Magazine Texts Research Articles

Changing Magazine Journalism: Key Trends in Norwegian Women’s Magazines

Abstract This article analyses developments in Norwegian magazine journalism in the last decade, focusing on the broad and varied spectrum of magazines targeting women. The analysis is based on multiple methods and data sources, aiming to connect the production and reception of magazine journalism to the texts of magazines. This article will identify and discuss five key trends: fragmentation, digitalization, Nordic inspiration, redefinition of the political and beautification. The trends are discussed in light of public sphere theory and selected orientations in Nordic journalism research.

Positioning the self

This article explores how a group of regular magazine readers interpreted representations of women's lives in women's magazines. These readers consistently evaluated magazine texts in relation to their own lives and their own conceptions of identity. They used their personal experiences and their notions of what a woman's life is really like in order to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant journalism in women's magazines. When talking about women's magazines they formulated narratives about their own identities, and they drew on various discourses that placed women's magazines in relation to their subjective experiences of ordinary everyday life. A reflexive positioning of the self was therefore crucial to their mode of interpretation. The analysis is based on qualitative in-depth interviews with subscribers to a popular Norwegian women's magazine, and the findings are discussed in the light of Anthony Giddens' theory of the reflexive self and Toril Moi's reading of Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminist philosophy.

The Black Canadian: An Exposition of Race, Gender, and Citizenship

This essay discusses “The Black Canadian,” an article written by Britton B. Cooke and published in MacLean’s Magazine in November 1911. The authors explore how the text fits within the larger story of immigration to Alberta, what discourses it enables and constrains, and what representations are brought to the surface within the article. In addition, the authors develop their analysis beyond the specific magazine text to an understanding of the intertextual nature of the piece.

Women’s magazines and their readers: The relationship between textual features and practices of reading

Research on women’s magazines has provided important insights about magazine texts as possible purveyors of ideology and pleasure, and about magazine reading as a social practice situated in everyday life. While the methodological focus has shifted from textual analysis to ethnography, very few studies actually combine audience studies with the textual analysis of magazines as they appear to readers. This article explores the possible connections between magazine reading as a social practice, investigated through a qualitative questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with magazine readers, and magazines as texts with certain characteristics, investigated through reader-guided textual analysis. The aim of this approach is to gain a more profound understanding of the relationship between practices of reading and textual features.

