment Weekly  169, 288 entrepreneurial consumers  31 environmental magazines  58, 170, 375, 448 Ernest Journal  96, 99 Esquire  37, 156, 173–174, 224, 234–236 Essence  40–41, 151, 174, 236 Estonia (magazines in)  441 Ethical Consumer  54, 170–171, 379 ethnicity  40, 43, 171, 226, 398, 453 Europe (magazines in)  219, 440–449 events sponsored by magazines  16, 60, 95–97, 129–130, 243, 272, 274, 295, 312–314, 317, 393, 395, 397, 405–406, 424, 431 ex‐communist countries (magazines in)  440–449 extended family repertoire  208–209 The Face  93, 217, 324, 328–9 Facebook  105–107, 109, 111, 112, 115, 116

fact‐checking  69–71, 436 Faludi, Susan  84–85 Family Circle  172, 214, 455 Family Handyman  170, 288 fan magazines  199, 205, 293–304 fashion magazines  41, 55–56, 154–155, 158, 182, 268, 283, 298, 419, 442, 446, 449, 463 Fathers 92 Felker, Clay  308–309, 311 female readers  202, 205, 209–211, 282 feminism  215–218, 221, 333, 336, 442, 447 feminist literature 333–339 magazines  100, 181, 217, 219, 283, 364, 446 theories  333, 336 FHM  217, 220, 226, 231, 234–235, 448 FILE 270 Finland (magazines in)  92, 245, 281, 364 Fish, Stanley  294 Fitzgibbon, Ryan  94, 100, 102 Flaneur 92 Fleet St. 24, 27 Flow 288 Flower City 421 Folio  8, 12 food (culinary) magazines  453–460 Forbes  42, 110, 155, 407, 429 Fortune  37, 106, 429 Foucault, Michel  80, 87, 184, 250, 346, 361 Foxton, Simon  87 France (magazines in)  61, 92, 219, 264, 270, 288, 345–347, 361, 442, 446 Franklin, Benjamin  310 Fray, Peter  65–72 Friedan, Betty  38, 358, 362–363 Fujin Gaho (Illustrated Women’s Gazette) 220 functions (of magazines) agenda‐setting 57–59 of B2B magazines  125–128 of Chinese magazines  419–425 of culinary magazine  455–460 of customer magazines  139 of fashion magazines  154–160, 449 gatekeeping 59–60 ideological  58–59, 445–447 interactive  420, 422 of magazines in Latin America  403 of magazines in post‐communist countries 441–449 of media in society  51–54 pedagogical 278–289 of readership groups  4 of reading apps  116, 420, 422–423 future of B2B media  130–131 of local magazines  317–318 of the magazine industry  65–72, 397–398, 425

476 Index gal‐dem  97, 393–398 Gamson, Joshua  198–199 Gannett 312 gastro porn  456 gatekeeping theory  59–61 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr.  88–89 gender  38–39, 41, 43, 55, 58, 61, 171–172, 180–194, 214–221, 227–235, 241–246, 296, 333–340, 365–366, 398, 409, 412–413, 446, 462–470 The Gentlewoman  93, 98 Geo 429 Germany (magazines in)  92, 138, 140, 219, 270, 308, 316, 348, 353–354 Girlfriend 230 Girls’ Life 228 Glam Belezza Latina 411 Glamour  178, 226, 230, 232, 243 globalization  176, 249, 272–275, 454–455 Golsorkhi, Masoud  97 Good Housekeeping 281 Google  105, 106, 108, 109, 111–116 gossip  199–200, 202, 205–206, 212 GQ  69, 84, 156, 173–4, 183, 217, 220, 226, 234–6 El Gráfico 407 Graham, Dan  266–268, 271, 272 Grazia  21, 154, 394–395, 469 Griffin, Brian  322, 324–325, 327–328, 330–331 Habermas, Jürgen  263–264, 346 Hall, Jerry  32 handwritten/handmade magazines  270, 445 Harper’s Bazaar  155–157, 160, 169, 268, 325, 419 Harper’s Weekly 348 Harvard Lampoon 351 Haymarket Media  12, 324–325 Hearn, Marcus  303 Hearst Magazines  78, 113, 116, 154–156, 172, 243, 244, 349, 453 Hello 288 Hello Mr.  94, 100–102 Herizons 219 Hermes, Joke  208–209 Herzog, Herta  51–52 high‐brow periodicals  284 Highlights 226–227 Hip Mama 233 history  36–38, 138–139, 310–312, 441–443 of city and regional magazines in the United States 310–312 of customer magazines  138–139 of food and culinary magazines  453–455 of magazines in Central and Eastern Europe 441–443 history magazines  284 Hochshild, Arlie  79, 81 Hoggart, Richard  22–24, 28

