Magazine Editors Research Articles

From Swaddling to Dresses: Infant Clothing as a Reflection of Emancipation and Secularisation in Reform-Era Russia

This article fills an important gap in the study of early childhood culture in Russia and the social history of material culture between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The authors argue that changes in children’s clothing reflected some important social processes through which a new type of parenting and maternity began to rapidly form in Russia. This was accompanied by the emergence of new features in the class difference visualisation and demonstrative behaviour of the elite. That people decided to stop swaddling infants and started making them dresses is associated with changes in child care practices. These changes were caused by the emancipation, the westernisation and secularisation of the educated classes in Russian cities, the commercialisation of infant fashion, and the influence of new agents (representatives of the medical community, atelier owners, fashion magazine editors, etc.) on the everyday life of townspeople in Russia. This illustrates the process behind the formation of ideas concerning gender differences and gender stereotypes in new conditions. The analysis of practices connected with dressing infants relies on the historical and anthropological approach and sociological theories of fashion, with reference to visual sources (museum artifacts, photographs, and advertising images), fashion magazines, ego-documents, and early medical literature. The authors demonstrate that until the eighteenth century, the practice of dressing infants from all classes was simple and universal: in the following period, which lasted a century and a half, there were considerable changes in the practices of dressing infants depending on class. During the second half of the nineteenth century, representatives of the educated urban class dressed their newborns in accordance with the demonstrative function of “conscious parenthood”. Children’s fashion was gradually turning into a special social institution. Despite the stability of swaddling practices in rural Russia, among townspeople the infant was “emancipated” rapidly: swaddling practices became less common. Infant fashion became independent. Between the 1900s and 1910s, tight corsets and bodices ceased to be used; infant clothes became functional, practical, child-oriented, and clearly gender-marked.

Giant Pools of Content: Theorizing Aggregation in Online Media Distribution

Giant Pools of Content:Theorizing Aggregation in Online Media Distribution Andrew J. Bottomley (bio) It has been fifteen years since Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson first introduced the concept of the "long tail" for describing how the contemporary online media environment was reshaping the production and consumption of media content and other cultural products.1 In economic terms, the basic premise of the long tail is that the internet lowers the barriers to entry found in traditional media distribution, such as channel capacity constraints in radio and television broadcasting, shelf-space limitations in physical bricks-andmortar retail stores, and editorial gatekeepers. Online, any and all content can be made available regardless of its origins or popularity, and digital search technology and recommendation systems allow audiences to discover niche and otherwise obscure content. Thus, circa 2004, Anderson's long-tail theory posited that our economy and culture were shifting away from a model of mass media that focused on a relatively small number of mainstream "hits" at the head of the product demand curve and toward a huge number of niche products and markets in the tail (hence, the "long tail"). It suggests that the potential combined audience size for niche, low-popularity content may someday rival that of the large audiences for popular mass media content. At its core, the concept of the long tail—much like Tim O'Reilly's contemporaneous Web 2.0 concept—was a business model, conceived of as a solution to the failures of web commerce during the earlier dot-com era (1995–2001).2 Nevertheless, the long-tail concept carried deep cultural significance, promising to democratize and diversify the production and consumption of media. Yet the niche marketing phenomenon that Anderson described in 2004 was hardly new. He was simply articulating a new way for online businesses to strategize and monetize their offerings. The niche media producers and content that populated the long tail always existed; they [End Page 149] just were not economically advantageous in a mass media economy. Moreover, the means for distributing and accessing these cultural products online had been developing for a decade. In Anderson's original 2004 Wired essay, he points to digital platforms like Amazon, Netflix, Apple iTunes, and Rhapsody, some of which dated to the mid-1990s. These were online retailers and media subscription services that all operated off one central principle: content aggregation. In this essay, I historicize the concept of aggregation by tracing the rise of the web portal, specifically highlighting audio media and the case of AudioNet (later Broadcast.com). AudioNet innovated the vertical portal idea for audio and video content in the late 1990s, signaling a shift toward aggregation as the primary distribution model in the digital media industries. By "content aggregation," I am referring to the practice of pulling media content from various sources and making it accessible at one dedicated, easy-to-find location. Nearly all the major digital media companies and platforms of the post-1990 web era operate through principles of aggregation: Google, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, iTunes, and even social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. Aggregation lies at the heart of one of the great promises of the internet: the ability of individuals to access whatever they want, whenever and wherever they want.3 Tied up in these utopian visions are metaphors of abundance, prosperity, and democratization. Historically, modern computing and the internet are founded on the principle of abundance (and overabundance). Vannevar Bush's key observation, articulated in his prescient 1945 article "As We May Think," was that, although the scientific community was producing a trove of vital research and information, it was becoming impossible for researchers to sort through this immense maze of information and make practical use of it.4 He argued that scientists had a responsibility to share their research more widely and to find ways to make knowledge more accessible, to give individuals more control over information. Bush's solution to these problems of information overabundance and inaccessibility was computer-like machines, such as his theoretical Memex (or memory extender), which could enhance collaboration and perform functions such as compression, storage, and retrieval.5 During the 1960s and 1970s, the internet followed this...

