Mm ch 05magazines

Mass Media in a Changing WorldSecond Edition

George Rodman

Brooklyn College of CUNY

HISTORYINDUSTRYCONTROVERSY

Chapter 5Magazines: The First of the

Specialized Media

Chapter Outline• History• Industry• Controversies

A Brief History of Magazines

The First Magazines• The first magazine appeared in Germany

in 1663, nearly 200 years after printing technology had been used to produce books. Edifying Monthly Discussions was targeted to an elite, literate audience.

• The first two magazines in America, Andrew Bradford’s American Magazine and Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine, were published within three days of each other in 1741.

• Six months later both magazines had failed because, while books and newspapers were considered necessities, magazines were seen as a luxury.

• By 1776, a hundred magazines had started and failed.


•Ladies’ Magazine was a special interest magazine that began publishing in 1828, under the editorship of Sarah Josepha Hale, a widow who took up writing and editing to support her family.

•Ladies’ Magazine was the predecessor for Ladies’ Home Journal, which was founded in 1883 and expanded the area of women’s interests to include sheet music and popular fiction.

•The first magazine to achieve a general interest, mass audience was The Saturday Evening Post.


•During the 1880s magazines were luxury items that cost 35 cents a copy. The first magazine to cut prices was the Munsey Report, which dropped its price to 10 cents.

•Publisher Frank Munsey later estimated that his move tripled the size of the magazine reading public from 250,000 to 750,000.

•Within a short time advertising became the chief source of revenue for the magazine business and CPM, or cost per mille (thousand), became the standard guideline.


• In the early 1900s magazines and newspapers got serious about crusading for social reform. Magazines, however, were most effective in bringing about in-depth investigations.

•McClure’s Magazine attacked the monopolistic practices of Standard Oil and exposed municipal corruption in several cities. Other magazines began to follow suit.


•Muckraking articles of this period helped bring about child labor laws, workers compensation and the first congressional investigations.

•Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 partially because of the influence of muckraking reporting.


Mass Circulation Magazines

•Cultural magazines included the New Yorker, founded in 1925 by Harold Ross, style magazines, and pulps such as True Confessions.

•Reader’s Digest, published in 1922 by Dewitt and Lila Wallace, was a digest featuring brief versions of articles that were informative, well-written, and stressed conservative middle class values.


•The first news magazine was Time, founded in 1923 by Henry Luce, which originated the terms “photojournalism,” and “photo essay.”

•The true golden age of photojournalism began in the 1930s with the introduction of the 35 mm Leica camera, which made it possible for photographers to move with the action, taking shots of events as they were unfolding.

•This golden age lasted until the decline of the great general-interest magazines.


• Magazines were America’s only national medium until the 1920s, when radio networks were established.

• By the 1960s advertisers interested in reaching the wide and diverse audiences of general-interest magazines moved to television.

• Ethnic and business magazines flourished as the U. S. became more culturally diverse in the post-industrial information age.

• Special interest magazines include Latvian Dimensions, Filipina, Lefthander Magazine, Working Woman, Black Scholar, and Hispanic Engineer.


Adapting to New Media• Magazines have always adapted to

competition from new media. When movies became popular the industry developed magazines about movies.

• Playboy makes more money from cable and broadcast than from magazines.

• Magazines publish their content on the Internet which is cheaper because of no investments in paper, ink, or presses, no printing overruns or underruns, or postal rates. Online publishing also provides an interactivity with readers that is appealing to advertisers.


Global Endeavors• Ulrich’s International Periodicals

directory lists over 165,000 serials published throughout the world.

• Many U.S. publishers are moving to international editions to take advantage of new markets, especially in post-iron curtain countries and in Latin America.

• There are more that 50 versions of Cosmopolitan.

• Selecciones, the Spanish version of Reader’s Digest, is the best selling magazine in both Argentina and Chile.

Milestones in Magazine History timeline


Types of Magazines

Understanding Today’s Magazine Publishing

Industry

Types of Magazines•A consumer magazine is

released at least three times a year, with a circulation of at least 3,000 general readers, and containing at least 16 pages of editorial (as opposed to advertising) content.

Major Types of Consumer Magazines


Industry

Top magazines by revenue


Industry

Top magazines by circulation


Industry• Trade magazines are those that focus

on a particular business, and are usually essential reading for people in those businesses. Billboard is the trade magazine for the music industry.

• Public relations magazines are put out by organizations, corporations, and institutions with the sole intent of making their parent organization look good.

• Cigar Aficionado was a public relations magazine for the tobacco industry that caught on as a men’s lifestyle publication.


Industry

• Professional journals are periodicals that doctors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals rely upon for the latest research and information in their fields.

• Professional journals are expensive. For example, a subscription to Brain Research costs $14,919 a year.

• Libraries are cutting back on professional journals and academic journals to save money. They are reinvesting in digital online databases instead.

• A little magazine publishes promising and established poets and authors of literary essays and fiction. Most of them, including The Antioch Review and The Paris Review, have tiny circulations.


