US Magazines Research Articles

Store inventory can affect demand: Empirical evidence from magazine retailing

In retailing, inventory analysis and inventory practice have traditionally been based on the assumption that underlying demand does not vary with inventory levels. A growing body of research supports the contention that the validity of this assumption has significant implications for optimal inventory policies. The concern for such inventory effects motivated a major US magazine publisher to conduct the market study documented in this article. It presents empirical evidence that demand can indeed vary with inventory, and it quantifies the magnitude of these inventory effects which are twofold. An inventory decrease for one brand can, first, result in a decrease of demand for the brand and, second, in an increase of demand for a competing brand. These observations support the expansion of the traditional Newsvendor model to include inventory effects as well as the practice to make inventory decisions for retail categories rather than individual brands.

WHERE IS SHE?

Gatekeeping studies indicate that the top reason invoked by editors for excluding newsworthy stories from publication is a lack of space and inflexibility. Online news media, however, are not restricted by space and can, therefore, publish more diverse content with equal coverage. This content analysis of US and foreign online news magazines was conducted to determine whether women's portrayal in the news has benefited from the Internet's potential for space and equality. Previous research has concluded that representations of women in traditional mass media are scarce, stereotypical, and gender biased. Our comparison of online news magazines examined whether this was also true for digital media. The findings partially supported the hope for more extensive and balanced coverage of women in online news media. The companion websites of the highest circulated news magazines in the United States, Britain, Korea, and Mexico allocated only an average 3–5 percent of their articles to female news subjects, and the featured stories were less likely to focus on women in leadership positions and more likely to highlight feminine attributes. However, those stories also avoided stereotypes and included more positive content than the coverage dedicated to men, and the placement of these articles was as dominant as the placement of articles about men. Thus, this study identified the Internet's potential for diversified and equitable media coverage.

Hidden Sexism: Facial Prominence and Its Connections to Gender and Occupational Status in Popular Print Media

A total of 779 article-embedded photographs from six popular US magazines during 2004 (Newsweek, Time, Fortune, Money, People, and Sports Illustrated) were examined assessing the relationship between occupational status and gender and the depiction of men and women in print media. Results show individuals depicted in intellectually focused occupations had higher face-to-body ratios than individuals depicted in physically focused occupations. Gender differences in facial prominence did not reach significance. A gender by occupation interaction indicated men in intellectually focused occupations had higher face-to-body ratios than women in similar professions, whereas women in physical occupations had higher face-to-body ratios than men in similar occupations. This suggests a disparity in the media with regard to displaying men and women equally in similar occupational roles.

Freedom of expression as liberal fantasy: the debate over The People vs. Larry Flynt

The People v. Larry Flynt initiated a public discussion in the United States on `freedom of expression'. By analyzing reviews and discussion of the movie in US newspapers and magazines, I look at the way in which `freedom of expression' is constructed as a core American liberty. I argue that this construction is an example of ideological fantasy, which relies on a fetishization of individual expression as proof of freedom. The public discussion I analyze constructs a fantasy of exaggerated `freedom' by focusing on individual and sexual elements of speech and ignoring economic constraints on speech in the movie and in US political and social life.

The legend of the Tarahumara: Tourism, overcivilization and the white man's Indian

Reading articles about the Tarahumara Indians of Northern Mexico that have appeared in popular US magazines, I identify four interlocking themes that constitute the Tarahumaras as a ‘white man's Indian’: a) the Tarahumaras are primitive hunters; b) they eat a simple and healthy diet; c) they complete superhuman feats of endurance; and d) they lack the sense of time/work discipline that would make them successful athletes in Western-style endurance events. These themes constitute the Tarahumaras as noble savages whose supposedly primitive lifestyle offers US runners a solution for the diseases of overcivilization. They also serve the needs of a burgeoning sport/tourism industry that sells stereotypical images of ‘Indians’ to US runners and tourists.