Accounting for play as work in The Expense Account

PurposeThis paper aims to examine how and why finance is represented in cultural products. Focussing on an illustration by Norman Rockwell for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, this analysis suggests that financialization is represented through the technique of visually incongruent humour. Humour relays the cultural value of the separation of work and play, and financialization is a tool to make sense of play as work. Addressing why certain financial representations are produced highlights the influence of finance in determining how and what messages about financialization are made public. This analysis of a single illustration suggests a need for further research into comparative and contextual studies of culture and finance.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is a qualitative analysis of The Expense Account (1957), a cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post.FindingsIn analysing the visually incongruent humour of the illustration, the cultural value of the separation of work and play is muddied by the lack of supervision and undefined organizational space. Freedom of travel and lack of managerial presence suggest that travelling salesmen face anxiety and uncertainty in having to account for their fun activities as work. Accounting is one tool of financialization used to interpret play as work by employees. This illustration was produced in a for-profit context and was therefore influenced by the financial decisions of magazine editors and customers.Practical implicationsInterdisciplinary qualitative analysis of finance and humorous popular cultural images suggests that accounting is a financial tool for making sense of play as work outside fixed organizational spaces. Additional support is given for studying popular culture and finance together, as popular culture is produced within a financial system in which financial decisions determine humorous representations of financialization.Originality/valueThis paper adopts a financial perspective in examining a Norman Rockwell illustration and makes the case for examining how representations of financialization are made by humour and financial influence.

Voice of the management or employee advocate? How editors of employee magazines see their professional role

PurposeEditors of employee magazines work in a grey area between public relations and journalism. On the one hand, they need to accommodate the company management’s interest in a positive presentation; on the other, they must meet the employees’ need for objective and independent information. Although employee magazines reach millions of recipients every day, its editors have rarely been the focus of academic work. The purpose of this paper is to change this and scrutinise the way the editors view their professional role and the role conflicts to which they are subjected.Design/methodology/approachWe conduct 15 qualitative semi-structured interviews with editors of employee magazines to analyse their professional role and possible conflicts in their work.FindingsThe editors’ self-concept varies significantly along two dimensions, which the authors use as the basis for distinguishing four types: the management ambassador, the employee representative, the mediator and the service provider.Originality/valueThe study sheds light on employee magazines, a medium between public relations and journalism that has not been analysed before. It helps to specify the role of these magazines and its editors’ between the expectations of the management and the employees.

The “Sheriff of the Town of Little Mag”: An Appreciation of Len Fulton (1934–2011)

ABSTRACTLen Fulton was a key figure in bridging the gap between libraries and the small press/little magazine movement that developed in the 1960s. As the founder and publisher of Dustbooks, Fulton sought to document the growth of independent publishing through the Dustbooks “skein” of directories that provided information about books and periodicals traditionally overlooked by library and mainstream publishing review sources. He also served as a cofounder of the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers, which attempted to organize independent publishers to find better distribution among libraries and bookstores. This article provides an overview of Fulton's accomplishments and influence among the American small presses.

