Time To Have a Little Talk About Those "Women's Magazines?"

I admire Caroline Kennedy. Her dignity and her character are striking. So when she made the remark to the New York Times' David Halbfinger the other day, "Have you guys ever thought of writing for a woman's magazine or something? ...You're supposed to be crack political journalists," I was surprised -- and disappointed. Then I had a wider concern: Why, 40 years after the advent of second-wave feminism, are the words "women's magazine" still so automatically a term of mild ridicule? Maybe it's a good occasion for a little public education.

First, a couple of general points.

(1) Women's magazines not only regularly break news, but many of them require "enterprise journalism." Many of them mandate exclusive stories. Any story that's been on national TV or in any national (and in some cases, big-city local) publication is automatically out of the question, even for a small feature. Writers and reporters have to hunt, hard and constantly, for fresh, never-told stories. That means keeping in touch with lawyers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, private eyes, doctors, whistleblowers, vice cops, shelters, NOW chapters, rape clinics, and the multidinous NGOs, small do-good orgs, and foundations whose press events the magazines's reporters are always running out to cover.

(2) Women's magazines have created whole categories of news. Ever since Ms. (a women's magazine) coined the term "Battered Women" on an early cover, the entire domestic violence field, with its many side-issues and offspring, has been a signature beat for these magazines. I remember first reading about the brand-new ruling Thurman vs. Torrington CT (the case that -- in the late year of 1982 -- made police departments liable if their members stood by and watched while men tried to kill their wives) in McCalls magazine. Women's magazines indefatigably (but not rashly or gratuitously) cover violence against women, a term that owes its salience to that publication genre. One example of many recent hard-hitting and creative responses: Several years ago, a proliferation of wife-and girlfriend killings led Glamour Editor in Chief Cindi Leive to commission a multi-part package that opened with two whole pages of mug-shot-like pictures, painstakingly culled from virtually every police precinct in the country -- of disparate women killed by intimate partners in that one-year period.

Women's health is second case in point. Breast cancer's existence as the gold-standard in medical charity and research owes a lot to the unflagging, cutting-edge coverage in women's magazines. Says Lucy Danziger, who's been Editor in Chief of Self for seven and a half years. "The life-saving breast cancer coverage in Self started with our co-founding of the Pink Ribbon for awareness and activism (specifically, breast health awareness and cancer research fundraising) back in 1992, and then continued with 16 years of award-winning coverage of the disease, including risk reduction through healthy lifestyle changes, the latest technologies for screening, early diagnosis, advances in treatment and ultimately cures. Now, if caught in the first stages, breast cancer is 98 percent treatable to a cure. That's something all women's magazines can be proud of."

Women's reproductive freedom is another. Says Wendy Naugle, Glamour's Deputy Editor (Health): "Historically, Glamour -- and other women's magazines -- have been champions of women's reproductive rights, not just in terms of abortion" -- Editor in Chief Leive grilled John McCain on his stand on the subject before the election -- " but also emergency contraception, contraception coverage, insurance issues and more." For example, a May 2006 Brian Alexander piece "The New Lies About Women's Health" was a comprehensive look at how local, state and federal policies (including those of the Bush administration) were affecting women's health care, including how doctors in some states are forced to lie to their patients about the fake abortion-breast cancer link." It was cited by the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern for public interest journalism and, recalls Alexander, "also broke news about how the military first accepted Plan B [the "morning-after" pill] and then withdrew it -- an unprecedented move." Former Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feldt recalls that during her tenure "we found most insurance plans didn't cover contraception, so we secured bipartisan sponsorship of the Equity in Insurance and Contraceptive Coverage bill in Congress and started a campaign to pass similar legislation in states. Glamour jumped on the story even though most of the mainstream media ignored it for over a year. Glamour's coverage was extremely important to increasing public awareness. Today, half of states have contraceptive equity laws, it's part of the federal employees' health plan, and contraceptive coverage has become more the norm than the aberration. "

As Peggy Northrop -- who's now the Editor in Chief of Readers Digest after decades in high posts at women's magazines -- three and a half years as EIC at More, before which years spent at Redbook, Real Simple, Glamour, Mirabella and Vogue -- puts it, "Every issue that touches women has been dealt with first and often only in women's magazines."