Diversionary Tactics and Coercive Acts: John Burgoyne’s Fête Champêtre

Diversionary Tactics and Coercive Acts: John Burgoyne’s Fête Champêtre Daniel O’Quinn (bio) On Thursday the 9th of June 1774, General John Burgoyne, of Saratoga fame, arranged an elaborate Fête Champêtre at the Oaks, in Surrey, to celebrate the wedding of his nephew Lord Edward Stanley and Lady Elizabeth Hamilton. The guests included the foremost men and women of the kingdom and this seemingly trivial gathering of fashionable society was the subject of extensive reporting in the newspapers. Lengthy descriptions of the event were published under the title of “Oaks Gazette Extraordinary” in the Public Advertiser, The Morning Chronicle, and in The Gentleman’s Magazine. The title is important because the supplemental texts which were added to the papers as “Gazette Extraordinaries” were generally devoted to political or military news, and thus this text was signaling that something more than the pleasure of the elite was at stake on this evening. If the title implies that Burgoyne’s Fête Champêtre is an event of some consequence, an editorial note to The Gentleman’s Magazine’s printing of the “Oaks Gazette Extraordinary” speaks directly to charges of triviality which, despite the infiltration of cultural analysis into all manner of practices, continues to inhere: “those who may think the repetition of this rural festival beneath the notice of a periodical work intended to record the principal transactions of the times, will, perhaps, be of another opinion, when they recollect that [End Page 133] it is from the gravest authors we learn the diversions of the ancients.”1 The editors of The Gentleman’s Magazine are making an argument more specific and more profound than that simply implied by the title. To suggest that this report is comparable to similar passages in the ancients is to argue not only that the magazine itself is recording a history comparable to that of the Roman empire, but also that this “diversion” tells us something about the current imperial situation. The term “diversion” here is significant because, as the Oxford English Dictionary indicates, it constitutes the “turning away of the thoughts, attention, etc., from fatiguing or sad occupations, with implication of pleasurable excitement; distraction, recreation, amusement, entertainment.” As Richard Steele indicated in Tatler no. 89, “Diversion, which is a kind of forgetting our selves, is but a mean Way of Entertainment.”2 Steele’s usage emphasizes that a diversion is an entertainment, however facile, that instantiates forgetting. Implicit in these definitions is a recognition that diversion is fundamentally connected to sadness or aggravation, and even in its enactment is but a temporary abatement of displeasure.3 The Gentleman’s Magazine text subtly reinforces this point when it emphasizes the relationship between accounts of diversion and the gravity of ancient authors. In that term “gravity” lurks a historical shadow. The “Oaks Gazette Extraordinary” makes a great deal of General Burgoyne’s management of the Fête Champêtre, and I would argue that the reiteration of his involvement in the event immediately prior to the editorial argument for its historical importance is not coincidental. It is important to remember that during the months when this celebration was being organized, Burgoyne was an active parliamentarian working with Lord North, a notable participant in the fête, to pass the Coercive Acts. When news of the Boston Tea Party reached Britain in January of 1774, the ministry moved quickly to punish the residents of Massachusetts by passing the The Boston Port Act on March 31, The Administration of Justice Act on May 20, The Quartering Act on June 2, 1774, and The Quebec Act on June 16. A quick glance at The Gentleman’s Magazine for 1774, or any of the dailies in this period, reveals that the press was overwhelmed with discussions of how best to discipline the American colonies. And these parliamentary measures, quickly re-named the Intolerable Acts by the colonists, not only instantiated further insurrection and revolutionary organization among the residents of Massachusetts, but also precipitated widespread resistance in the arena of colonial print culture.4 Burgoyne and Stanley were strident advocates for military intervention in America.5 On April 19, 1774, in a widely reported speech...

The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (review)

Reviewed by: The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale Beth Palmer (bio) Caroline Sumpter , The Victorian Press and the Fairy Tale (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. xii + 254, $80 cloth. This is a book to be welcomed by scholars of the Victorian press. The central argument of Caroline Sumpter's engaging monograph is that the Victorian periodical press helped to reinvent the fairy tale for nineteenth-century audiences. In doing so it contests the assertion, put forward by Charles Dickens (in "Frauds on the Fairies," 1853) and many others since, that the age of mass media left little room for belief in fairies or an oral folkloric tradition. Instead of perceiving the fairy tale as the "antithesis of [End Page 343] the newspaper—as timeless, untouchable, and beyond the reach of politics and commerce" (3), Sumpter shows the Victorian fairy story to be constructed by and responding to the same social and political developments as the newspaper and the periodical. The first chapter spans the nineteenth century to provide an overview of the fairy tale's modulating relationship with print culture. While the chapbook was seen by many as a more fitting, antiquarian form for the publication of fairy tales, it was the newer media of the press that helped fire enthusiasm for a fairy tale revival. The second and third chapters concentrate on the children's magazines and shilling monthlies of the 1860s. Sumpter suggests that the middle-class Aunt Judy's Magazine, Good Words for the Young, and the Monthly Packet relied on fairy tales and folklore, whereas cheaper children's literature like the Boy's Own Paper went in for sensational adventure fiction. The fairy tale was of particularly vital importance to these socially conservative magazines because it was perceived to be "the record of man's earliest spiritual impulses" (42). As such it played on contemporary links between the child reader and the "childhood" of the race to formulate fantasies of origin. In this vein Max Müller's etymological and linguistic theories are revealed as important intertexts for Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald's fairy tales. Chapter three also builds on work by Geoffrey Cantor, Sally Shuttleworth, Gowan Dawson and others that examine the crossovers between science, pseudo-science and literature in magazine settings. Here Sumpter locates Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies centrally among a matrix of texts in Cornhill and Macmillan's magazines which form an ongoing and multifaceted response to Darwin's 1859 Origin of Species. The fourth and fifth chapters move into the 1890s to examine the fairy tale in the socialist press and the elite little magazines. As with the earlier chapters, Sumpter focuses in on a decade in which she sees the periodical press undergoing significant developments in response to social change. In chapter four the analysis of Keir Hardie's Labour Leader and John Trevor's Labour Prophet offers interesting comparisons with the better-known and more successful Clarion. The final chapter turns from labour to leisure to show how writers like Laurence Housman and Edward Purcell understood "belief in the fairy tale . . . as a training in the appreciation of beauty" (151). Refreshingly, the well-known Yellow Book is mentioned, but, as with the Clarion, the better-known periodical serves as a context for exploring under-read texts like the Pageant and the Dome. In this final chapter especially, the reproductions of fairy tale illustrations receive the same kind of illuminating interpretations as the literary works. As well as analysing the uses to which fairy tales are put by magazine writers and editors, the book tackles the thorny issue of periodical readership. [End Page 344] While, at points, the ideas about readers' interpretations are necessarily conjectural, real readers' responses to fairy tales are particularly central to the sections on child readers in chapters two and four. For example, through the letters printed in the Labour Leader, Sumpter reveals children willing to understand fairy tales as political allegories but also shows how their specialist demands shaped the magazine (although she exercises healthy scepticism about whether or not children's letters to the editor were genuine). Previous work on fairy tales by scholars like Jennifer Schacker, U.C. Knoepflmacher, and...