The Indian Ladies' Magazine, 1901–1938: From Raj to Swaraj by Deborah Anna Logan

Reviewed by: The Indian Ladies' Magazine, 1901–1938: From Raj to Swaraj by Deborah Anna Logan Jennifer Scott (bio) Deborah Anna Logan, The Indian Ladies' Magazine, 1901–1938: From Raj to Swaraj (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh, 2017), pp. xxxi + 293, $110.00 hardcover. Deborah Logan's most recent book offers the first sustained scholarly examination of the Indian Ladies' Magazine, a periodical edited by an Indian woman and aimed at Indian women readers, with some contributions from British and American writers. Logan's book provides an immensely valuable resource for literary scholars and historians interested in women's magazines, transatlanticism, and empire. This extensive consideration maps the history of the magazine in its cultural, social, and political milieux. Taking a transatlantic focus allows Logan to chart the flows between the Indian subcontinent and Britain during the magazine's long but truncated run. The magazine, which was published from 1901 to 1938, with a hiatus between 1918 and 1927, is clearly not a Victorian one. Yet Logan makes a case for the importance of this magazine in the lineage of Victorian periodicals by tracing the hefty influence of Victorian England—and indeed, Victoria herself—on the magazine's political persuasion, contributors, and editor, Kamala Satthianadhan. [End Page 754] The book is divided into eight chapters, each attending to a different context in which the magazine was situated. The first chapter provides a brief history of English women's magazines, before offering a substantive history of Indian women's magazines. Logan articulates how the growth of periodical publishing contributed to the empire's political instability during the time the Indian Ladies' Magazine was published. Along with several other Indian periodicals aimed at women readers, the Indian Ladies' Magazine was a major force in encouraging women's education and literacy efforts across the country. As the "first Indian women's English-language publication edited by a woman," its very existence was testament to the changing role of women in India's literary sphere (30). However, what Logan explains so well are the tensions between the changing ideals of Indian womanhood and Victorian gender roles, as exemplified by the Angel of the House and the New Woman. She demonstrates how Satthianadhan negotiated these tensions both in her editorials and in her choice of content, defining both as a panacea to the modern, feminist undertaking of a woman-edited, mostly woman-written magazine. Chapters two and three address the literary aspects of the magazine. The second chapter investigates how Victorian ideals of womanhood were included in the Indian Ladies' Magazine, particularly through articles analysing Tennyson's The Princess, John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, and Coventry Patmore's The Angel of the House. British authors were commonly featured, and Logan shows how articles like "Tennyson's Ideal of Womanhood" and "Ruskin on Women by an Indian Lady" created a dialogue with the British literary sphere. Criticism of Indian literature was also a key feature of the magazine. Logan describes how some contributors were vocal in "claiming the superiority of the East over West" (51). This priority of Eastern texts paved the way for Indian contributors to write back to England, countering romanticized versions of India and its religious and cultural practices long before Edward Said coined the term "orientalism" (51). The third chapter offers examples of Indian poets, journalists, philosophers, playwrights, and novelists whose contributions to the Indian Ladies' Magazine reveal links between the literary sphere and political conversations happening during the transition from colony to independence, from raj to swaraj. In her examination of literary works, Logan demonstrates that it was not simply the magazine's structure that countered the typical male-dominated periodical culture of its time; she shows how the editor carefully chose pieces that were not overtly political yet supported the feminist aims of the magazine. Chapters four, five, and six are dedicated to the overt political work undertaken by women in India and documented in the Indian Ladies' Magazine. Chapter four focuses on women's social activism, which aligns with [End Page 755] the campaigning undertaken by Victorian women. Logan highlights how the Indian Ladies' Magazine differs from other magazines of the period in its coverage of not only the lives...

The Influence of Prague’s Lusatian Seminary on the Sorbian National Revival

The Catholic Lusatian Sorbs are today the most important element of the Sorbian ethnic group and their national culture. After the Reformation, they found themselves in a minority and in a highly negative situation. For the Catholic Sorbs, the opening of the Lusatian Seminary in Prague in 1728 was a significant source of strength and encouragement. Over the nearly two centuries of its existence, the Lusatian Seminary became a national institution for Catholic Sorbs, and Prague was considered their second capital after Budyšin (Bautzen). The Sorbian seminarians, who usually attended the German grammar school in Prague’s Lesser Town before going on to study theology at the city’s university, were taught by leading figures of Czech science such as Josef Dobrovský, Václav Hanka, Karel Jaromír Erben, and the Slovak Martin Hattala. The Sorbs thus received their education not only in their native language but also expanded their knowledge of other Slavic tongues. The seminary and the Sorbian youth association Serbowka, founded in Prague in 1846, significantly helped to spread education among the Sorbs, to strengthen their Slavic identity, and to develop their efforts at a national revival. Over its nearly 200-year-existence, the Lusatian Seminary was attended by many leading figures of the Sorbian national revival, including Slavist, magazine editor, and leading figure of the Sorbian national revival Jan Pětr Jordan; priest, editor, linguist, and long-standing chairman of the Maćica Serbska Michał Hórnik; and author and editor Jakub Bart-Ćišinski, considered the most important Sorbian poet.

