Chapter Review
COMMON THREADS
One of the Common Threads discussed in Chapter 1 is about the commercial nature of the mass media. The magazine industry is an unusual example of this. Big media corporations control some of the most popular magazines, and commercialism runs deep in many consumer magazines. At the same time, magazines are one of the most democratic mass media. How can that be?
There are more than twenty thousand magazine titles in the United States. But the largest and most profitable magazines are typically owned by some of the biggest media corporations. Advance Publications, for example, counts GQ, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue among its holdings. Even niche magazines that seem small are often controlled by chains. Supermarket tabloids like Star and the National Enquirer are owned by Florida-based American Media, which also publishes Shape, Muscle & Fitness, Men’s Fitness, Fit Pregnancy, and Flex.
High-revenue magazines, especially those focusing on fashion, fitness, and lifestyle, can also shamelessly break down the firewall between the editorial and business departments. “Fluff” story copy serves as a promotional background for cosmetic, clothing, and gadget advertisements. Many titles in the new generation of online and tablet magazines further break down that firewall—with a single click on a story or image, readers are linked to an e-commerce site where they can purchase the item they clicked on. Digital retouching makes every model and celebrity thinner or more muscular, and always blemish-free. This altered view of their “perfection” becomes our ever-hopeful aspiration, spurring us to purchase the advertised products.
Yet the huge number of magazine titles—more than the number of radio stations, TV stations, cable networks, or yearly Hollywood releases—means that magazines span a huge range of activities and thought. Each magazine sustains a community—although some may think of readers more as consumers, while others view them as citizens—and several hundred new launches each year bring new voices to the marketplace and search for their own community to serve.
So there is the glitzy, commercial world of the big magazine industry with Time’s Person of the Year, the latest Cosmo girl, and the band on the cover of Rolling Stone. But many smaller magazines—like the Georgia Review, Edutopia, and E-The Environmental Magazine–account for the majority of magazine titles and the broad, democratic spectrum of communities that are their readers.
KEY TERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
For review quizzes, chapter summaries, links to mediarelated Web sites, and more, go to bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
The Early History of Magazines
- Why did magazines develop later than newspapers in the American colonies?
- Why did most of the earliest magazines have so much trouble staying financially solvent?
- How did magazines become national in scope?
The Development of Modern American Magazines
- How did magazines position women in the new consumer economy at the turn of the twentieth century?
- What role did magazines play in social reform at the turn of the twentieth century?
- When and why did general-interest magazines become so popular?
- Why did some of the major general-interest magazines fail in the twentieth century?
- What are the advantages of magazines moving to digital formats?
The Domination of Specialization
- What triggered the move toward magazine specialization?
- What are the differences between regional and demographic editions?
- What are the most useful ways to categorize the magazine industry? Why?
The Organization and Economics of Magazines
- What are the four main departments at a typical consumer magazine?
- How do digital editions of magazines change the format of magazine advertising?
- What are some of the models for digital distribution of magazines?
- What are the major magazine chains, and what is their impact on the mass media industry in general?
Magazines in a Democratic Society
- How do magazines serve a democratic society?
- How does advertising affect what gets published in the editorial side of magazines?
QUESTIONING THE MEDIA
- What role did magazines play in America’s political and social shift from being colonies of Great Britain to becoming an independent nation?
- Why is the muckraking spirit—so important in popular magazines at the turn of the twentieth century—generally missing from magazines today?
- If you were the marketing director of your favorite magazine, how would you increase circulation through the use of digital editions?
- Think of stories, ideas, and images (illustrations and photos) that did not appear in mainstream magazines. Why do you think this is so? (Use the Internet, Lexis-Nexis, or the library to compare your list with Project Censored, an annual list of the year’s most underreported stories.)
- Discuss whether your favorite magazines define you primarily as a consumer or as a citizen. Do you think magazines have a responsibility to educate their readers as both? What can they do to promote responsible citizenship?
- Do you think touch-screen tablet editions will be a successful format for magazines? Why or why not?
ADDITIONAL VIDEOS
Visit the 
VideoCentral: Mass Communication section at bedfordstmartins.com/mediaculture for additional exclusive videos related to the issues discussed in Chapter 9.