Okay, so women's mags serve women's needs. But what's hard news do they break, or feature in particularly thorough and hard-hitting ways? Here are just a few examples among many:

Essence had its own contract photographer exclusively follow Obama on the campaign trail, taking amazing pictures no one else had seen. Good Houskeeping did a powerful piece, "You Can't Live Here Unless You're White," (by K.C. Baker) on illegal housing discrimination that still exists, in 2007. Marie Claire had an exclusive interview with Debra Ryan, the wife of financier-turned-fugitive Sam Israel III, the hedge-fund manager who tried to fake his own suicide to escape a 20-year fraud sentence and an exclusive interview with the wife of a Belgian terrorist who went to jail for aiding the Madrid train bombers; she shed new light on how young people are recruited into jihadist circles in Europe. Elle's profiles by Lisa DePaulo are always news-breaking. O has featured long, revealing interviews with Nelson Mandela and Elie Wiesel. Glamour accomplished what the U.S. government had trouble doing: in 2005 bringing Pakistani women's rights activist Mukhtar Mai (who had been raped on the orders of her village counsel) to the U.S. for the first time, and arranging for her to speak at the U.N. And its piece on "The War's Deadliest Day for Women," by Susan Dominus--about an ambush in Iraq that left three US military women dead and 11 badly injured--showed the war: from the women soldiers' point of view, in all its brutal, patriotic and painful detail. More's "Leslee Unruh's Facts of Life," by Amanda Robb, exclusively revealed the deceptions and the money trail of a foremost abstinence-only and anti-abortion activist.

Assistant journalism professor Patti Wolter, of Medill, is proud of her former occupation as senior features editor for news (and head of an investigative unit) at Self magazine. She recalls how her stories won awards and how a piece she assigned and edited helped deepen the understanding of obesity as a national health problem. Of her sending a writer to Peru to investigate the impact of Bush's funding cuts to international health clinics that suppported abortion, Wolter rhetorically asks, "Would any other kind of publication [but a woman's magazine] would devote those resources to pursuing a story on global women's health?"

Women's magazines have foreign correspondents. Jan Goodwin has covered conflicts and crises in Afghanistan, Angola, Bosnia, Cambodia, Congo, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Kosovo, the Middle East and Gulf, Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka and Uganda (and U.S. prisons) for Marie Claire (as well as for O, Harpers Bazaar and Glamour). And regular award-winners: National Magazine Award winner Stephen Fried, says, that, for Glamour, "I did the first-ever interview with the Justice Department's lead prosecutor on sex trafficking; the piece I did on addiction to Paxil was one of the very first (if not the first) piece on the subject of a drug side-effect which is now very commonly known but at the time was being disputed; and last year I did the first major piece on the psychological and financial issues facing widows of Iraq war soldiers." David France says, "For Ladies Home Journal, I spent a year following the a family whose son had committed suicide, the only piece of its kind, trying through forensic journalism to understand" the death. "For Glamour " -- aside from getting the then-yet-to-be-elected George W. Bush to admit he didn't know who the Taliban were --" I wrote an investigation on mandatory minimum drug sentences, which impact women more than men. Bill Clinton gave clemencies to each of the women I profiled." He adds, "I've always found women's magazines ideal places to write `justice journalism.'"

"Justice journalism." That's a good term for the work many of us do, and I agree with David about where it usually is most welcomed and fits best. For Self, I unearthed, through confidential Pentagon transcripts leaked to me, the known-to-the-military higher health risks to women of the mandatory Anthrax vaccine; and I learned of several hushed-up hospital deaths due to the 2001 U.S. nursing shortage. For Glamour I've done the first or exclusive stories on: a landmark victory of sweatshop workers, the travails (and shocking findings) of an FBI whistleblower Attorney General John Ashcroft was trying to silence, the 40-year-later aftermath of one of the most brutal murders of the Civil Rights era, and an abortion doctor's sexual assault on 32 of his patients. Sometimes having the cover of "women's magazine" is an advantage. Years ago, for Redbook, I sleuthed out biased judges, resulting in one being booted off the bench and official investigations being launched on two others. I was looking for America's "most sexist" judges, but a couple of my flattered prey thought I'd said "sexiest judges," and the best way to get a source to talk, of course, is to think you're calling him handsome.