Industry• Comic books don’t contain much

advertising and have a smaller revenue stream than other types of magazines. But comics, like the superhero monthlies published by Marvel and DC comics, have been an important part of American culture.

• Zines are small, inexpensive publications put out by people who are enthusiastic about a specific, usually obscure, topic. Zines, were important parts of the beat movement of the 1950s and the hippie movement of the 1960s.

• Today, many Zines exist only on the Web. In fact, Weblogs are an online version of what Zines use to be.


IndustryThe Players

• Many publishers are entrepreneurs with a deep interest in the topic, a small amount of money and a high tolerance for risk.

• Celebrity founded magazines is a recent trend. O, The Oprah Magazine has been one of the most successful while Rosie folded after a dispute between Rosie O’Donnell and her corporate parent.

• Supermarket chains have been the corporate publishers of several successful women’s magazines including Family Circle (Piggly Wiggly) and Women’s Day (A&P).


IndustryThe Staff

• The editor, editor-in-chief, or executive editor is in charge of the magazine’s overall direction. There is usually a managing editor, several deputy editors, senior editors or associate editors.

• Magazine editors work mostly with freelance writers because only the largest magazines have primarily full time writers.

• The title contributing editor is generally given to the magazine’s highest paid freelance writers. Tom Wolfe, a well-known and highly respected author, is a contributing editor at Harper’s.


Industry

Top magazine corporate publishers


IndustryThe Magazine Staff

Each department in a magazine company contributes in its own way to the success of that magazine.


Industry

Where Magazines Are Sold


Industry• In the extremely competitive

magazine business advertising sales staffs sell the personality of the magazine and the worth of the target reader to advertisers.

• The advertiser needs the magazine to enhance its product sales and its overall image. The magazine needs the advertiser for content as well as income.

• The circulation department is responsible for finding and keeping subscribers, manage the subscriber list, and to promote single-copy sales. Most publishers also rely on subscription fulfillment companies such as Publishers Clearing House.


Industry• Single-copy sales are mostly of interest to

paid circulation magazines whose readers actually pay subscription fees and newsstand charges.

• Controlled circulation magazines are sent free to readers who qualify.

• The production department coordinates the actual printing of the magazines with outside companies, including those that specialize in high-speed color printing and the use of glossy paper.

• The publicist’s job is to make headlines (in newspapers, radio, television and Internet news services) with news from the cover of the magazine’s current issue.


IndustryThe Reader

• The magazine industry claims that 90 percent of American adults read 12 issues a month on average, and that the more education and income people have, the more they read magazines.

• Magazines have a healthy pass-along circulation, which means that several more people than the original buyer or subscriber typically read them.

• Larger magazines have their own research departments, but rely on outside organizations like Simmons Market Research Bureau and Mediamark Research Inc. to run major studies.

Controversies

• Fashion magazines define the ideal female beauty as having perfect facial features, long legs, a long neck and terrific body tone. She must also be 5’ 10” tall and weigh less than 120 pounds.

• The average woman is around 5’ 3” and weighs 144 pounds. As fashion magazines continue to promote this unrealistic body size surveys show that women are increasingly unhappy with their bodies.

• Many critics insist that men’s ideas about women are shaped by images such as Playboy’s centerfold and editorial content such as Penthouse Forum.

Controversies

Outline of a Normal Woman’s Body versus Outline of a Model’s Body

Controversies• Credibility is a magazine’s primary

asset, even in an industry that includes National Enquirer.

• Legally, magazines are expected to be even more diligent about truth and accuracy than daily newspapers are because magazines have a longer time to work on stories and check facts.

• In 1998 Time, in a joint investigation with CNN, reported that, during the Vietnam War the U.S. Army had used lethal nerve gas on U.S. deserters. The government quickly proved that Time had edited testimony to prove an untrue allegation. Time was forced to issue a quick retraction and apology.

Controversies• Editorial independence usually refers

to a magazine’s independence from advertisers, but can also refer to independence from those it writes about and those who supply it with information.

• Some magazines have a long history of separating advertising and editorial matter. Ms., Mad, Consumer Reports, and Consumers Digest take no ads, and Reader’s Digest refuses all cigarette ads.

• The Saturday Evening Post, in its final days as a mass circulation magazine, promised to feature Henry Ford on its cover in exchange for $400,000 worth of Ford advertising.

Controversies• Magazines and subscription fulfillment

companies always seek innovative ways to sell.

• For many years, direct-mail solicitations made it look as if the recipient had won a million dollar check. Older people often subscribed to magazines they could not afford on fixed incomes.

• Critics and the courts agreed that this practice was unethical. Publisher’s Clearing House had to reimburse subscribers $18 million, Reader’s Digest was forced to return $8 million, and Time Magazine was forced to refund nearly $5 million to customers who were fooled.

Mm ch 05magazines

Business

business magazines

style magazines

new media magazines

magazine history timeline

magazine business

lefthander magazine

consumer magazine

news magazine