homogenization  249, 312, 318 Hong Kong (magazines in)  315, 354 Hop and Barley 96 Houseparty 286 HUES  217, 316 Hungary (magazines in)  59, 270, 440, 448 Husni, Samir  3, 424 i‐D  93, 217, 322, 324, 328–331 identity  6, 14, 16, 21–2, 30, 39–40, 55–56, 95, 142, 185, 189–191, 214, 226, 229, 269, 317, 323, 359, 361, 363, 366, 389, 393–4, 453, 469 Brand & consumer identity  111, 160, 166, 181 gender & sexual identity  39, 187, 189, 193, 220–1, 293, 366 local identity  307, 310–311, 316 National and cultural  43, 56, 152, 336, 435 reader identity  6–7, 55, 168, 171–175, 295–7, 302 ideology  40, 58, 81, 166, 176, 184–5, 192–3, 216, 249–51, 295, 349, 387, 390–1, 445–6 The Idler 97 India  207, 337–9, 347 (magazines in)  97, 282, 307, 315, 317, 333–334, 427–433, 435, 437 India Today  427, 429–433 indie (independent) magazines, definition  93–97 influencers  31, 111 innovation  406, 413–415 InPublishing  8, 158 Inspire 384–391 Instagram  8, 98, 109, 155, 173, 186, 212, 242, 245, 364, 395 instructional videos  287–288 Interfunktionen 270 interpretive communities  294–304, 458 intersectionality  181, 183, 185, 188–190, 192–193, 214, 221, 269, 336, 389 intimacy  199–200, 202–204, 207–209 Into 181–191 investigative journalism  311–312 Iran (magazines in)  221, 274 Italy (magazines in)  92, 270 Jackie  22, 229 Jacobin Review 97 Japan (magazines in)  39, 157, 220–221, 265, 270, 308 Jet 149–150 jihad  384–386, 389, 392 Johnson, John H. 146–152 journalism  16, 26, 31, 37–9, 42, 66–72, 78, 85, 87, 92, 94, 99, 102, 121–9, 131, 136, 138–40, 142–3, 193, 295–6, 298, 300, 307–9, 311, 314, 317, 329, 345–6, 349, 352–3, 358–9, 370, 373, 380, 394, 397, 407, 409, 427–8, 431–4, 436–7

