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Monday 17 June 2013

Can Women's Magazines Do Serious Journalism? Some people don't think so ... BY JESSICA GROSE

ast week, the feminist Internet exploded with censure for the British quarterly Port Magazine. The magazine’s transgression? Publishing a cover story about “A New Golden Age” of print media and featuring six white, male editors. It provided visual evidence for what many of us in journalism know to be true: The editors-in-chief of the so-called “thought-leader” publications overwhelmingly have been, and remain, white dudes.
But on second glance, something else stuck out. While five out of six of those editors edit general interest publications (the industry term for mags that aren’t directed at a specific gender), a men’s magazine, GQ, was included, while no women’s magazine editors made the cut. In fairness, Port editor-in-chief Dan Crowe—a male of the Caucasian persuasion himself—told Gawker’s Nitasha Tiku that he asked Vogue editor Anna Wintour to participate in the shoot and she declined.
When I asked Cosmopolitan editor-in-chief Joanna Coles about the Port article, she assumed that the writer “asked Janice Min, of The Hollywood Reporter, Foreign Policy's Susan Glasser, and Gillian de Bono of the FT's How to Spend It, and they were too busy editing to pull out the Thom Browne and pose for his cover." Crowe didn’t ask other female editors in Wintour’s—or any other’s stead—because, as he put it, “unfortunately these are not the people editing” truly excellent magazines. This reveals another pernicious assumption: that what women’s magazines publish is not as influential or important as what men’s and general interest magazines publish. How and when did this assumption arise?
Indeed, Crowe isn’t the only person to feel this way. The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME)—the main organization for magazine journalists in the U.S.—has only regularly nominated women’s magazines at their annual National Magazine Awards (NMA) in a few writing categories over the past three decades: personal service, essays, and public interest. This represents only three writing categories out of a possible eight (going by 2013 categories—the writing awards aren’t exactly the same every year).
Not a single women’s magazine has been nominated for profile writing in more than a decade, while GQ and Esquire have received multiple nominations. (Men’s Journal even got one). What’s more, women’s magazines have received zero ASME nominations for reporting in the past 30 years and zero ASME nominations for fiction in the past 20 years. (This is not because women’s magazines weren’t publishing pieces that qualified in those categories; they were—more on that in a minute). And though Elle and Vogue both have excellent literary and film criticism, neither has received a nomination in the “essays and criticism” category in the past decade.1 (Neither have any other women’s magazines, by the way. You have to go back to 1999, when the now-defunct Mirabella got one.) While Elle got a nod for columns and commentary in 2013, no other women’s magazine had been nominated in the past decade in that category.
When I asked ASME chief executive Sid Holt about the disproportion, he said, via email, “Literary journalism is not central to women's magazines' editorial mission—which is one reason these magazines are rarely nominated in these categories.” He also adds that no one questions the editorial strength of women’s magazines, pointing out that Glamour was magazine of the year in 2010. He says that he can’t comment on the judges’ decisions, but that there’s no discrepancy among the judges. “There are far more judges from women's magazines than from any other magazine category,” Holt says. “Women's-magazine editors are assigned to every literary journalism judging group.”
Still, there are formal distinctions that put women’s journalism in a different camp. Women’s magazines are considered for a “general excellence” award in their own separate category—“service and fashion magazines”—while men’s magazines like GQ and Esquire are considered in the general interest category. The segregation has been justified by the nature of the business. As ASME chief executive Sid Holt has previously said, “there’s no men’s category—that’s not the way the magazine business works, as a trip to any newsstand will show—and [men’s magazines] compete against other magazines in the same category for readers and advertisers.” But given the inability of women’s magazines to compete in the more broadly prestigious categories, it seems like separate is not equal.
Read more: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113511/can-womens-magazines-do-serious-journalism

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