Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 27

Writing Women’s Magazines

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advertisers the vexed question of what a woman is today is constantly debated. In
addition to editors and advertisers I suggest that readers might be added, as all
three have the potential to produce, through the pages of the magazines, definitions
of what it means to be a woman.

The Weekly Market

We will briefly identify the market in terms of readership, sales, titles, launches
and so on before exploring women’s magazines and the roles that readers play in
their production and development. The weekly women’s magazine market is a
huge industry with total sales of approximately nine million every week (Driver
and Gillespie 1993). Take a Break, Britain’s best selling weekly for women, is read
by five million readers and the established weekly. W om an s Own, is read by over
three million (National Readership Survey 1997). Demographically, typical readers
of weeklies are female, working class, married with children, and aged in their late
thirties/early forties. For example, Bella"^ core audience is women in social classes
Cl (e.g. clerical workers) and C2 (e.g. skilled manual workers) with a median age
of 40. No data is available on the racial backgrounds of readers but from an
examination of the stories and photographs in Take a Break, Bella and Best, it
appears that the magazines are read by all women, but the majority of stories are
from white readers (Oates 1997). However, this may be due to the selection of
stories for publication, rather than a representation of actual readers.
The UK weekly market is expanding, and new titles such as Eva, Enjoy! Here!
and N o w have launched in the last three years. The weekly market is more volatile
than the monthly arena, although there has also been a recent growth in monthly
titles such as Frank, Minx, Passion and Red. However, in 1999 Prinia, the leading
monthly title, had lower sales figures (510,142) than Take a Break, the top weekly
with sales of 1,273,820 (Addicott 1999).
Women now have more choice than before over their weekly or monthly
magazine, emphasising the competitive nature of the market and the need for each
title to identify or create a niche for itself (Garratt 1996). Although women’s
magazines are seen by some commentators as having become lacklustre, the input
of new titles is currently revitalising the market (e.g. Weale 1997).
Contemporary women’s magazines, particularly the weeklies, are different
from their predecessors of ten or even five years ago. The most marked difference
is in their extensive use of ‘true life’ material from readers, a trend which is
noticeable in magazines such as Take a Break, T h a ts Life, Eva and Chat, although
true life has not affected the monthly magazines in a similar way. Monthly
magazines, aimed at the upmarket consumer, continue to offer more fashion, beauty,
sex, and lifestyle features, and do not attempt to include their actual readers to the
same extent as the weeklies.