Magazines are both economically driven business enterprises and culturally fueled vehicles of social mediation.Periodicals serve as cultural markers,reflective of the social reality in which they are produced,but are also economic entities,inherently subjected to their industry's traditional business parameters.Hence,it is possible to examine changes within the magazine market as a whole for aspects that may illuminate a number of the prevailing sociocultural dimensions of contemporary America.
Viewed quantitatively over a substantial period of time,it is clear that a number of defining magazine business parameters(e.g.,levels of circulation,cover prices,advertising page rates,cpms)have played important determinants in shaping the U.S.consumer magazine industry.By studying the periodical industry's aggregate reaction-cost management and the optimization of revenue within market conditions-to these economic pressures,one may not only try to understand how the industry has responded to market changes,but also find clues to the ways in which magazines mirror the sociocultural reality of their times.
Literature Review
Any consideration of the scholarship associated with the magazine form must start with a respectful nod toward two magisterial historical surveys.Rich in chronicle and narrative,both Mott and Peterson did much to establish the periodical as a legitimate topic for scholarly study.More recent authors such as Tebbel and Zuckerman,Abrahamson(1996,1995),Nord,Nourie and Nourie,and Van Zuilen have put many of the magazine industry's economic dimensions in an historical context,while Compaine(1982,1974),Rankin,and Whitman summarized the defining parameters of the business operations essential to magazine publishing.
The scholarly literature on the more specific considerations related to the economic aspects of the magazine industry is not as rich as one might imagine,but a number of authors have illuminated a variety of essential details.Krishnan and Soley,Fletcher and Winn,and Malin have focused on the considerations concerning circulation and advertising readership and cycles,while Sumner,Norris,and Soley and Krishnan have investigated the role of revenue sources in the viability of magazines.The subject of gender as a factor in magazine readership and marketing has also been examined.Canape and Chung have studied aspects of male readership,while Damon-Moore and Waller have,from a historical perspective,explored the circumstances related to female readership.
A review of the literature,however,reveals surprisingly little quantitative analysis of consumer magazine industry as a whole;hence this effort to build on the previous baseline study(Abrahamson,1991)one decade later.
Methodology
This article is based in large measure upon the results of quantitative research.An effort,however,has been made to focus the text on qualitative rather than quantitative issues.In most cases,statistics and results of statistical tests are relegated to footnotes,figures and tables.Readers who do not consult footnotes may assume that all relationships between variables have been tested for statistical significance,chiefly to determine if one can generalize from observations in the sample to the larger population(and with which this article is concerned,i.e.the consumer magazine industry as a whole).
Information on U.S.consumer magazines was obtained from two editions a decade apart of the Consumer Magazine and Agri-Media Rates and Data directory published by the Standard Rate and Data Service,a standard industry reference.Standard Rate and Data Service,Consumer Magazine and Agri-Media Rates and Data,73,3(27 March,1991)and Standard Rate and Data Service,Consumer Magazine and Agri-Media Rates and Data,82,3(28 March,2000).All data on individual magazines in the sample was then confirmed by telephone with every publisher.For the purpose of analysis,the data from the SRDS directories had a limitation that should be noted:Only those publications that accept advertising are included in the directories.
An nth-name sort(n=7)of the 2000 SRDS directory's index of U.S.consumer magazines(2,422 valid entries)was performed,yielding a random sample of 346 entries.After telephone confirmation,publications that either had gone out of business or were published with a frequency less than quarterly(e.g.semiannually or annually)were removed from the sample,resulting in a dataset containing a total of 300 titles.In contrast,the 1990 study performed a sort of 2,645 entries yielding a total sample of 377 cases,which,upon validation,produced a final dataset of 288 cases.
Where possible,measures of the significance and strength of all relationships were calculated.Hence,words such as“significant”or“strong”are used in the text to describe characteristics of all consumer magazines only when their use is supported by the results of statistical tests reported in footnotes.Relationships between nominal variables were tested using non-parametric tests such as Chi Square(X2)and,if samples were small,Fisher's Exact test(FE),but no significance was found.