From Madame Noire Business:
In college, I couldn’t wait each month for the new issues of women’s magazines to hit the newsstand. I’d rush to get the latest copies of Glamour, Mademoiselle, Elle, Allure, Vogue, Cosmo. Sure, I drooled over the fashions and gave myself a makeover with the new season’s beauty tips, but I also devoured the articles, which covered everything from vital health issues to life-changing experiences. The articles were informative, inspiring and insightful. They were also well-written, serious journalism.
But for some, serious journalism doesn’t equate with women’s magazines, and recently Slate pondered why. Port magazine’s discussion last month on the importance of print magazines was void of input from women’s magazine editors who are mostly women, and, by the way, get paid $15,000 less than male editors, according to Folio magazine’s annual compensation survey. Insulted by the Port omission, editors and contributors to women’s magazines launched a hashtag — #womenatlength — to share their greatest works on Twitter. And Slate went on to theorize that the reason why men don’t take women’s publications seriously is due to article length; men’s mags tend to run longer (and thus presumably more in-depth) articles. And, as the site points out, we know the value men give to length.
Moreover, the sales for magazine’s targeted to women continue to drop. Magazine sales were down across the board 8.2 percent in the second half of 2012, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. But it is the women’s magazine segment that suffered the most. “Among the top 25 magazines according to newsstand sales, women’s titles and celebrity glossies took the deepest dives,” reports WWD. Cosmopolitan, Hearst’s highest-selling magazine, dropped 18.5 percent to 1.2 million copies, Glamour declined 14.5 percent to 402,000 copies, and Elle declined 11.8 percent to 213,000. Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue also dropped.
Read the rest of this story on Madame Noire Business.