Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age

2: Transforming the Magazine

2 transforming the Magazine From Print to Bits The massive tides of change churning through the early twentyfirst -century media landscape have had a profound impact on the women’s magazine industry. But what exactly are these changes? To what extent can they be ascribed exclusively to digital innovations? Are they being felt evenly across the industry? And how have they created a perfect storm that has opened up the question of “What is a magazine?” Certainly, some of the salient industrial shifts—the movement to online production and distribution and the meteoric rise in free, immediate, and interactive channels for news and information—are largely due to the forces of digitization. Yet technology is only one part of a larger story about the magazine industry’s recent transformation . In fact, many of the trends associated with convergence within the consumer publishing industry—including audience specialization, multiskilled production patterns, and advertising/editorial interdependence—were set in motion during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The consolidation of media companies that began in the 1980s was primary among the factors that set the traditional magazine business on a new course. As a series of rapid-fire mergers and acquisitions swept across the mass media system, the publishing industry became more concentrated and globalized. Vertically integrated companies such as Hearst, Time Inc., and Condé Nast significantly increased their share of the market by bringing smaller or independent titles under their corporate umbrellas. Consequently, these magazine behemoths were able to wield considerable power in the marketplace by luring advertisers with volume discounts. For example, to attract a large consumer goods company such as Unilever (whose products 38 . chapter 2 include Dove, Axe, TRESemmé, Lipton, and Hellmann’s), Hearst publishers might offer a discounted rate if the advertiser purchases space across several Hearst titles, say, House Beautiful, Harper’s Bazaar, and O: The Oprah Magazine . This system clearly incentivizes partnerships between advertisers and the largest of the publishing chains. It was likely this logic that compelled Condé Nast to purchase Women’s Wear Daily from Fairchild Publications in the late 1990s. As Roberta Garfinkle , then director of print media at the advertising agency McCann-Erickson, explained, “It makes advertising rates more attractive because Condé Nast can put W in with the rest of the package. That’s the key. And advertisers will be drawn to that.”1 A few years later, Time Inc. added roughly one hundred titles to its international publishing roster with the acquisition of the British company IPC Media. Hearst undertook a similarly hefty acquisition in 2011 when it purchased more than one hundred magazines from the French publisher Lagardère, making Hearst the largest monthly magazine publisher in the United States and a viable contender in the women’s market.2 This period of globalization and consolidation also saw the rise of magazines as branded entities. Indeed, as large companies began acquiring titles in already successful categories, they realized the crucial need to emphasize the unique brand identity of each title. A few of the most successful magazines even spawned brand spinoffs; for instance, the publishers of People launched People en Español, the now defunct Teen People, and People StyleWatch. This branding logic also, presumably, helped to attract advertisers who were presented with a seemingly infinite array of media options. As media industries scholar Joseph Turow explains, media companies aimed to placate restless advertisers by telling them they were not associated with a media product, but rather “with a media brand that many consumers saw as a badge signifying important relationships in their lives.”3 While the branding rhetoric was communicated externally to magazines’ audiences and advertisers, other significant changes were taking place internally and behind closed doors. As labor regimes became increasingly flexible across the creative sector, magazine workers were expected to diversify their skill sets. Specialty writing began to wane by the late 1990s as magazine workers were expected to have “broad skills and adaptable constitutions” that would enable them to work in a variety of environments.4 Anna Gough-Yates explains that these new work patterns were especially pronounced within the women’s magazine market. The publishing business, she explains, became decentralized as a way to foster “flexibility, internal competition, innovation, and a greater degree of emphasis on design and quality.”5 Thus creative work- transforming the magazine · 39 ers were expected to remove themselves from professional silos and move fluidly within...