Author Meets Critics: The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die, and the Creative Resurrection to Come

Abstract: This talk centers on Andrew Essex's book The End of Advertising: Why It Had to Die and the Creative Resurrection to Come (Spiegel & Grau, 2017). A leading advertiser and two advertising scholars meet with Essex, a major advertising industry executive and former magazine editor, to discuss many topics covered in the book: challenges to advertising brought about by streaming media and ad blockers; ways to make advertising relevant in a media-saturated world; the limits of algorithmically-based programmatic advertising; the end of interruptive "command-and-control" advertising; infrastructural investment as a form of advertising and brand awareness; advertising's democratic and social responsibilities; advertising in a world of peak television; advertising's place in live sports; brands' involvement in politics; and privacy and Big Data.

Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective by Ewa Glapka

Reviewed by: Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective by Ewa Glapka Miglena Sternadori Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective. Ewa Glapka. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 245 pp. $95.00 paperback. I planned my three weddings without ever flipping through the pages of a bridal magazine. Sure, I knew they existed. But for a broke first-generation immigrant, with penniless parents in a faraway country, it seemed pointless to daydream of fairytales. This means I failed to be what Ewa Glapka, author of Reading Bridal Magazines from a Critical Discursive Perspective, calls a "superbride"—an agentic manager of her own commodified "big day" (p. 65). Glapka, like me, hails from Eastern Europe, where weddings are relatively cheap and mostly public, held in churches and state-owned "ritual halls," with brides and grooms in mass-produced (often rented) wedding attire entering and exiting before gawking passersby. The ensuing parties are usually small, by Western standards, but jovial and heartfelt. There are no bridesmaids in matching dresses, no color schemes, no rehearsal dinners, no wedding favors, and definitely no anxiety-ridden yearlong planning. Having this perspective as an outsider serves Glapka well as she takes on dissecting British wedding magazines. Though she never discusses her own "comparison" reading, she chafes at the idealization and fetishization of consumption as a means of self-actualization, and notes that bridal magazines' existence depends on convincing "readers that a modern woman getting married expresses herself through her transformation into a princess, in a process that necessitates a series of informed consumer choices" (p. 96). Glapka is also critical of wedding magazines' heteronormative and inherently conservative construction of gender and of their blatant promotion of individualism that "does not emanate from the inside, it is a result of externally provided inspiration" (p. 101-102) But the book goes further than critiquing the "wedding-ideological complex" (p. 55). Glapka is not exactly surprised that bridal magazines are full of gendered and traditional discourses. Rather, in a Radway-esque fashion, she is more interested in the readers' perception and interpretation of the magazines' content. The book contains an in-depth analysis of four interviews with recent or soon-to-be brides, out of a total of 11 interviews Glapka conducted. What she discovers in these conversations is that "exposing the trashiness and superficiality of the world recreated on the pages of the magazine gave the women subversive pleasure" (p. 188), but it did not make them rethink their worldview. To elicit interviewees' reactions without explicitly asking their thoughts on gender, Glapka relies on prompts: a magazine editor's letter about the importance of personalizing one's wedding; a discussion about the practice of "trashing" wedding gowns; an ad for high-heel-walking courses in a blurb highlighting women's insecurities about walking in heels; and the use of beauty "countdowns" encouraging brides to invest time and effort into looking their best when they walk down the aisle. Although the interviewed readers claim to ignore or resist the magazines' discourse of femininity, Glapka perceives that they simultaneously embrace a lot of its practices, such as expressing insecurities about their bodies and positioning themselves as the objects of the male gaze. Her conclusion is that "women remain anchored in the dominant gender paradigm in spite of their insubordination to its underlying discourse" (p. 198). A shortcoming of the book is that, like many other critical/cultural scholars, Glapka sees magazines only as media texts rather than as complex cultural artifacts at the center of their reader communities. She argues that bridal magazines manipulate readers into feeling a part of "a community of shared knowledge" (p. 77) through practices such as "simulated intimacy" (p. 108) and "synthetic personalization" (p. 109). But even though magazines' reader interaction is guided by pragmatic interests, Glapka's theoretical choices fail to fully explain or predict social realities. A cursory perusal of social media platforms suggests wedding magazines do, in fact, have reader communities that are anything but illusory. For example, on Facebook, Malaysia's Shaadi Wedding magazine has 2.7 million followers, the British Brides magazine has 2.6 million followers, and the Australian ModernWedding magazine has 1.5 million followers. Another shortcoming of...