Prom Dreams and Prom Reality: Girls Negotiating “Perfection” at the High School Prom*

Adolescent girls are often assumed to be extremely vulnerable to media influences; however, this study argues that girls actually negotiate meaning from media texts. Content analysis of teen prom magazines is combined with ethnography to explore how magazine texts operate within their readers’ worlds. This article argues against two commonly accepted dictates. First, I propose that popular magazines for adolescent girls are more complicated than previously acknowledged and do not rely on a singular message of perfection derived from beauty and heterosexual romance. And second, how girls engage with the magazines is more complicated than prior research has argued; girls use “strategic selectivity” (a term proposed to explain how girls make meaning of cultural texts) to negotiate the dominant meanings found in prom magazines and other cultural texts.

Time, the body and the reversibility of ageing: commodifying the decade

ABSTRACTContemporary popular culture proposes new ideological associations between time, ageing, the body and personal identity projects. In a range of magazine texts, television shows and associated websites, several commercialised discourses equate ageing, and women's ageing in particular, with the ‘look’ of ageing. They project a version of personal ageing that is reversible and repairable, on the presumption that looking younger is universally a desirable goal and one that can be reached through regimes of control operating on skin, body shape and weight, hair and clothing. Different moral stances are established in these discourses. One set offers magazine readers putative control over acknowledged risks and threats deemed inherent to ageing. Such texts invoke personal responsibility for maintaining and indeed for re-claiming a youthful appearance in middle and old age. Another set shames and vilifies people who ‘look older than they should’. In those cases, visible ageing needs to be urgently dealt with, on the gerontophobic assumption that the look of ageing renders the individual progressively less socially desirable or even less acceptable. Different frames of mediation, such as the keying of personal censure and humiliation as play, complicate the moral critique of these discourses, even though their ageist orientations are often stark. The decade is constructed as an important unit of bodily ageing, when the target is to look or in some ways to be ‘ten years younger’.