In fact, saying "women's magazines" with an implicit eye-roll is, these days, like calling Brooklyn a hip residential "frontier" or using a VCR: transparently passe. As the earnest compliance with the requests for sit-downs with as many women's magazine EICs who requested them by McCain and Obama made clear, "politicians understand that they can't get elected without women," says Cindi Leive. "So they give us access they never would have two decades ago. Anyone who doesn't get that is sort of trailing the boat, anyway."

Peggy Northrop has it right, when she says: "I'm waiting for the day when a woman's magazine editor runs for office. Now that would be a candidacy I could get behind. A smart businesswoman, in touch with women's everyday concerns, resourceful, committed, well-informed, a communication genius, and, damn it, brave about stuff that really matters.

"I can name ten women off the top of my head who fit the bill. Let's start a movement."

Comments

[smoore2614]

Ms. Weller these said articles are far and few between. The magazines do not hit hard news every month. If they do, they end up being puff pieces on the political canidates i.e. the story this summer with Obama and McCain Glamour magazine. Caroline Kennedy was right and if that makes me as a women elistist or a snob, so be it. We all should be looking at the trend of women taking more control in power or the lack of. I hear men everywhere go after Caroline and other women of power saying they are not ready -they can not do it-she has no backbone. We as woman are starting to get pigeon holed into 1950's stay home and take care of your husband and children. You as a women have no seat at the political table. I am not saying that staying home with the children is bad. I am saying is, that we are not being taken seriously when we want to go out and work. Our issues are not being addressed i.e. equal pay or birth control to name two.

[bekhuff]

A month or so ago, a young person I know was telling me about the college Ethics class he's taking. The class was broken into groups, and each group was tasked to make an argument either for or against the right to have an abortion. One of his group-mates shrugged the whole thing off --he had better things to do. Why? Apparently he's not a woman, so why should he care?

Regardless of whether Kennedy was talking about gossip mags specifically or any magazines targeted to a female audience, I believe she was responding as does much of society in a pinch, including myself at times, right or wrong (mostly wrong). If it's by women for women, etc., then that's ALL it is --it's a "women's thing" and therefore inconsequential.

The trouble is that those same magazines get their audience exactly by marginalizing. We can argue until the cows come home (heh - a little irony there) that mainstream news magazines and newspapers argue/present predominantly from a male perspective, but whether or not that's true is kind of moot. Women's magazines proclaim themselves, in order to get advertising revenue, as exclusively about the feminine. Unlike mainstream news sources, which would never admit to telling only half the story, women's mags make their money by saying so.

It's "not fair," but that's where we are right now, I believe.

[Joan2Madison]

Certainly there is substance in many of the leading women's magazines—but they undo themselves by choosing cover photos and cover lines that are all about pleasing men (through diet, beauty, sex). Who is making those cover decisions, really? As for content, substantive pieces are far outweighed by ads and fluff. The serious articles almost look misplaced. Sorry, but women's magazines have the reputation they deserve. Occasionally I'll buy O or More, but that's it, and those are the best of the bunch.

[merger]

Sometimes in tight spots our prejudices come out. I have always believed that many of the so-called "elite enlightened" just say and do what makes them appealing to the to the politically correct crowd. Ms Kennedy is human and believe me, like all of us, she has secret biases and prejudiced that she tries to conceal. She had a very human moment. Don't we all.

[JZ735]

Human? Snobby, if you ask, er, you know, me.

[merger]

Well, I was just trying to be a diplomat. You're right, it was snobby and not a good moment for her.

[madatrepubs]

Being smart is not snobby.

