Telling It Like It Is: Letters to the Editor Discuss Journalism Ethics in 10 American Magazines

Comments from the Editor

By Leara Rhodes, University of Georgia

This issue of the Journal of Magazine and New Media Research was edited by Dr. Wallace B. Eberhard, retired professor of journalism from the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia.Dr. Eberhard brings to this issue of the journal his many years of teaching magazine writing courses at the Grady College and his years of editing the journal for journalism history. For his tremendous work and valuable expertise, we thank him for this issue of the journal.

Different viewpoints of the magazine industry are included in this issue. The research presented includes historical, content analysis, quantitative, and descriptive and broadens previous research on magazine topics to include sociocultural themes for magazine covers, male figures in advertising, economic business parameters, media kits as means of selling audience to advertisers, and how magazines acknowledge errors.

Linking this issue with the previous issue is Ted Spiker’s article on how U.S. magazine covers captured the emotions of the September 11 attacks—and how editors and art directors decided on those themes. Spiker suggests that through the use of such themes as terror, sorrow, pride, and hope, these magazine covers not only captured a moment; they captured history.

Eric Freedman’s article suggests that traditional methods of acknowledging a mistake, such as publishing a correction, running a letter to the editor, or printing a follow-up article that acknowledges the mistake, may be inadequate for a major error that could undermine the magazine’s reputation. Confronted with such problems, National Geographic, Black Issues in Higher Education, and Surgical Laparoscopy, Endoscopy and Percutaneous Techniques took drastic measures to respond to their readers.

Mikalee Dahle and Jennifer Greer in their article on male images in female-targeted magazine advertising used a content analysis of ads featuring men in women’s magazines published in 1978, 1988, and 1998. The ads in 1978 publications tended to feature men in a clear role and were related to the product; those in 1988 presented men in no clear role and were unrelated to the product (a purely decorative role); and images in 1998 served as the middle ground between the two extremes. Trends also emerged across magazine titles.

Carolyn Kitch examines how two recent magazines for Baby Boomers—more, targeting women over 40, and the short-lived my generation, for the “young old” between 50 and 55, two-thirds of them women—have defined and marketed their audiences. While this study considers editorial content, it primarily examines the rhetoric of the magazines’ media kits, focusing less on how magazines are sold to readers than on how such readers are sold to advertisers. The article suggests that, through editorial and advertising messages promising eternal youth, these publications have replicated for older women the same kinds of unattainable ideals long presented to younger audiences—a profoundly commercial vision based on the fear of aging rather than its celebration.

David Abrahamson, with students Rebecca Lynn Bowman, Mark Richard Greer, and William Brian Yeado, examine a number of fundamental questions about the U.S. consumer magazine publishing industry in a historical context, the research of a baseline 1990 quantitative study was duplicated exactly ten years later employing the same research methodology. It is evident that a number of the defining economic business parameters, such as levels of circulation, cover price, and advertising rates (in cost-per-thousand and page rates), have undergone significant change in the last decade. The periodical industry’s responses to these changes reflect not only a variety of economic pressures—specifically, those related to cost management and the optimization of revenue within the framework decade’s market conditions—but also, perhaps speculatively, the ways in which magazines may continue to reflect the ongoing sociocultural reality of American society.

I want to thank the authors and Dr. Eberhard for contributing their time and efforts.

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Journal of Magazine and New Media Research

Spring 2003, Vol. 5, No. 2