Editor's Reflection: On Magazines and Media

Though you will find it in volume 18, number 1, this letter marks the beginning of the first volume of The Journal of Magazine Media. A little bit more than a year ago, the membership of the Magazine Media Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which created and supports this journal, voted to change the journal's name from The Journal of Magazine and New Media Research. The name change reflects changes in the magazine industry, since the Magazine Publishers Association changed its name to MPA: The Association of Magazine Media, in 2010. But the name change also reflects an existential question about magazines: What is a magazine?

Scholars in the Division have been debating this question. We have a gut feeling that there is some collection of qualities that, together, define "magazine-ness," but the general public, and many scholars who don't specialize in magazines still think of the glossy, bound bundles of paper that are Time and Vogue and The Atlantic. Are magazines just the print edition? Are they longform journalism? Are they visual? Are they about niches? Are they about building communities of interest? To that end, this first issue of the re-launched journal takes on those questions.

First, in the front matter of the journal, you will find a transcription of a talk by the eminent scholar David Abrahamson, who encourages professors to hold their students in longform writing classes to the highest standards. Also, you will find a discussion among several great thinkers on the topic of magazines, who explicitly answer the question "What is Magazine Media?" in a panel that I organized at the AEJMC convention in Chicago in August 2017. I asked each of the panelists to choose an unorthodox medium and explain what it is about that medium that demonstrates something about that idea of "magazine-ness." The proposals were brilliant: a subscription box; a museum; social media; content marketing… And the audience became as much a part of the discussion as the panelists.

The front of the book also presents a critical obituary of Hugh Hefner, a man very much of an old media mold, but one who has led an influential and controversial life. Chelsea Reynolds of California State University—Fullerton has written a remarkable critical obituary of Hef on remarkably short notice. As of the writing of this letter, Hefner has been dead for less than three weeks. Reynolds takes a first stab at comprehending Hefner's legacy for scholars and her work is as much a critical review of the literature on the legacy of Playboy magazine as it is a narrative the life of a man and his magazine.

The journal also presents three works of peer-reviewed scholarship in this number. Two of the papers take on fairly traditional topics in magazine research, analyzing two of the most important genres of magazines for researchers: news magazines and women's magazines. Nisha Garud-Patkar analyzed more than 250 articles from Time and Newsweek, all covering conflict in Syria, and read them in light of Johan Galtung's framework of war journalism versus peace journalism. And Yiyi Yang performed a multi-modal analysis of the portrayal of skin cancer in women's magazines, demonstrating that the text and the images that accompany that text do not always send the same message to readers.

The third research study in this number, by Lindsey Conlin Maxwell, Coral Rae and Richard A. Lewis, looks outside of the binding of traditional magazines to explore how celebrity lifestyle bands are promoted on the social networking site Pinterest. They find that "purchasable" items are no more likely to be shared by users than other categories of post, complicating the idea that lifestyle brands are strictly aspirational places for women.

And of course there are reviews, too. Even a journal that exists (for now) with no physical form takes its cues from the traditional magazine format, and what magazine would be complete without a "back of the book," even if that book is entirely digital.

Thank you as always to Associate Editor Joy Jenkins, who does all of the real work of dealing with our peer reviewers. Thank you to all of the anonymous peer reviewers who read, critiqued and improved the research in this number of the Journal. Thank you to reviews editor Miglena Sternadori who procured an above-average number of reviews for this issue. Thank you to webmaster Carol Schwalbe, who has graciously agreed to post at least one more issue of the journal as we transition to a new publisher. And thank you to the Journal's editorial assistant, Caroline Chan, without whom this journal would never be published.