Diabetes Portrayals in North American Print Media: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis

This study investigated how media coverage has portrayed diabetes as newsworthy. The quantitative component involved tabulating diabetes coverage in 2 major Canadian newspapers, 1988-2001 and 1991-2001. The qualitative component focused on high-profile coverage in 2 major US magazines and 2 major Canadian newspapers, 1998-2000. Although coverage did not consistently increase, the quantitative results suggest an emphasis on linking diabetes with heart disease and mortality to convey its seriousness. The qualitative component identified 3 main ways of portraying type 2 diabetes: as an insidious problem, as a problem associated with particular populations, and as a medical problem. Overall, the results suggest that when communicating with journalists, researchers and advocates have stressed that diabetes maims and kills. Yet even when media coverage acknowledged societal forces and circumstances as causes, the proposed remedies did not always include or stress modifications to social contexts. Neither the societal causes of public health problems nor possible societal remedies automatically received attention from researchers or from journalists. Skilled advocacy is needed to put societal causes and solutions on public agendas.

Healthy, Wealthy and Globalized? Reader Letters to Australian Men's Health Magazine

While the international success of the US magazine franchise Men's Health has been lauded in the publishing industry (Puri, 1998), the introduction of an Australian edition in 1997 inspired a range...

IS EVANGELICALISM ITCHING FOR A CIVILIZATION FIGHT?: A MEDIA STUDY

Abstract Many political theorists have subscribed to Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations”, which sees the Islamic world and Judeo-Christian world on a collision path. However, there are some fundamental problems with Huntington's theory. Firstly, neither Islam nor Christianity is monolithic. The secular media contributes to the illusion of a civilization clash by underestimating the diversity of evangelical leadership and media. A content analysis of the two leading evangelical magazines in the US, Christianity Today and World magazine, illustrates the diversity of opinion among evangelicals towards Islam.

Audience characteristics and the price of advertising in a circulation industry: evidence from US magazines

This paper investigates the impact of audience characteristics on the newsstand sales, the cover price and the price of advertising in the US magazine industry. Employing a unique data set describing 94 US magazines, a simultaneous equations model estimates the impact of various audience and magazine characteristics on the price of magazine advertising. The empirical model is guided by previous theoretical work that predicts audience characteristics may influence the price of advertising. The results indicate that average reader income, average reader age, the number of pages printed per year, and the possible number of advertising impressions enhance the price of advertising. On the other hand, a higher cover price, having local distribution, and a greater dependence on newsstand sales reduce the price publishers charge for advertising.

Alcohol advertising in magazines and adolescent readership.

Adolescent drinking is a major public health concern. The federal government does not restrict alcohol advertising to adolescents, but relies on the alcohol industry for self-regulation. To investigate recent alcohol advertising in magazines and to determine whether advertising frequency is associated with adolescent readership. All alcohol advertisements were counted that appeared from 1997-2001 in 35 of 48 major US magazines, which tracked their adolescent readership (3 refused all alcohol advertisements; and advertisement counts were unavailable for 10). Variation was assessed in the advertisement placement frequency for each major category of alcohol (beer, wine and wine coolers, and distilled liquor) by a magazine's adolescent readership (age 12-19 years), young adult readership (age 20-24 years), and older adult readership (age > or =25 years); readership demographics (sex, race, and income); year; frequency of publication; and cost per advertisement. Variation in alcohol advertising frequency by adolescent readership. Adolescent readership ranged from 1.0 to 7.1 million. The alcohol industry placed 9148 advertisements at a cost of 696 million dollars. Of the 9148 advertisements, 1201 (13%) were for beer, 443 (5%) for wine, and 7504 (82%) for liquor. After adjustment for other magazine characteristics, the advertisement rate ratio was 1.6 times more for beer (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.0-2.6; P =.05) and liquor (95% CI, 1.1-2.3; P =.01) for every additional million adolescent readers. Wine industry advertising was not associated with adolescent readership. Magazine advertising by the beer and liquor industries is associated with adolescent readership. Industry and federal policymakers should examine ways to regulate advertising that reaches large numbers of adolescents.