The Publication of Victory in Munsey's Magazine and the London Star

The Publication of Victory in Munsey's Magazine and the London Star Roger Osborne Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 6. Munsey's Magazine, February 1915, cover. Illustration by Walter Dean Goldbeck. [End Page 266] The reception of Victory has often hinged on Joseph Conrad's wider use of popular literary forms in his later career and the appearance of his work in periodicals of allegedly low aesthetic standards. In 1957 Thomas Moser initiated an influential theory of decline that continues to attract responses: How can a writer as complex and profound as Conrad have written these stories? Their stock characters belong in the romantic melodramas of inferior magazines, as do their conventional love-trysts, and their pernicious sentimental "message." Can a writer stop writing serious books and begin to turn out work indistinguishable from popular trash? (106–07) A long tradition of criticism exists to challenge Moser's thesis, but arguments about the aesthetic merit of the novel are complicated by the textual history of Victory, which includes versions of Victory in the American mass-market periodical Munsey's Magazine (see figure 6) and the high-circulation evening newspaper, the London Star (see figure 7).1 These periodicals might easily be written off as ephemeral media of their respective readerships, but that does little to help understand the significance of the appearance of Conrad's Victory (an enduring work of art) in this context. The following pages contribute to our understanding of this aspect of Conrad's literary career by exploring the relationship between Conrad and the readers of Munsey's Magazine and the London Star through their contribution to the life of Victory as a serialized text. [End Page 267] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 7. The Star (London), 14 September 1915, cover. [End Page 268] The first English edition of Victory was published on 24 September 1915, more than three years after Conrad began writing the short story, "Dollars," from which it evolved. The text of the English edition descended from the corrected proofs of Doubleday's American edition, but Conrad undoubtedly made more changes to these proofs and further corrected Methuen's proofs before the English edition was published.2 The Doubleday text was set from what Conrad called the "second-state" typescript, a clean copy of the typescript that had accumulated during the process of composition (CL 5: 203). This "second-state" typescript was also the setting copy used by Munsey's Magazine, but Conrad denounced the magazine text as unsuitable. To his literary agent, James Pinker, he wrote, Pray let Doubleday know by cable if necessary that he must not set up Victory from the magazine text. It won't do […]. They have cut, transposed and altered the paragraphing more than I can stand […]. I look upon the matter as of considerable importance. We must have the same text for book form in Eng and the US.—and that text cannot be the Munsey Magazine text. (CL 5: 435) Strongly asserting that the magazine text was not suitable to stand as the text he wished to be known by in literary circles, Conrad continued his dominant practice of rejecting the authority of serializations in favor of subsequent book form. Magazine texts may have added to the financial outcomes of his creative efforts, but they held limited aesthetic value for the novelist. The attribution of aesthetic value was left to the readers of the periodicals in which Conrad's work appeared. Despite looking down on the magazine forms of his works, Conrad had a good idea of the types of readers a text like Victory could attract. Early in the process of composition, Conrad gave Pinker an outline with which to sell the unfinished story to American publishers: As, for instance that it has a tropical Malay setting—an unconventional man and a girl on an island under peculiar circumstances to whom enters a gang of three ruffians also of a rather unconventional sort—this intrusion producing certain psychological developments and effects. There is philosophy in it and also drama—lightly treated—meant for cultured people—a piece of literature before everything—and of course fit for general reading. Strictly...

The capitalist Christ of the Word of Life Church's unlimited women's magazine: an intertextual and interdiscursive analysis

“Unlimited” is a quarterly publication of the Word of Life Church women's ministry that was examined from a perspective of intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The paper focuses on the magazine's editorial article in order to characterise its discourse and its persuasive value. It concludes that the editorial was dominated by a capitalist voice. This probably reflects the church's concept of prosperity, a key theme of Modern African Pentecostal teaching. The paper further concludes that Christian discourse (Biblical teaching) was used as a vessel to persuasively convey capitalist principles to the audience. The magazine's text is thus characterised by the hybridity in which the central agenda of fostering a capitalist mindset was couched in Biblical text. This hybridity was clearly discernible in terms of explicit intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The former introduced Biblical text into the article while the latter developed capitalist principles. It is a case of stuffing Christ's mouth with capitalist discourse. International Journal of Emotional Psychology and Sport Ethics Vol. 10 2008: pp. 110-122

Governing the healthy male citizen: Men, masculinity and popular health in Men's Health magazine

Recent commentators have noted the potential of newer neo-liberal discourses of health care to position responsibility for the management of well-being with the individual. Often promoted through the inculcation of risk avoidance and management, such discourses are played out in myriad settings, including the popular media. Magazines are one such media site in which diverse exhortations for the achievement of health, well-being and the perfectible body are made, and Bunton [1997. Popular health, advanced liberalism and good housekeeping magazine. In A. Petersen & Bunton R. (Eds.) Foucault, health and medicine (pp. 223–247). London: Routledge] has identified ‘magazine medicine’ as a significant manifestation of more dedifferentiated models of health care. Recent discussions have placed men's health high on research and policy agendas, with a concomitant interest in more popular realms. The UK magazine Men's Health ( MH) is indicative of these trends, and represents a site at which discourses of men, health and masculinity are constructed. Typically reflecting neo-liberal models of health, here men are constructed as active and entrepreneurial citizens able to maintain their own health and well-being through the judicious management of risk in contexts appropriate to dominant discourses of hegemonic masculinity. Data which resulted from a critical discourse analysis of a 2-year sample (21 issues) of MH are considered and findings related to medicalisation, individualisation and risk discussed. It is suggested that magazine texts such as MH reflect newer individualised models of health care and neo-liberal strategies of health governance premised upon constructing a healthy male citizen, willing and able to take responsibility for their own well-being.

