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3: Production Tensions
- University of Illinois Press
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3 Production tensions New Positions, Routines, and Gender Roles Joanna Coles, the fêted Hearst editor who was designated “Editor of the Year” by Adweek in 2011, commented during our interview, “One of the things that readers always want to know is what is it like to work at a magazine—what [are] the staff like?” It was partly such inquisitiveness about the women’s magazine profession that inspired Marie Claire executives—including Coles, who served as the magazine’s editor-in-chief from 2006 to 2012—to launch the reality TV series Running in Heels in 2009. Broadcast on NBC Universal’s Style Network, the show centered on three young women interning at Marie Claire’s New York headquarters. Noteworthy scenes depicted Coles getting a finicky celebrity to pose for a “money shot” publicity photo, staffers working feverishly to make looming deadlines, and an intern “running in heels” in order to deliver a designer fashion line to Coles on schedule. As Lauren Ruotolo, director of entertainment promotions at Hearst Magazines, explained, “We want to tell the true story of women working in fashion. . . . [Running in Heels] will reveal what real life is like behind the shimmery curtain.”1 Indeed, the show provided an exclusive glimpse behind that “shimmery curtain” as it dramatized some of the less glamorous aspects of the women’s magazine business: long hours, menial tasks, office frictions, and a distinctly hierarchical workplace culture. Despite making significant inroads into contemporary popular culture, the series neglected to address the larger challenges confronting today’s magazine professionals, including those related to the emergent logics of digitization , cross-platform distribution, and flexible labor. On one hand, a flood of nonprofessional participants (e.g., bloggers and citizen journalists) have 52 . chapter 3 entered the media marketplace, making competition for audience attention fiercer than ever. On the other hand, workers in traditional media environments are expected to be multi-skilled masters who can fluidly move content across media platforms. Both of these trends seem to amplify the movement toward “precariousness” in the creative industries, which according to media theorist James Curran involves “[decreased] job security, depressed wages, few employment rights, and long hours.”2 In light of this powerful mix of factors, today’s media industries are a site of mounting tensions. In the last half-decade, a great deal of ink has been spilled by researchers seeking to understand the implications of transformed circuits of production and consumption for professional content creators. In addressing the so-called blurring of roles between producers and audiences, many of these studies engage with questions of identity. The field of journalism studies is especially ripe with examples of this type of scholarship. Seth Lewis, for instance, locates the work and professional identities of journalists within an “ongoing tension between professional control and open participation in the news process.”3 More broadly, in his cross-industry study of media work, Mark Deuze argues that “the binary opposition between the social identities of ‘production’ and ‘consumption’” is no longer relevant, as they are “mutually enabling and constitutive.”4 Not only are emergent production and consumption practices reconfiguring professional and organizational identities, they are also foregrounding questions about creativity and constraint. Accordingly, many of the production -based studies of the news profession, including those mentioned in the introduction, explore how individualist impulses for news creation have been overpowered by organizational demands for standardized content .5 The negotiation between creativity and constraint is ostensibly more pronounced outside the news sector, where artistry is emphasized within the production process. Vicki Mayer’s detailed study of “below the line” TV producers (a budgetary term that describes the industry’s hierarchical division of labor) explores how the notion of creativity essentially helped to structure this division by rendering invisible the creative actions of set assemblers , camera crews, casters, and other “below the line” producers.6 In addition, the consumer magazine industry has been described as adhering to a value hierarchy of autonomy whereby magazine journalists can “operate with relative freedom as long as they produce results imbued with creativity.”7 This chapter examines the implications of convergence-related shifts for the production processes, creative actions, and structure of the women’s magazine industry. On both the editorial and publishing sides, executives and in- [3.236.247.213] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:00 GMT) production tensions · 53 dustry leaders are creating positions, redeploying responsibilities, realigning departments, and establishing routines that converge around new industry norms about content. Such changes are challenging...