A comparison of services advertising strategies used in US and Korean magazine ads: a content analysis

This study assesses the level to which services advertisers follow guidelines for effective services advertising suggested by prior academic literature. The study analyzes George and Berry’s five guidelines for effective services advertising strategies and Berry and Clark’s four tangibilization strategies. The extent to which these suggested strategies are actually implemented by practitioners in the USA and South Korea is investigated, using a content analysis methodology. It is hypothesized that advertisers in a more advanced services economy like the US would be more in tune with the distinctive nature of services (e.g. intangibility) and would practice these guidelines more frequently than advertisers in a newly developed services economy like Korea. The findings suggest that US services magazine ads do use most of the suggested services advertising strategies more frequently than the Korean counterparts. However, there are a few exceptions, and some of the guidelines were not widely used in either country. Managerial implications and suggestions for further research are provided.

Un(di)ing legacies: White matters of memory in portraits of ‘our princess’

This article analyzes ‘commemorative’ images of Diana Spencer for how they invoke tropes of charity and sympathy to produce racialized mediations of history, memory, motherhood and US national identity. Drawing from cultural theory that establishes technologies of memory and forgetting as material forces, this discussion illumines how images of Diana appearing in such popular US magazines as People and Life incorporate visual scripts of race and sentiment that have historically demarcated the relative social value(s) of maternity and reproduction. Understanding visual culture as a force that is both structured by and structuring of hierarchies of power enables us to see how the posthumous circulation of images of ‘Our Princess’ are indeed not ideologically innocent memorializations. Rather, these images are the physical, embodied material of a national monument that provides faithful ‘visitors’ an affective connection to historically idealized notions of whiteness, motherhood, and the family.

Cyberspace meets domestic space: Personal computers, women's work, and the gendered territories of the family home

During the early 1990s, marketing discourse in key US magazines attached a newly invented “feminine”; identity to the personal computer, fuelling a second great wave of home adoption. These public fantasies, which attempted to ease the machine into the pre‐gendered spaces of the American family home, drew upon a slate of postfeminist appeals, emphasizing the PC's value in women's work‐both income‐producing and family‐centered. This three‐part paper traces how Utopian expectations for a postfeminist work tool and recommendations about where to place it on the domestic map ultimately collided with the gendered constraints built into the pre‐established territories of the US home. The first part of the paper documents the addition of postfeminist work applications to a formerly masculinized technology; the second part reviews the marketing appeals that extolled the PC's potential to help a woman produce income, manage her household, and provide educational advantages to her children, all at once; the final part uncovers how these hopeful dreams were deconstructed by a second stream of discourse that failed to situated the PC comfortably within the domestic sphere, signalling fundamental vacillations about the micropolitics of homebound feminism.

Knowledge of Methadone Toxicity Among US Maintenance Clinic Staff

Abstract In 1996, readers of the US magazine Addiction Treatment Forum completed a questionnaire on methadone maintenance. All the 149 respondents working in maintenance programs had difficulty answering six questions on methadone toxicity. Surprisingly, there was no measurable association between knowledge of methadone toxicity and either respondents' qualifications, experience or position, or their general knowledge of the risks and benefits of maintenance treatment. Respondents were better informed of these general risks than staff working in 14 New York City maintenance programs in 1994. These findings suggest there is a pressing need for US methadone maintenance staff to be informed of the risks, signs and symptoms of methadone toxicity.

‘Represent’: race, space and place in rap music

Say somethin' positive, well positive ain't where I liveI live around the corner from West HellTwo blocks from South Shit and once in a jail cellThe sun never shined on my side of the street, see?(Naughty By Nature, ‘Ghetto Bastard (Everything's Gonna Be Alright)’, 1991, Isba/Tommy Boy Records)If you're from Compton you know it's the 'hood where it's good(Compton's Most Wanted, ‘Raised in Compton’, 1991, Epic/Sony)IntroductionHip hop's capacity to circumvent the constraints and limiting social conditions of young Afro-American and Latino youths has been examined and celebrated by cultural critics and scholars in various contexts since its inception in the mid-1970s. For instance, the 8 February 1999 issue of US magazine Time featured a cover photo of ex-Fugees and five-time Grammy award winner Lauryn Hill with the accompanying headline ‘Hip-Hop Nation: After 20 Years – how it's changed America’. Over the years, however, there has been little attention granted to the implications of hip hop's spatial logics. Time's coverage is relatively standard in perceiving the hip hop nation as a historical construct rather than a geo-cultural amalgamation of personages and practices that are spatially dispersed.