Women, Workers and Race in LIFE Magazine: Hansel Mieth's Reform Photojournalism 1934-1955 by Dolores Flamiano

Reviewed by: Women, Workers and Race in LIFE Magazine: Hansel Mieth's Reform Photojournalism 1934-1955 by Dolores Flamiano Carol Zuegner Women, Workers and Race in LIFE Magazine: Hansel Mieth's Reform Photojournalism 1934-1955. Dolores Flamiano. Ashgate Publishing Co., 2016, 288 pp. $149 hardback. The life of German-born photographer Hansel Mieth reads like fiction—from traveling through Europe as a teenager under a boy's disguise, to working as a fruit tramp, to being the second woman hired at LIFE magazine (after Margaret Bourke-White). Mieth's life was all too real. In "Women, Workers and Race in LIFE Magazine: Hansel Mieth's Reform Photojournalism 1934-1955," Dolores Flamiano highlights the boundaries and borders Mieth continually encountered and often crossed: gender, nationality, class, and race. An in-depth cultural exploration of Mieth's photographs, buttressed by her unpublished memoir and oral histories, the book raises questions about gender, documentary versus photojournalism, and the power of the photojournalist (versus the power of magazine editors) to frame a story. Flamiano divides Mieth's career into four phases: an apprentice photographer in the early 1930s, when she was a migrant farm worker and a photographer with the San Francisco Public Works Administration; her professional career with LIFE, which started in 1937 in New York; freelance photography and farming in California beginning in 1941; and, after the 1973 death of her longtime companion and husband Otto Hagel (also a photographer), a period of renewed interest in Mieth's work. Mieth had no formal training as a photographer, but she had a deep interest and experience in the causes of social reform and change. She came to LIFE reluctantly because she was more interested in social reform photography than photo stories on celebrities. Flamiano says LIFE magazine wanted Mieth's ability as a candid photographer, especially her skill with visual storytelling and the photo essay. In the heart of the book, Flamiano examines a series of photo essays—including one called "Garment Workers at Play" and featuring women union workers—aiming to contrast Mieth's motivation in taking the pictures with what actually appeared in the magazine. Mieth developed an interest in science stories, and "embraced scientific progress as a vehicle for social change," Flamiano writes. That part of Mieth's career at LIFE is illuminated by a photo essay on a rhesus monkey colony on Puerto Rico. One photo she took on that assignment became a Picture of the Week – and one of her most famous photos, reprinted and even mentioned in her New York Times obituary. But it was the stories about social reform that drew Mieth. Her work targeted the intersection of gender and race. She published a LIFE photo essay in 1938 called "Negroes: The U.S. Also Has a Minority Problem," and went to a predominantly African-American community in South Carolina in 1940 for a photo essay that she thought would center on an African-American nurse. But the magazine editors recast the story (titled "Birth Control: South Carolina Uses It for Public Health") in a different light that left Mieth appalled and disenchanted both with LIFE and her editors' story choices. The most compelling chapter of Flamiano's book shows some of the photos taken by Mieth that never appeared in LIFE. An especially interesting example is a photo essay about Heart Mountain, a Japanese internment camp of 11,000 in Wyoming. LIFE killed the story in 1943, but Mieth's photos of the camp have emerged in various collections and exhibitions. Mieth's career at LIFE declined during World War II, when she and Otto Hagel moved to a California farm, photographing a few social reform stories. Mieth claims the two were blacklisted during the Cold War because they refused to appear before the before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Though that claim is disputed, Hagel and Mieth's work was clearly marginalized in the post-war climate. Flamiano's examination of Mieth's life, work, and the culture in which she worked offers a fascinating exploration of the constraints and treatment of gender, race, and class in the context of magazine photojournalism. The books would have a place in both undergraduate and...