[degenerate1991]

Women's magazines, men's magazines, they're all the same, aside from the requisite feminine or masculine theme. They tell you (or so they claim) how to get in shape, how to cook (even men's magazines), how to have more sex, how to fix your car (unless you are a woman, then you get someone else to fix your car), gender specific sob stories (men's magazines might have something about guys getting screwed by the child-support system, women's magazines might talk about pharmacists refusing to fill Plan B prescriptions), blah, blah, blah, etc.

[Transcendentobserver]

Women's magazines like their Men's counterparts: Sports and automotive periodicals are diversions, with a few notable exceptions both addressing the lower reaches of human growth and understanding. We are as a species, one supposes, always been been motivated by the more trivial existential trappings subordinating the intellectual and substantive media to others we often deride as effete, elitist, or nerds.

Ironically much of the criticism of Ms. Kennedy has been an alleged failure to demonstrate her political underpinnings; so, upon sitting in an interview with the reportorial elite, she was confronted with meaningless trivia from her interviewers. Her response was humorous and an iconic putdown of the quality of those questions; they were nonsense and totally unrelated to her civic insights, concerns and political positions and certainly not senatorial qualifying queries.

[lynettema]

I have been reading "women's magazines" off and on for 40 years at the beauty salon. I have yet to see any magazine resembling the above description of said mags.

[Carrie-On]

This article is preposterous. In 2002 we worked our heads off on "Rethinking Breast Cancer" and the SELF supplement on breast cancer at the same time, "Time" won out (February 2002). SELF capitulated with its' advertisers, thus diluting what was an incredible, top-notch breast cancer supplement for women, and those who love and respect them. There are no publications for women on the market that stand up to the very destructive "right" of editorializing by advertisers. MS did it and it's not been done again. Some of "us" remember.

Schizophrenia reigns in America and when it comes to women, the nation's economic force, women are a mere commodity, and shall be until our CR groups start up again, and we take control over our bodies. Women must realize that without them, there is no life, but "women's magazines" are merely another game of corporate America.

Americans must realize that "truth in journalism" is an oxymoron in magazines. We must analyze material presented in any form: the validity of the publisher, author, and publication to cover a topic. Women in America are still 4th Class citizens.

Until America builds a museum to the suffragettes nothing will change.

[Carrie-On]

And . . . every word in magazines, including AARP's, is scanned by the advertisers to skew content toward their product(s); in fact, even those landing in our mailboxes at home and business, are not identical; ads are zip code/income specific (simple exercise: compare friends' issues that went to "other zip codes and see which car models and high end products are advertised).

How can any publications be "women's" or even health-focused "for women" when they're full of menus, recipes, and ads that are unhealthy, and then have articles on how to lose weight? Every issue is equally as schizophrenic. "Here! Try this yummy recipe" stuffed into the pages, glued in, and then, "Don't Eat This Or You'll Die!" filling in the articles, as we tear stuff out and toss such "ads" into the shredder.

Ms. Kennedy has given an off-hand public comment that has been rather troublesome more than once, lately. Methinks someone in politics needs to coach her before this keeps happening. My biggest concern is that her awareness of issues, and perhaps exposure outside of the immediate east coast is limited.

[merger]

Well, you are right, but then she would be representing the east coast. I just found her comment an exercise in snobbery. I wish she had taken some of her inheritance and spent on a Public Speaking class or two. Wow, she is a non charistmatic and boooorrrrrring, monotone.

[ChrisO]

What a ridiculous assertion. If I read your first sentence correctly, you're saying that the content of every magazine is changed to suit advertisers? There are certainly some publications that do that, but it's rare for any kind of reputable publication. Some pubs will give an advertiser a heads up if they're publishing an article that will make the advertiser look bad, but that's so the advertiser can pull or change their ads. That's very different from changing the content to suit the advertiser.

As for different publications in different regions, magazines have been doing that for a long time. But they determine what content each region is going to get, then the advertisers choose which regions they want to advertise in. It's hardly as nefarious as you are portraying it.

