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Chapter 5: Magazines: The Power of Words and Images
Summary and Learning Objectives
Magazines were the first media to become national in scope rather than appealing to a limited
geographic area. They also contained articles designed to be of lasting appeal. Although there
were magazines available during the colonial period, the first significant American magazine
was the Saturday Evening Post. Espousing conservative, middle-class values, the Post was seen
as a reflection of American society. Literary and commentary magazines flourished in the 19th
century, and several of them survive today. These magazines provided a forum for important
authors and were among the first to feature the work of pioneering photojournalists such as
Mathew Brady.
W. E. B. Du Bois expanded the range of commentary magazines with the founding of the Crisis
as the official magazine of the NAACP. The Crisis became the first magazine to provide a forum
for black writers. The early twentieth century saw a trend in investigative magazine reporting
known as muckraking. The work of the muckrakers set the stage for much of the investigative
reporting done today by newspapers and television news.
Henry Luce founded Time magazine in 1923, creating what would become one of the nation’s
largest media companies--Time Warner. Luce’s publishing empire grew to include not just the
news in Time, but also photojournalism in Life, sports journalism in Sports Illustrated, and
personality and celebrity journalism in People.
Women’s magazines got their start with Godey’s Lady’s Book under the editorship of Sarah
Josepha Hale. In addition to editing the magazine, Hale established many of the principles of
modern magazines: copyrighting the stories, running original material, and paying authors for
their work. The “seven sisters” women’s service magazines followed in much the same tradition
as Godey’s and were concerned mainly with the home, family, and quality of life. An alternative
to the traditional values of service magazines is offered by the more youth-oriented
fashion/beauty/lifestyle magazines such as Glamour and Cosmopolitan.
Many magazines targeted at men appeal to them through their hobbies, but the two most
influential men’s magazines are Esquire and Playboy. Although Playboy was initially more
explicit with its pinup photography, both it and Esquire now feature men’s fashion, lifestyle
coverage, and articles by well-known writers. In recent years, a new type of men’s magazine
focusing on adventure, fashion, health, and sex has appeared; one of the strongest examples of
these magazines is Men’s Health.
Trade publications are magazines that cover a particular industry rather than being designed for
consumers. Although they often are more serious and feature less photography and color than the
consumer magazines, they make up a substantial portion of the magazine market.
Fashion magazines have been criticized in recent years for featuring extremely thin models in
both ads and editorial content. Critics argue that the unrealistic image promoted by these models
can contribute to the development of eating disorders in young women. Several magazines and
advertisers have bucked this trend and featured plus-sized models and even ordinary people.
Magazines have also started offering more racial and ethnic diversity on their covers. Other
conflicts in the magazine industry can involve the blurring of editorial content and advertising, as
well as the photos and headlines used on covers.
Magazines in the 21st century are continuing many of the trends that made them successful
throughout their history, including building relationships with readers, adapting to change, being
supported by advertisers, and defining major issues in society. Magazines continue to be
successful in their print formats but are expanding their content with tablet versions and other
digital offerings.
After studying this chapter, you will be able to:
1. Explain the importance of the Saturday Evening Post in the development of the mass media
in the United States.
2. Describe the key characteristics of trade, literary, and consumer magazines.
3. Illustrate how magazines have given a voice to different groups of people.
4. Discuss the role that magazines and magazine ads play in defining people’s body image.
5. Describe what is meant by “native advertising” and why it is controversial.
6. Discuss the major trends in 21st-century magazine publishing.
Review Questions
1. How can magazine short stories provoke discussion in the age of social media?
2. How did the existence of magazines lead to the development of a national culture in the United
States in the late 19th century?
3. How does Godey’s Lady’s Book compare with modern women’s magazines? Could Godey’s be
designed to fit into the modern magazine market? Why or why not?
4. What has made Men’s Health one of the most popular men’s magazines? Is it similar to or
different from women’s fashion/beauty/lifestyle magazines?
5. Models sometimes fight back against excessive digital editing (popularly known as
Photoshopping) of their photos. What are their concerns? Are these concerns a serious problem?
6. Is a magazine that is delivered digitally to a tablet still a magazine? Why or why not?
Media Literacy Exercises
The Evolution of Women’s Magazines
You can see numerous issues of Godey’s Lady’s Book
(https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000050287) at the Hathi Trust Digital Library. Compare
and contrast the content of Godey’s with that of one of the modern women’s magazines. How are
they similar? How are they different? (This website has the text of all the articles and scans of all of
the illustrated plates.)
Notes: This is going to be a fairly time-consuming exercise. It also may have only minimal
interest for the some of your students. It will also be somewhat frustrating to try to do on a
mobile device. I typically use this exercise as one option available to students to select. The
unsophisticated student will note that Godey’s does not have lots of sex and photographs in it.
The more sophisticated student will note that it still dealt with fashion, projects, and book
reviews. They may also note that Godey’s seems more similar to magazines like Family Circle or
Better Homes and Gardens than to magazines like Glamour or Cosmo.
Magazine Covers
Take a look at 10 issues of magazines that you read on a regular basis. (They can be issues of a
single magazine or of different magazines) Make a list of the people who appear on the covers.