Miracle in South Africa: A historical review of US magazines' coverage of the first heart transplant

Little has been written about magazine coverage of the first heart transplant. Magazine coverage of the first human heart transplant, which was performed in South Africa in December 1967 by Christiaan Barnard, was reviewed. Magazines showed a pro-American slant in their coverage by asserting that luck played a large part in Barnard performing the operation. They also downplayed Barnard's accomplishment by saying he received surgical training in the US. Only a few stories mentioned that Barnard's patients were living much longer than those of American surgeons.

Melatonin in feverfew and other medicinal plants

In 1995, the US magazine, Newsweek, named synthetic melatonin (N-acetyl-5-methoxytryptamine) the “Pill of the Year” for its potential health benefits. In the same year, there was a report associating chronic migraine headaches with lower circulating levels of melatonin.1 Edible plant tissues contain melatonin and their consumption increases the circulating melatonin supply in mammals.2 Commercial preparations of feverfew (Tonacetum parthenium), St John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum), and Huang-qin (Scutellaria biacalensis) leaves are recommended as a medicine for the treatment for ailments of the nervous system based on anecdotal and historical evidence.

Regulating Firearm Advertisements

To the Editor. —Britain's new handgun ban, accompanied by curtailment of magazines about guns and knives, and the call by Johns Hopkins researchers1for curbs on the contents of advertisements, the accuracy of which can readily be defended, should remind Americans of the indivisibility of fundamental freedoms. The advertisements in question seek to persuade women in the market for a handgun for protection that they should choose 1 brand or model over others, based on size, quality, and cost. Only 1 of the 8 advertisements even appeared in a nongun publication, although the others might if US magazines had greater concern with providing the marketplace of ideas Justice Holmes thought the First Amendment envisioned. The idea the advertisements are suggesting is that handguns may add to the security of middle-class women aged 21 to 45 years, whom the survey by Kleck and Gertz2indicated use handguns for protection well more

Getting Wired for McLuhan's cyberculture

The first UK issue of Wired, the self-styled house magazine of the digital revolution, went on sale on Friday 24 March 1995, to some comment from the print and broadcast media. Louis Rossetto, founder and Editor-in-Chief, was interviewed on BBC2 TV's media and cultural review programme The Late Show on 21 March during UK Science Week, providing a background to the magazine's origins and philosophy. He also appeared again in a May 1995 Late Show in a wider examination of the 'information superhighway', offering the optimistic, utopian view, con trasted with the pragmatic and sceptical views. As a computing publication, Wired is noted for the quality and diversity of its writers; by making all the text of the US magazine freely available and redistributable, via the World Wide Web and electronic mail, it is contributing a useful electronic library for students, educators, and media researchers. Ten selected articles from US back-issues are briefly described.

Targeting of cigarette advertising in US magazines, 1959-86

Correspondence to : Dr Warner. Abstract Objective To examine whether and to what extent targeting of cigarette ad vertising has occurred in magazines in the United States from 1959 to 1986. Design Analysis of data on advertising revenues and readership demographics for 92 magazines categorized by type of magazine (women's, sports, news, high brow) and by the occupational class of the readership (crafts and trade and professional). Main outcome measures Relative share of cigarette advertising revenue for each category (the category's percentage of cigarette advertising revenues in the sample of 92 magazines divided by its percentage of total advertising revenues). Results Over the 28 years studied the relative share of cigarette advertising increased significantly in women's maga zines (0-14 to 1 11), sports magazines (1 23 to 1*76), and magazines with predomi nantly blue collar readerships (104 to 1-78). The relative share of high brow maga zines (those focusing on political and intellectual commentary and scientific matters) fell (1 36 to 0 63). By 1986 blue collar and sports magazines had shares of cigarette advertising revenue that were three quarters larger than their share of advertising revenue in general. Over the entire period relative shares of cigarette advertising revenue grew more rapidly for women's magazines than for any of the other categories studied, in part reflecting the fact that women's maga zines had the lowest relative share of cigarette advertising at the beginning of the period. Conclusion In general, our findings are consistent with commonly held beliefs about the nature of targeting in cigarette advertising.