[bigbadsam]

If "women's mags" mean supermarket tabs, then they maight deserve ridicule but at lest they are mostly harmless. To be fair, the best of "men's mags" are worse (and more harmful )than supermarket tabs.

[lungfish]

I see women's magazines all the time in the grocery aisle and all I see is advertizing and marketing for clothes, makeup, dieting, sex tips, etc...... the magazines seem to set the standard for the kind of women that the feminist movement seems to be against.... skinny, beautiful in a classic way, trend sensitive, etc.... I am sure that these magazines contributed greatly to the self image issues that women seem to complain about today.

[MGWilson]

I think Carolyn Kennedy's jab was an appropriate response to a tabloid question. What's the problem with that? When I read the question I thought the same thing. Look at the cover on any housewife rag that is on display at the grocery store checkout. Gender is an audience.

[LillianB]

She got the question when she started thinking about running for office, and dismissed it as too personal (with the women's mag comment - implying, in my opinion, not that women's mags consists of second grade journalism, but of journalism focused on personal stuff.) What is silly about the remark, in my opinion, is the assumption that "when did you start thinking..." is too personal a question to take seriously. The answer may be personal, we don't know - she didn't answer. I find it quite interesting and think it would give an interesting insight into her motivation why to run - which in turn would tell us something about what she wants to do as a candidate. That's if her reason is political - if there's a special issue that made her want to run. "I realized it's time to fix THIS".
If the answer is personal it would probably only endear her to the public. (Because, if it is, it most likely has to do with one out of two - that she grew up in the media spotlight and didn't want her kids to do the same, hence, waiting until they were grown to run, or that she didn't want to run on her name, but her career and writing merits. In either case, wise choices, and it wouldn't hurt her to tell.)

[jsomerville5]

What is so tabloidy about asking someone when they decided to run for the all important office of Senator from New York State? If they'd asked her about her feelings about when her brother died -- that would have been tabloidy.

But this was a standard question that would have been asked of any candidate. Also her statement that she was dismayed by her voting record is irresponsible. She's distancing herself from her own mistakes. I do not want her representing my state.

[MGWilson]

I suggest you read the transcript. She was asked six consecutive questions about her family leading up to the tabloid question, but none of the six questions was unreasonable. The seventh question was tabloid in nature and the interviewer knew it as is apparent by his lead-in remark. The tabloid question didn't ask for information about when she decided to run as you suggest. The interviewer was going after pillow talk. That crosses the line in my book. It's the stuff of supermarket checkstand magazines. Kudos to Caroline Kennedy for stopping it.

[TomTheAlmostUgly]

Right now Bush is spending his last month in office "on vacation," while Israel is starting a war. What does the MSM have to say about this? Nada. Bush and his lackeys are going around spewing lies about the last eight years. Who in the MSM is calling them on it? Only Rachel Maddow. Meanwhile, the MSM won't stop trying to prove that Barack Obama has made some kind of dirty deal with Gov. Blagojevich. Is there ANY evidence to support this? No -- but stories about crooked politicians sell newspapers.

See the irony? The NYT political reporter sneers at Caroline Kennedy because she publishes "fluff," but the hacks who cover Washington are unable to write anything BUT fluff.

[weatherwaxx]

Okay, she should have said "gossip magazine."

As long as women's magazines use headlines that emphasize diet, makeup, and clothes -- and even the best of 'em do -- they will not be taken seriously. And no scolding will change that.

[RuthlessDictator]

Diet, makeup, and clothes - and cute guys and sex - are magazine topics designed by men to keep women timid and subservient.

It's a man's world, unfortunately.

[JZ735]

Timid and subservient?
Someone has some serious issues with men to work through...

[neosoul]

I think I might agree with Caroline. Women’s magazines need to raise the bar or at least that's the perception (okay my perception) and perception is reality? The articles like the ones mentioned above seem like the exception and not the rule, but perhaps I’m am not the best person to asses their worth since I no longer look through the women’s magazines (for free) at the book store anymore (perception is reality).

[newzworthy]

Does anyone know what the reporter asked her before she replied with the "Women's magazine" comment?

[LillianB]

When she started thinking about running.