What sort of distribution of people do you find (i.e., male/female, race/ethnicity, old/young)?
Why do you think these people were placed on the cover (other than that they will sell
magazines)? List several cover lines that you find interesting. Would they draw you into the
magazine? Why or why not? Write a cover line of your own for a story in one of the magazines.
Notes: This makes an excellent research project for a smaller class. If you assign specific magazines
to students, you can collect a fairly good size data set to see whether the magazines you’ve picked
match the study results from the text. You might also either give students or have them develop a
uniform coding sheet if you want to compare their results.
You can learn more about the New York Times story about magazine covers here:
An interesting alternative assignment, if you have a smaller class, is to give students a couple of
magazine articles to read and then write provocative cover lines for them.
Grading Rubric:
Levels of Achievement
Criteria
Deficient
Less Than
Assigned
As Assigned
Superior
Length
Weight
25.00%
0%
Assignment is
significantly
under length
70%
Assignment is
under assigned
length
85%
Assignment is
approximately 500
words
100%
Assignment is fully
developed essay
that goes beyond
basic assignment
Cover
Data
Weight
25.00%
0%
Assignment
omits
significant
details
70%
List is vague or
incomplete on
one or more of
the required
details
85%
Assignment includes
name of magazines,
cover dates, and
information about who
was on the covers
100%
Assignment
contains all
required materials;
elaborates on
details
Cover
Analysis
Weight
25.00%
0%
Assignment
omits
significant
details
70%
Assignment is
vague or
incomplete in
one or more of
the required
details
85%
Assignment’s analysis
includes required
discussion of
demographic
distribution and
reasoning behind cover
model’s presence
100%
Analysis adds
understanding
beyond basic
concepts
Cover
Lines
0%
Assignment
omits
60%
Assignment is
vague or
85%
Assignment discusses
cover lines, how they
100%
Assignment has
added depth to
Weight
25.00%
significant
details
incomplete in
one or more of
the required
details
draw readers into the
magazine; includes a
cover line you have
written
discussion of actual
and original cover
lines
Suggested Readings
• Okker, P. (1995). Our sister editors: Sarah J. Hale and the tradition of nineteenth-century
American women editors. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Okker provides a look at Hale
and the other pioneering women editors of the 19th century.
• Wilson, S. K. (Ed.). (1999). The Crisis reader. New York: Modern Library. A collection of the best
pieces published in W. E. B. DuBois’s The Crisis.
• Lois, G. (1996) Covering the’ 60s: George Lois, the Esquire Era. New York: Monacelli Press. A
collection of the often controversial covers of Esquire magazine from its days as a leading
journalistic magazine; these covers by ad man George Lois are still among the most original
ever published anywhere.
• All of the Chapter 5 links posted to my RalphEHanson.com blog
http://www.ralphehanson.com/category/chapter-5/
Lecture Builders
Annie Leibovitz
Note: For six editions, the magazine chapter always opened with a vignette about photographer Annie
Leibovitz. This edition we finally changed it up with the story of how a short story published in The
New Yorker went viral. But I thought I would keep the most recent Leibovitz vignette alive here in the
IM.
Bruce Jenner was kind of a big deal back in 1976 when he won the gold medal in the decathlon at
the Montreal Summer Olympics. In the 1990s and early 2000s, he got another measure of fame for
being the stepfather of the Kardashian clan of reality TV stars. But his ultimate act of notoriety was
having a photo session for a cover story in Vanity Fair magazine with famed photographer Annie
Leibovitz for his official coming-out as a transgender woman, Caitlyn Jenner. The image was
dramatic, featuring Jenner with long hair, a direct expression, and a white corset with the cover line
“Call me Caitlyn.”
i
For perhaps the first time in Jenner’s long career, she was comfortable with her fame. “This shoot
was about my life and who I am as a person. It’s not about the fanfare, it’s not about people cheering
in the stadium, it’s not about going down the street and everybody giving you “that a boy, Bruce,”
pat on the back. OK, this is about your life,” Jenner told Vanity Fair.
ii
The attention from his
decathlon win, which earned him accolades as “the world’s greatest athlete,” got him a TV contract
with ABC and a seventh-round draft pick with the NBA team the Kansas City Kings. But none of this
brought him happiness. As he told Vanity Fair, “I can’t tell my story. There’s so much more to me
than those 48 hr in the stadium, and I can’t talk about it. It was frustrating. You get mad at yourself .
. . Little did they know I was totally empty inside. Totally empty inside.”
iii
Although Leibovitz has made a name for herself shooting portraits and magazine covers of every
celebrity from England’s Queen Elizabeth II to former Beatle John Lennon, the Jenner shoot had a
big effect on her. Leibovitz told Vanity Fair that she did not try to remain objective while working
on the Jenner cover. “Our whole team--and it was a team--wanted to make it a success for her, and
to take her over that hill. I think she has a long way, still, to go, but what she’s done is pretty
amazing.” Leibovitz said it was Jenner who pushed the idea of the corset photo forward. “I wanted
to be more conservative with her. I was looking at photos of Katharine Hepburn. This was an
acquired idea of: What is a woman? What should a woman look like? How does a woman dress up?
