Book Review: Remake, Remodel: Women’s Magazines in the Digital Age, by Brooke Erin Duffy

Abstract

Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age. Brooke Erin Duffy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. 208 pp. $85 hbk. $25 pbk.Women's magazines-those overtly gendered media spaces-have played a role in shaping concepts of female identity since Godey's 's Lady's 's Book began offering advice on domestic ideologies in the 1830s. But what is a woman's magazine in an age of iPads and tablets, social media, and fashion blogs? How are convergent media technologies and their concomitant economic pressures reshaping the industry? What happens when a woman's magazine positions itself as (to use the industry's new mantra) a brand rather than a physical text?In Remake, Remodel: Women's s Magazines in the Digital Age, Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor in the School of Media and Communication at Temple University, surveys the shifting media landscape of today's women's magazines, skillfully tracing the recent seismic shifts in the industry, including the rise of participatory culture, the need to produce copy for multiple platforms, and the pressures convergent technologies put on the magazine industry's already-close relationship with advertisers. Looking largely through the lens of magazine producers-publishers, digital directors, editors, graphic designers, and other creatives-Duffy blends theory with extensive field interviews, attendance at trade shows and professional conferences, and a thorough review of the discourse on digital disruption found in the industry's professional and trade publications. In doing so, she provides a thoughtful-and thought-changing-look into a specific segment of a specific media industry as well as a compelling case for a research methodology that blends political economy with cultural studies.The early chapters of Remake, Remodel establish the necessary context for Duffy's analysis, both in terms of media theory and magazine history. Later chapters-the most compelling of the study-focus on the complexities of the industry as it works to incorporate digital practices. For example, Chapter 4, Rethinking Readership: The Digital Challenge of Audience Construction, explores one of the industry's formerly unassailable principles-audience segmentation. Relying heavily on demographic and psychographic data, consumer magazines in general ( and women's magazines in particular) have long targeted niche audiences based on factors such as age, marital status, and household income, building the magazine's content and tone around those specific readers and, perhaps more importantly, attracting advertisers based on that reader profile.But new digital technologies, Duffy shows, have put pressure on the way magazine publishers think about their audiences. Thanks to digital technologies, for example, today's magazine publishers can combine demographic data with detailed information about consumer purchases (so-called transactional data) from sophisticated customer databases, making cross-marketing opportunities easier to sell to advertisers, but also raising issues of editorial creativity and reader privacy. …