Tobacco images and texts in Norwegian magazines and newspapers

Print media may influence smoking behaviour through tobacco advertisements and editorial use of tobacco pictures and texts. In Norway tobacco advertising has been banned for many years. The authors studied the coverage of tobacco promotion and tobacco and health in some general Norwegian magazines and newspapers. The findings were related to the publications' policy as stated by their editors. During three months in 1998-99 all pictures of tobacco and smoking situations were registered, plus the coverage on health aspects of tobacco in all consecutive issues of 7 newspapers and 19 magazines. The editors were asked about their attitudes regarding indirect tobacco advertisement and editorial use of people smoking. All editors for men's magazines and the majority of newspaper editors had no restrictions on displaying both indirect tobacco advertisements and images of people smoking. In total, 610 texts or pictures on tobacco were found in the 624 issues of magazines and newspapers. Only 26 items were indirect tobacco advertisements. Items promoting smoking were more common than coverage of tobacco and health (71% vs 29%), and occurred most frequently in men's magazines (2.1 per issue) and least frequently in local newspapers (0.3 per issue). The proportion of tobacco and health coverage compared with the total tobacco coverage was significantly lower in men's than in family magazines and local newspapers. Editors should be encouraged to increase the coverage of tobacco and health in print media. This may be an important factor in helping their readers to give up or not to take up smoking.

Mídia, escola e leitura crítica do mundo

O texto faz uma reflexão sobre o uso da imprensa na sala de aula e sua relação com o processo de aprendizagem. Questiona a excessiva inserção de fragmentos do discurso jornalístico nos livros didáticos em detrimento de outros gêneros. Discute a qualidade da narrativa jornalística e os riscos que ela encerra se não houver uma leitura crítica da mídia. Defende a necessidade de trabalho integrado entre educadores e jornalistas para a real compreensão do processo de produção da imprensa, construção da linguagem e da linha editorial dos veículos de comunicação.

Mobile marketing

Reminds us that mobile phones are ubiquitous and a status symbol for young people, so that more traditional media are getting on the act: Emap publishes a number of teenage magazine brands that have mobile databases and regards mobile marketing as a valuable tool, since messages to an opted‐in audience are targeted and relevant. Outlines how this interactive system works: members of Emap’s mobile databases are recruited via the magazine, and readers opt in to receive free text messages, but are free to unsubscribe once part of the database, with an opt out in each message. Illustrates this from a “Bliss” magazine text campaign and a mobile campaign for the film “Honey”, and indicates issues to consider in these campaigns: whether to use databases, WAP site or other media platforms, SMS or richer media formats, the choice of brands, the billing and reporting system, and legal and financial aspects.

‘Lucky this is anonymous.’ Ethnographies of reception in men’s magazines: a ‘textual culture’ approach

In this article I address the contribution that a study of reader reception might make to our understanding of the cultural meanings of the discourses to be found in and around men’s magazines. Reception is a cultural site often neglected in linguistic analyses of popular cultural texts, which are commonly treated as discrete, autonomous and ahistorical within these approaches. Conversation Analysis of unstructured interviews with magazine readers is one means of accessing contexts of reception, which, unlike many ethnographic approaches, is properly reflexive about the ontological status of its data. The drawback of a strict ethnomethodological approach, however, is its limited ability in recreating the original context of reading: the interview is arguably a situated account rather than a transparent report of reception. In order to expand the terms of ‘context’ for these interviews, therefore, the article proposes a triangulated method whereby the discourses and categories identified in talk can be intertextually linked (and indeed are sometimes intertextually indexed within the talk itself) to other communicative contexts in the circuit of culture, such as the magazine text, media debates, editorial identities and everyday talk. This ‘textual culture’1 approach to the analysis of popular culture effectively aims to analyse with ethnographic breadth and in discursive depth, the various, intersecting sites of culture within which the material text is formed - of which reception serves as the focal point for this article - and mirrors recent developments in Critical Discourse Analysis.