Культурна політика Михайла Грушевського як редактора селянських газет

Культурна політика Михайла Грушевського як редактора селянських газет

Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards by Jack Zipes

Reviewed by: Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards by Jack Zipes JoAnn Conrad (bio) Jack Zipes. Tales of Wonder: Retelling Fairy Tales Through Picture Postcards. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Jack Zipes's latest omnibus is a lusciously colorful coffee-table book that (re-) unites fairy-tale themed postcards with their textual inspirations. Seeking to redress the "neglect" (xiv) of such fairy-tale postcards "by collectors, scholars of cultural studies and folklore, and the general public" (xiii), Zipes's stated mission is to examine these "incredibly exotic" (xiii) postcards in order to provide a new "optique" (xx) on fairy tales, forcing us to rethink them through different perspectives. Indeed, the field of fairy-tale studies has been slow to analyze the role of mass-mediated illustrations as semiotic markers, circulating, as do these postcards, disconnected from their tales while tethered to them through their iconization. As a result, illustrations have mostly been treated as complementary and ancillary to the tales themselves, and Zipes's promise of a new integrative analytic approach is as welcome as it is long overdue. Unfortunately, in terms of the material, organization, and analysis, this book fails to deliver on its ambitious goals. The publisher's webpage describes the book as "a pictorial history of fairy-tale postcards throughout the world" ("Tales"), and yet the organization of the material is neither chronological nor historically contextualized. Instead, the organizing principle is the classic European fairy tale, with the images on the postcards receiving slight mention or analysis. Despite the subtitle's promise to "retell" the tales through the postcards, the cards are merely appended to a reiteration of the classic tales. [End Page 387] The book is organized into two lopsided parts: "The Tales" comprising roughly ninety percent of the book, and "The Art" making up the remaining ten percent. The first group introduced, by far the largest, is what Zipes calls "Classical Tales"—Little Red Riding Hood, Little Tom Thumb/Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots, but also incongruously The Pied Piper and Rip Van Winkle, both more appropriately categorized as (local) legends, not fairy tales. For all these "Classic Tales" Zipes also provides full texts, and for the first six he lists the versions from both Charles Perrault and the Grimms, although with no other reference to source material, editions, or translators. Additionally, Zipes includes Robert Browning's poem of the Pied Piper as well as Washington Irving's full story of the supernatural encounter in the Catskills. Taking up a good two-thirds of this large book, the inclusion of such readily available texts begs the question: Why include them again here? The presentation of tales and accompanying illustrated postcards proceeds with a series of shorter sections: "A Mélange of the Brothers Grimm," "Stories by Hans Christian Andersen," "Russian Fairy Tales," and "Fairy-tale Novels." In most of these sections, the accompanying postcards are at most described, and often unremarked upon, as if the images are self-evident and ahistorical, their presence bearing witness to the timeless and transcultural nature of the tales themselves, despite the fact that the majority are from the French and German literary canon. The section on Andersen demands a deeper look in that it represents a missed opportunity to truly investigate the dynamic relationship between published tales and their illustrations. Andersen courted magazine editors and publishers who traded in illustrations, and his stories were the subject of hundreds of different visual interpretations during the "Golden Era" of book illustration. Those images, owned by the publishers, were reprinted in a host of media—cards, postcards, calendars, coloring books, paper dolls, and die-cut trade cards, for example. However, rather than focusing on this intersection of the tales and their industrially produced images and mass distribution, Zipes instead relies on his previous biographical and psychoanalytical analysis of Andersen the man. This inattention to historical context coupled with a set of images that comes almost exclusively from German postcards sets the stage for such pronouncements as: "there are not many fairy-tale postcards of ["The Little Mermaid"], perhaps because Andersen was somewhat of a misogynist" (159). Putting aside the impossibility of extrapolating...

Eugene O'Neill Remembered

Eugene O'Neill Remembered

Building Bridges between Research and Applications

Newly appointed Editor in Chief Torsten Moller thanks outgoing EIC Miguel Encarnacao, discusses the history of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and the current issue, and welcomes new members of the magazines Editorial Board.