Index 477 feminist 215 food 459 investigative  8, 352, 371–2, 433 literary 312 online and multimedia  83, 420 participatory 16 “pedagogical” 279 photojournalism  323, 360 “slow”  99, 102 “snackable” 379 urban 318 journalistic reporting  10, 37, 53, 125, 137, 139–143, 176, 182, 202, 275, 295, 309, 312, 348, 353–4, 359, 370–5, 377, 379–80, 428, 433, 436–7 Kalachuvadu  335, 336 Katz, Elihu  51, 54–55 K/D  97, 101 Khan, Samir  384, 385, 388, 391 Kinfolk  93, 97, 102 Kitch, Carolyn  38, 244, 346, 358 Kleina, Agnese  97 Kosovo 2.0  97, 101 Krokodil  354, 444 Kumudam 334 Kungumam 334 Ladies’ Home Journal  5, 40–43, 226, 236, 282, 372, 455 The Ladies’ Mercury  37, 214, 362, 393–394 “lad” magazines  235 Ladybeard  97, 101 Lagom  96, 97 Lasswell, Harold  51–53 Latina 412 Latino/a magazines in the U.S. 40, 411–412 Latvia (magazines in)  92, 441 see also Benji Knewman layout  83, 126, 137, 140, 242, 267, 323, 328–329 see also design Lazarsfeld, Paul  51–54 Lear’s 235 Lebanon (magazines in)  94, 101–102 see also The Outpost Le Carré, John  24 Leslie, Jeremy  96, 98 LGBTQ  16, 183–4, 193, 236 issues in magazine content  180–1 magazines  174–175, 185–190, 192 Life  37–8, 40, 42–3, 52, 57, 167, 309, 323, 375–6, 435 influence of  146, 148–49 lifestyle publications  216–218, 248–258, 288 lifestyles  166, 170–175, 248–258, 313, 315 Life Week 422–423 The Lifted Brow 94 Lionheart 96

literacy  23, 26, 28–31 mass  23, 27, 31 purposeless  27, 29 literary  37–38, 61, 93, 215, 294, 301–302, 310, 323, 334–335, 404, 408, 410, 421, 433, 436, 442, 444, 445 journalism  37–38, 433, 436 magazines  61, 93, 215, 294, 301–302, 310, 323, 334–335, 404, 408, 410, 421, 442, 444, 445 studies/criticism  22, 23, 37–38, 279, 294 Little, Liv  393, 395 little magazines  311, 333–339 Lloyd, Edward  25–27 loaded  217, 226, 231, 234 Lockhart, Carolyn  456 Lonely Planet 429 Look UK weekly  154 US mass‐circulation magazine  149, 167, 309 Lost 97 Loving Dalston 32–33 Lumpen 97 MacGuffin 92 Mademoiselle 230 Mad Magazine  349–350, 354 magazine art  263, 271 magazine (journalism) education  65–71, 308–309 magazine exceptionalism  61–62 MagazineLine 167–169 magazine maker apps  32 Magni, Pietro (Reading Girl) 28–29 mail art  270 MAKE Magazine 284 Man 219 Management Today  322, 324–328, 331 marginalization  147, 185, 189, 192–193, 273, 315, 334, 388–389, 393, 396–398 Marie Claire  111, 154, 178, 217, 232, 243, 409, 429 marketing tools  136, 139 materiality (of print magazines)  8, 98–99, 263, 265, 267 Maxim  174, 217, 234–236 McCall’s  226, 236 McClure’s 371–372 McCombs, Maxwell  52, 57 McLeod Smith, Tess  155–160 McRobbie, Angela  22, 38, 80, 100–101, 229 McSweeeney’s 354 media effects  41–42, 141 media functions  51–54 media theories  51–62 Megazine, concept definition and explication  9–13 Men’s Health  39, 169, 220, 235–236 Men’s Journal  173, 174 men’s magazines  168, 173–174, 183, 214–221, 227, 231–232, 234–237

