Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age Brooke Erin Duffy. Champaign: University Illinois Press, 2013.What is a magazine ? Recent changes in publishing have complicated this seemingly obvious question, and Brooke Erin Duffy details these developments in her timely study the magazine industry. Remake, Remodel: Women's Magazines in the Digital Age examines the ways in which an expanding digital marketplace has prompted a reimagining the mission, format, and strategies women's magazines. Duffy's research, based on in-depth interviews with magazine producers, trade press reports, and firsthand observation, offers a critical recalibration an industry attempting to redefine itself in the face technological evolution.the opening chapters, Duffy provides a flyover view central topics within the field magazine studies: audience research, industry studies, and the examination circuits production and consumption. Using concise, readable prose, she introduces key media theorists (Henry Jenkins, Raymond Williams) as well as a range scholars whose work has shaped the field women's magazine research (Ien Ang, Betty Frie dan, Joke Hermes, Angela McRobbie), before delving into the history the industry. Readers learn the early days magazine production and how it was that women came to hold positions as both creators and consumers these popular texts, which were understood to be and of women. Duffy describes an era in which magazines were tangible, recognizable, and purchasable.Much has changed. While the digital revolution the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries gave rise to new resources, such as desktop publishing and digital imaging platforms, it also spawned an array virtual competitors who could work quickly and cheaply, forcing publishing houses to adapt. When the 2008 recession hit, worries mounted that a financially strapped readership would not spare what little disposable income it had for magazines when similar content could be found free online. Indeed, many titles folded. Those that persevered adopted a two-fold response, celebrating the importance and uniqueness the magazine itself while repositioning the magazine as a cross-platform brand (41).Today, Duffy argues, many titles envision their product not only, or even primarily, as a printed entity but as a brand. Publishers are scrambling to insert those brands into audiences' lives by aligning themselves with fashion companies and pop-up shops, iPhone apps, and blogs. This multi-platform approach has, Duffy writes, transformed circuits magazine production and consumption. …
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Jan 1, 2017
David Walden + 1
Open Access