Critical discourse analysis and social cognition: evidence from business media discourse

This article aims at reconciling Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and cognitive linguistics, particularly metaphor research. Although the two disciplines are compatible, efforts to discuss metaphor as a cognitive phenomenon have been scarce in the CDA tradition. By contrast, cognitive metaphor research has recently developed to emphasize the embodied, i.e. neural, origins of metaphor at the expense of its sociodiscursive impact. This article takes up the concept of social cognition, arguing that it organizes the modification of, and access to, cognitive resources, with metaphoric models playing a particularly salient role in the constitution of ideology. In a cyclical process, ideology will help particular models gain prominence in discourse, which will, in turn, impact on cognition. To illustrate the point, the article draws on an extensive corpus of business magazine texts on mergers and acquisitions, showing how that particular discourse centres on an ideologically vested metaphoric model of evolutionary struggle.

Global queens, national celebrities: tales of feminine triumph in post‐liberalization India

This paper's analysis of print media texts about India's six Miss World and Miss Universe title‐holders maps the cultural production of the global beauty queen as an emerging hero whose tale of ascent circulates in a nation that is renegotiating its marginal position in the global economy. News and magazine texts celebrate global beauty queens' bodily discipline and devotion to fitness and grooming programs as evidence of the meritorious hard work of committed professionals. Popular biographies construct beauty queens as humble and ordinary women, who have struggled to overcome adversities in their pursuit of global fame. Media accounts navigate the boundaries between modernity and tradition when they represent beauty queens as hybrid—wholesome, patriotic, and cosmopolitan—young women, who preserve their authentic national identities despite their success in the global arena. Unpacking the mythical tales of class, gender, and national ascent that are smuggled into the public profiling of the global beauty queen, I argue that such representations of feminine agency in popular print culture authorize the ideological interests of India's consuming classes.

The Press Response to the Corps of Discovery: The Making of Heroes in an Egalitarian Age

This study examines how the nation's print media played a role in the making of heroes out of early American explorers. The method includes examining the magazine and newspaper text for hero labels and those important hero referents that scholars have long described: distinctive physical skills, an exemplary response to a challenge, and admirable moral characteristics, as well as a reputation that transcends a lifetime.

Wireless marketing: the linking value of text messaging

Explains why mobile phone text messaging is so popular with children; linking with peer groups is the main reason, as it satisfies the basic human need for community in a world of freedom and potential isolation. Shows how media brands are creating interactive channels which give marketers new ways to communicate with their target markets; the personal space of the mobile phone allows marketers to extend on‐air sponsorship or advertising. Presents case studies to illustrate this, both of which involve mobile phone databases to promote records: the wireless marketing campaign for Oxide & Neutrino by East West Records; and the “Top of the Pops” magazine text club, which is operated by BBC Worldwide to link children with their media.

Tracing Travel Talk in the Popular Magazine Text

By tracing distinct travel discourses in travel articles in popular magazines this paper seeks to reveal how travel journalists, as mediators of travel messages, construct and inscribe particular positions for tourists, places and host communities through specific narratives, images and commonly used codes. Sightseeing, the idea of the privileged tourist and the aesthetic beauty of a place are dominant and recurring themes in the magazine texts examined. Sightseeing is presented as the dominant way to access and know tourism places, as opposed to knowledge involving other senses or types of social involvement. An assumed relationship of power between tourist and place privileges and legitimates the interests of the Western tourist in a narrative of the ‘independent and elite traveller’, rather than the ‘mass tourist’. ‘Place’ is prized while local inhabitants are diminished. Destinations are constructed as if they are tourists’ playgrounds, inscribed as beautiful and romantic to seduce the tourist, while locals are constructed as submissive and compliant, as they facilitate and sustain travel myths and fantasies.