478 Index mental health (in magazine content)  92, 180, 185, 189–191, 394, 397–398 Meredith Corporation  106, 107, 116 Merton, Robert  51–54 Metazine, concept definition and explication 13–16 MeToo movement  77–78, 89, 183, 413 Mexico (magazines in)  403, 404, 406, 407, 410–412, 414 Mirabella 235 Modern Screen  198–202, 205, 209–211 Mongolia (magazines in)  448 Monocle 350–351 more 235 Morocco (magazines in)  270 Mother and Baby 288 Mother Jones  58, 376–377, 380, 433 Motion Picture 199 Ms.  38, 58, 61, 217, 363, 447 muckraking  37, 311, 371–372, 375, 380, 432 Murdoch, Rupert  25, 26, 32–30, 351 Mushpit  97, 100–101 my generation 235–236 Nader, Ralph  374–375, 377 Nadia 459 The Nation  37, 268, 350–2, 374–5 National Geographic  40, 57, 61, 227, 359, 375, 380, 408 nationalism (in magazine content)  59, 334, 431–432, 442 native advertising  110, 115 Navasky, Victor  346, 350–352, 453 Neda (The Call) 221 Negro Digest 147–148 Nehme, Ibrahim  94, 101–102 neoliberalism  41, 100–101, 226, 232, 237, 249, 251 Nest 93 Net‐a‐Porter  142, 154–156, 158–160 Netherlands (magazines in)  60, 92, 128, 141, 219, 231 New Man concept  217 The New Republic 374–375 NewsCorp 116 newsmagazines  57, 59, 380, 409, 428–430, 433, 437 New Statesman  21, 362, 364 Newsweek  38, 42–43, 57, 106, 236, 289, 309, 375, 407, 435 Newsweek Polska 448 New Woman concept  215–216, 469 New York  151, 308–309, 311–312 New York Woman 235 The New Yorker  43, 61–62, 66–67, 77, 88, 284, 289, 309, 347, 354, 372–374, 380, 431, 433–434, 436

New Zealand (magazines in)  127, 230, 453–459 Nexos 407 Nigeria (magazines in)  59 nonbinary  182, 185, 187, 192 non‐Western magazines  175–177 Nova  325, 363–364, 409 novelty bundling  21, 31, 32 NZ Woman’s Weekly 455 Offscreen  92, 96, 99 Ogonyok (Flame)  444–445, 447 Ok! 198 “omni‐media” models  155, 421 The Onion 354 online magazines  156, 217, 221, 286, 393–398 OOMK  97, 101 ordinariness  206–207, 209, 212 Oredein, Toby  395, 397–398 organic intellectual  337 organizational publication  137, 142–143 Orientalism  40, 384, 391 O, the Oprah Magazine  172, 236 otherness/The Other  40, 190, 315 Out 182 Outlook  427, 431, 435, 437 The Outpost  94, 97, 101–102 Outside  375, 380 owned media  136 Paine, Thomas  310 paparazzi  199, 202 Parenting 235 parenting magazines  232–233, 235, 237, 280, 283, 285–286 Parents  233, 235 Parents Latina 411 Parents Must Read 424 pauper press  26, 31 Payan‐e Zan (Woman’s Message) 221 pedagogical journalism  279 pedagogy (as a function of magazines)  188, 278–289 Penthouse  219, 235, 488 People  106–107, 198–200, 202, 204–207, 209, 212, 289, 366, 429 Peres, Daniel  84–85, 88 periodicity  137, 142 PESO model  110–111 philanthropy (as a function of magazines)  307, 313–314, 317 photography 200 in celebrity magazines  200 in children’s magazines  227 in food magazines  456 importance of  148, 152

Index 479 local 312 magazines dedicated to  322–331, 445 social 316 Photoplay  198–200, 202–208, 211 Plamuk (Flame) 442–443 Poland (magazines in)  92, 176, 446, 488 political communication (via magazine content)  26, 404, 406–407, 409, 412 political economy  38–39 Pope, Alexander  346 Popular Cinema 423–424 popular culture weeklies  333–334, 336 populist magazines  59, 442 pornography 183 Porter  142, 154–160 Portugal (magazines in)  231 post‐communist magazines  440–449 power distance (between magazine staff and readers)  255–256, 286–287 Pressing Matters 96 Prevention 235 Pride 394–395 Prima 244–245 Private Eye  351–352, 354 Proceso 407 product placement  288 professional development magazines  281 programmatic advertising  112–115 psychological reactance  285–286 psychology  41–42, 80, 288 of consumption  165 of media  41–42, 56, 141, 285 public relations  53, 110, 122, 126, 136, 139–140 public sphere  263–264, 272, 275, 346 Puck 348–349 Punch 347–348 quality (of magazines)  404, 406, 407, 415 Queen  322, 325 queer theory  80, 86 quizzes (in magazines)  288–289 Rabotnitsa (Working Woman)  442, 444, 446 race  40, 43, 65–6, 86, 115, 149, 171, 174, 182, 190, 214–6, 221, 233, 237, 269, 364, 394, 397–398 racism  40, 53, 146–148, 150, 181, 185, 190–192, 229, 297, 353, 363, 397 radio magazine programs  282 Rake’s Progress  97, 101 Rayli 248–258 Reader’s Digest  40, 60, 147–148, 235, 289, 373 reader/ship 21–22 class‐based  23–24, 26 as distributed communication network  27