Who is Caitlyn?”
iv
The cover grabbed both social and legacy media by storm. Jenner’s new Twitter handle
@Caitlyn_Jenner attracted 150,000 followers within an hour of going live; as this was being written
in the summer of 2016, she had more than 3.8 million followers.
v
Leibovitz’s June 2015 Jenner
Vanity Fair cover won honors as “best overall cover” for 2015 from the American Society of
Magazine Editors.
vi
Leibovitz’s magazine covers have been honored on many occasions over the last several decades as
well as attracting their share of controversy. From her 1981 Rolling Stone cover featuring a nude
John Lennon taken the day he was murdered, to the 1991 Vanity Fair cover featuring a nude and
very pregnant Demi Moore, to her 2008 implied topless photo of a then-underage Miley Cyrus,
Leibovitz’s work has always been able to get people talking.
Leibovitz started out wanting to be a painter, but she submitted a photo she had taken of beat poet
Allen Ginsberg to Rolling Stone magazine. Her photo was accepted, and she went to work for the
publication full-time at age twenty. The photo that put her on the map was a cover portrait for
Rolling Stone of a naked John Lennon clinging to Yoko Ono. The photo was taken just hours before
Lennon was murdered.
vii
It was during her time at Rolling Stone that Leibovitz learned the
practical details of shooting successful magazine covers: The subject of the photo has to be
recognizable, there has to be something worthy of notice in the picture, and there has to be room
for the magazine’s name and a few lines of type.
Leibovitz went on to shoot for Vanity Fair, creating many of its best-known covers, including the
infamous one that featured a nude Demi Moore, who was 8 months pregnant at the time. The Moore
cover sold an extra 500,000 copies of the magazine, and former editor Tina Brown notes that Vanity
Fair picked up about 75,000 new subscriptions as a result.
Ad man and designer George Lois, who produced many of the most memorable covers of Esquire
magazine back in the 1960s, says that whatever else it was, the Moore photo was a great magazine
cover.
“A truly great magazine cover surprises, even shocks, and connects in a nanosecond,” Lois wrote in
Vanity Fair.
A glance at the image . . . depicting a famous movie star beautifully bursting with life and proudly
flaunting her body, was an instant culture buster--and damn the expected primal screams of those
constipated critics, cranky subscribers, and fidgety newsstand buyers, who the editors and
publishers surely knew would regard a pregnant female body as “grotesque and obscene.”
viii
Secret 3 Looking at Leibovitz’s long career in magazine journalism, you can see a prime
example of Secret 3--Everything from the margin moves to the center. Leibovitz started shooting
counterculture figures for the upstart magazine Rolling Stone and progressed to shooting A-list
celebrities for Vanity Fair and Vogue in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s.
ix
In fact, over the last five
decades, you would be hard pressed to not find a year where one or more of the most talked-about
magazine covers were shot by Leibovitz.
Media Activities
Should Magazine Covers Be True-to-Life?
Self, a health and fitness magazine for women, found itself in the middle of a controversy in the fall
of 2009 over its portrayal of how women look--specifically, singer Kelly Clarkson. The American Idol
star was featured on the September 2009 cover of the magazine. Her image went through the usual
digital retouching for color correction and the like, but the photo editor also added in a few digital
hair extensions and, while he or she was at it, slimmed down Clarkson considerably. Usually,
accusations of Photoshopping are met with denials or statements that only minimal changes were
made. But Self editor in chief, Lucy Danziger said that when it comes to magazine cover shoots,
editors should do whatever it takes to make the cover model look her best. Even if that means
changing her body digitally.
• You can read (and see) more about this story here:
http://www.ralphehanson.com/2012/02/11/link-ch-5-–-beauty-size-age-part-iii-kelly-
clarkson-self-magazine/
Magazines and Body Image: Is there in truth no beauty?
I have a wide range of posts on the blog dealing with magazines (and other media) and body image.
You can find all of them here:
• http://www.ralphehanson.com/tag/body-image/
You can give your students their choice of these posts or assign specific ones for them to read.
Questions:
1. Is there any harm in magazines featuring extremely thin (in the case of women) or very
muscular (in the case of men) models in their photos and advertisements?
2. Do you think the images in fashion magazines contribute to the problem of eating disorders
or steroid or supplement abuse? Why?
3. What about the opposite? Should magazines feature “realistically sized” models? Does this
help or harm things? Why?
4. Should magazines Photoshop models to make them look thinner?
Notes: Traditionally, the concern about unrealistic body image has been connected with thinness,
eating disorders, and young women. But more recently the debate has extended to the muscular,
“ripped” image of young men. There have been charges made that the unrealistic image
presented in magazines and on television has led young men to use or abuse dietary supplements
and steroids in their effort to achieve “the look.”
Classroom Debate on Truth One: Consumer Magazines
Do popular consumer magazines pander too much to advertisers? Do you have trouble telling the
difference between advertisements and articles? Or doesn’t it matter as long as the advertising is
interesting?