Covers that never happened

One of the changes I instigated in my eight years as Science Editor of The Biochemist was to invite design staff to the magazine's Editorial Advisory Panel meetings so that we could consider the visual angle for each issue (and also so that I could interfere incessantly with the cover designs). Sometimes thinking up novel cover concepts was tough, especially when the default option is to use a chemical structure but more often than not, dreaming up effective ideas for each issue proved an amusing exercise. Rather like practical jokes, sometimes the fun is in having the idea and it's usually better not to go ahead with the execution. But just for your amusement, I recount the stories behind some of the covers. Here are four cover concepts that it's probably just as well never appeared in their original incarnation and one that should have been slightly different.

Perspectives: A new world for pharma contractors

Last month, I testified before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Energy & Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health about a proposed over-the-counter (OTC) monograph user fee. This fee would be paid to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration by manufacturers of OTC drugs with an FDA-registered list of ingredients to help fund staff to review changes to formulations of those products. I was the fifth of five industry representatives to testify at that session. We each had five minutes for our oral testimony, which meant I had 20 minutes or so to wait while sitting at a table facing elected House members and their staff. I found myself wondering how I, a longtime trade magazine editor with a liberal arts background, ended up in this particular hot seat. The simple answer is that I had recently switched careers and was testifying as the president of the Pharma & Biopharma Outsourcing Association

Tracing the narrativity of National Geographic feature articles in the light of evolving media landscapes

This article seeks to trace the narrativization of the genre feature article as published in the National Geographic magazine over the past 100 years. I base my argumentation on the observation that image-caption-clusters have gained remarkable prominence in perception as they today often cover the entire layout space of a double-page, when they often appeared together with running text on a 1915 spread. Given that narrativization has always been a core popularization strategy of the magazine’s journalistic practices, and is thus likely to be expected by its audience, the question arises whether perceptually prominent image-caption-clusters have increased in their degree of narrativity. In order to explore this question, I establish an interdisciplinary framework for a media linguistic analysis of literary journalism inspired by theorization in linguistics, literary studies, narratology and its cognitive branches. I proceed by exploring a corpus of altogether 15 National Geographic print feature articles (and their 304 image-caption-clusters) published in 1915, 1965, and 2015. I conclude this paper with a discussion of my findings. In particular, I draw on the framework of audience design and outline five main aspects magazine editors are at least likely to consider when making assumptions about their audience’s genre expectations.

Top 10 tips for working in the media.

Pete Wedderburn shares his own top 10 tips for building good relationships with magazine, radio and television editors and producers.

Divide to rule: Magazine editor Wojciech Przybylski discusses the government’s attempt to stifle news in Poland and what journalists can do to fight back

Divide to rule: Magazine editor Wojciech Przybylski discusses the government’s attempt to stifle news in Poland and what journalists can do to fight back

Dietary advice for improving cardiovascular health in UK running magazines

PurposeThis paper aims to evaluate the dietary advice for cardiovascular health in UK running magazines.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative and quantitative content analysis was carried out on 12 issues (2014/2015) of Men’s Running (MR), Runner’s World (RW) and Women’s Running (WR). Coding of content took place into three themes: diet information, format and cardiovascular health.FindingsDietary advice comprised 17, 18 and 21 per cent of content in MR, RW and WR, respectively. A Mediterranean dietary pattern (e.g. fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds, wholegrains and legumes, oily fish) was recommended for cardiovascular health and lowering of BP and plasma cholesterol. Single components of this dietary pattern were emphasised combined with advice to alter fat intake and increase intake of antioxidant nutrients and polyphenols, while advice to restrict salt was scarce. There was minimal emphasis on weight control. Information was often presented as single-page compilations of multiple headlines and snippets. Lexical imperatives and magisterial vocabulary connoted learned expertise and citation of experts and journals was common.Research limitations/implicationsFuture research may qualitatively investigate how readers interpret and make use of the nutrition information and dietary advice provided in these magazines. A critical question would be to address whether these dietary messages lead to cardio-protective dietary behaviour.Practical implicationsImproved journalistic reporting of emerging nutritional science is also needed. Magazine editors and journalists need to follow reporting guidelines for science and provide more nuanced information.Originality/valueThis research is the first to describe the content and style of dietary content for cardiovascular health in running magazines.