literate 31–32 as makers  29–30 representations of  28–9 systems 26 as users  22, 27, 31, 32 The Realist 350 Real Life 271 Real Review  97, 101 Real Simple 54 Red 243–246 Redbook  172, 236, 363 religious magazines  281, 447 research approaches to studying magazines  36–44 on B2B media  120–130 on city magazines’ content  313 conducted by advertising professionals  111 on consumption in the context of identity 172–177 on customer preferences  157, 159, 161 focused on media content producers  21 on gender construction in magazines  214–221 on health communication targeting women 232–234 on imagined communities of readers  298–299 on Latin American media  403, 407, 408, 413 on magazines as tools of cultural pedagogy 279–289 on magazines’ globalization  249 on mass communication  51–62 on media effects  141 on media’s role in children’s socialization 227–232 on organizational behavior  78–89 relevant to magazine professionals  65–72 on sexual scripting in magazines  183–194 revenue (of magazines) from any type of advertising  5, 316, 379–380, 410, 433 declining  106, 245, 404, 417, 421, 436, 448, 458 from digital subscriptions  334 from digital supplements  287–288 from e‐commerce and retail  155, 160 from mobile/online advertising  109, 151, 421 from offshoots and magazine‐sponsored events  5, 16, 96, 313, 405, 431 from print products  128 from product placement  288 from subscription and advertising combined  95, 105–106, 130, 216, 297, 418, 431 Riposte  92, 96, 101, 364 Rolling Stone  37, 42, 57, 60, 62, 235, 375, 377–378, 408, 469 Romania (magazines in)  270, 440–442, 446, 448, 449

480 Index Roussel, Théodore (Reading Girl) 29 Russia (magazines in)  21, 39, 93, 273, 316–317, 354, 447–449 samizdat (self‐publishing)  93, 270, 446–447 Sassy  217, 231 satirical magazines  345–355, 441–442 Saturday Evening Post 281 Saturday Review 58 science magazines  282 Schenk, Roland  324–327 search advertising  108 self‐improvement  209, 241, 246, 250, 278, 280–281 semiotic approaches  42–43 Semana  407, 410 Serbia (magazines in)  440–442 Seventeen  37, 41, 175, 182–183, 226, 228–230, 232, 288 sex advice  280, 282–283, 285 sexism  40, 87, 181, 183, 192, 211, 234, 268, 353 sexuality  77–89, 184–189, 217, 230–231, 235–236, 307 sexualization  42, 60, 80, 82, 227–228, 235 sexual scripts (in magazine content)  180, 183–194 SFX 298 shed, magazine as  20–22 shoppability 154–160 Shout  242–243, 245 Shufu no Tomo (The Ladies’ Journal of Housekeeping) 220 Shufu to Seikatsu (Housewives and Life) 220 Simple Living 170 Simplicissimus 353 Singapore (magazines in)  96 Sirene 92 slow journalism  71, 72, 99–100, 102 social capital  316–317, 457 cognitive theory  55–56 justice (promoted by magazines)  58, 181–185, 193, 297, 309 media  67, 199, 205, 245, 312, 313, 394, 397, 420–424 network market  31 science 36–44 socialist/Marxist periodicals  335 socialist realism  445 sociology of agriculture and rurality  122 of consumption  165 of media  39–40, 71 of visibility  80 South Africa (magazines in)  56, 219, 283, 354 South Korea (magazines in)  55

Soviet Union (magazines in)  354, 444–447 Spain (magazines in)  92, 245, 284 Spare Rib 363 specialized agencies  137, 138 The Spectator  173, 183, 217, 220, 226, 234–236, 281 Der Spiegel 43 Spilsbury, Tom  302 Sports Illustrated  37, 59, 106, 235 sports magazines  69, 168–170, 234, 448 Spy 352–353 Star 198 star‐as‐reader 207–208 state regulation  94, 127, 418 Stuff 235 Style.com 82–84 Sumner, David  37, 43, 404, 453, 455–456, 458 Sunday funnies (Sally Mann)  28 Sweden (magazines in)  219, 228, 284 Swift, Jonathan  346 Switzerland (magazines in)  138, 323 takf īr 390–391 Tamil 333–339 Tank  97, 265 Tatler  155, 159, 328–330 Taylor, Sir Richard (Reading Girl) 30 teacher magazines  280 Teen 231 teen magazines  175, 228, 231, 233–234, 242–243 Teen People 175 Teen Vogue  65–66, 180–191, 217, 366 temporality  71, 99–100, 265, 266, 297 Ten.8 324 Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers, Magazines and Reviews 6 Texas Monthly  309, 317 Them 181–191 thin ideal  41, 228 Tillmans, Wolfgang  322, 329–330 Time  42, 57–58, 106, 110, 236, 289, 352, 370, 375, 380, 422, 435 Time Out  12–14, 24, 429 Town (previously Man About Town) 325 town‐square journalism  70 trade publications  60, 123–126, 128–129, 406 transgender 218 tutorials (in magazines)  288 tween (preteen) magazines  227–228 Twitter  10, 16, 98, 107, 110–1, 155, 180, 184, 245, 313, 345, 361, 364–6, 395 Black Twitter  151–2, 181, 397 Ukraine (magazines in)  440, 448 umma  385, 386, 390–392 United Business Media  131

Index 481 Upfront 280 urban journalism  311, 314–315, 318 uses and gratifications theory  51–52, 54–55 U.S. Hispanics/Latinos  411–413 U.S. News & World Report  106, 236 Us Weekly  198–199, 202–203, 205–207, 209, 211 utopia/utopian  100–102, 170, 266, 270, 271 Vanity Fair  88, 116, 159, 391, 456 Veja  406–407, 409 Vestoj 92 Vice media  95, 436 Vista 411 visual framing  42 visual stereotyping of gender  227 of race  40–44 Vogue  3, 21, 60, 78, 87–88, 154, 156–159, 175, 182, 218, 243, 268, 288, 328–330, 397, 419, 425, 429, 456 Vox the magazine produced by the Missouri School of Journalism  308 the online magazine  13 Vworp Vworp!  294, 300–302 Wacquant, Loïc  78 Weapons of Reason 97 WeChat 423 Weibo 421–423 Welteroth, Elaine  180, 182, 194 Westernization of magazines  176–177, 248–258, 447–449

Wintour, Anna  60, 78 Wired  12, 17, 20, 380 “wokeness” (in magazine content)  181–194 Woman’s Day  172, 455 Woman’s World 172 Women’s Health  106, 183, 243 women’s magazines  172–173, 183, 214–221, 232–234, 241–246, 248–258, 280, 283, 407, 409, 412, 446–447 women’s studies  333, 337–339 Working Mother 235 World War I and post‐war period  198, 229, 284, 347, 440, 442 World War II and post‐war period  28, 40, 147–148, 216, 282, 311, 353, 364, 372–373, 376, 442, 445, 466 Writer’s Digest 288 xenophobia (in magazine content)  275, 442, 446 Yeomans, Lucy  155–156, 159–160 YM  182, 229–232 Yoga Journal 288 YouTube  8, 108, 155, 242, 245, 364, 433 Yugoslavia (magazines in)  270, 440, 445, 446 Zanan (Women) 221 Zan‐e Ruz (Today’s Woman) 221 Zelizer, Barbie  295, 303, 458 0 To 9 magazine 267–269 Zhenata Dnes (Woman Today) 462–470 Zines  94, 98, 193, 217, 271

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