Six Major Types of Magazines

Magazines

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term magazine as "a periodical containing a collection of articles, stories, pictures, or other features." This definition is about as good as any that one can find. Even people who work in the magazine industry don't seem to have a consistent definition of a magazine. The difference between a weekly magazine and a weekly newspaper, for example, sometimes is in the eye of the creator or beholder, not in any particular features to which anyone can point.

Even though executives in the magazine industry cannot give a consistent definition of a magazine, they say that they know what they mean by the term. As a result, the magazine industry does take an accounting of itself. Folio, the primary magazine about the magazine industry, reports that there are close to thirteen thousand magazines published in North America each year. Folio also reports that most magazines are monthly (issued once a month), although semimonthly magazines (issued twice monthly), bimonthly magazines (issued once every two months), and magazines issued ten times each year are also common.

American newsstands regularly display about twenty-six hundred magazine titles. Many others can be seen in the periodicals section of large university or city libraries. Magazines differ widely in both circulation and topic. As a mind-boggling example, consider that the thirteen thousand magazines that Folio refers to include TV Guide (circulation 11 million), Inc. (circulation 650,000), American Woodworker(circulation 332,000), and Chocolatier (circulation 20,000)—all in the same list!

Six Major Types of Magazines

People who work in the magazine industry make sense of this enormous variety of magazines by placing them into categories. Although these people categorize magazines in several ways, there seems to be general agreement that if a periodical fits into one of the following four categories, it is to be considered a magazine:

• Business or trade magazines

• Consumer magazines

• Literary reviews and academic journals

• Newsletters

Magazine people are less in agreement about whether two other types of periodicals—comic books and zines—are part of their industry.

Business Magazines/Trade Magazines A business magazine, also called a trade magazine, focuses on topics related to a particular occupation, profession, or industry. Published by a private firm or by a business association, it is written to reach people who are involved with that occupation, profession, or industry.

Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS), a firm that collects information about magazine audiences and ad rates and sells it to advertisers and ad agencies, devotes an entire reference directory to business magazines. The directory divides business specializations into 220 categories. The top ten business categories in terms of circulation are:

Health care

Computers

Business

Engineering and construction

Building

Automotive/trucks

Banking/finance/insurance

Media

Advertising and marketing

Industrial/manufacturing

The titles within SRDS's categories are as varied as the subjects they cover. Notable business publications include Geriatrics, Architectural Record, Emergency Medicine, Institutions (covering the food service industry), Professional Builder, and Medical Economics.

Are you interested in what funeral directors read? You'll find nine magazines, among them American Funeral Director, The Director, and Morticians of the Southwest. The Director is the official publication of the National Funeral Directors Association. Morticians of the Southwest is a regional publication (that is, its circulation is limited to one part of the country), whereas the other two reach readers nationally.

Consumer Magazines Consumer magazines are aimed at people in their private, nonbusiness lives. They are sold both by subscription and on newsstands and magazine racks in stores. They are called consumer magazines because their readers buy and consume products and services that are sold through retail outlets and that may be advertised in those magazines. Think of a magazine that you or your friends read for fun—for example, Time, MAD, People, Essence, Woman's Day, Vanity Fair, U: The National College Magazine, Details, Spin, Wired, or Maxim. It's likely to be considered a consumer magazine.

The SRDS consumer magazine directory lists seventy-five categories, from Adventure and Outdoor Recreation to Youth. Two major categories are Women's Magazines and Men's Magazines. The magazines listed under these labels aren't the only ones targeted to women or men in the U.S. Instead, they're merely tags that magazine publishers want SRDS to use in presenting them to would-be advertisers – "beauty" magazines (for women) or "sports" magazines (for men) might be other listings. Still, the "women's" and "men's" categories provide an idea of the number of magazines specifically aimed at gender categories.

The Women's Magazines category alone contains 137 magazines, including titles such as Allure, American Woman, Cosmopolitan, Harper's Bazaar, Woman's World, Play girl, Woman's Health Monitor, and YM. The category also contains the periodicals that have long been the giants of the women's magazine business: Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, Woman's Day, Redbook, and Better Homes and Gardens. These and many other periodicals for women are called service magazines. That is, they provide advice for women across a wide spectrum of life issues -how to dress, how to cook, how to discipline kids, how to catch a man, how to make love.

If it's hard for you to think of men's magazines that fill this "service" role, that's because there are many fewer such magazines for men than there are for women. One sign is that the Men's Magazines category has far fewer titles than the Women's magazines category - 39 compared to 137. Another is the list of titles in the category. Among the better known are Details, EM, Esquire, Field and Stream, GQ, Men's Fitness, Men's Health, Men's Journal, Outdoor Life, Playboy, Cigar Aficionado, Maxxim, and Wired. As you can see, only a few of these magazines— EM, Esquire, Men's Health, Men's Journal, and maybe Maxim— could legitimately claim the broad service label. Magazine industry executives have puzzled for decades over the reasons for the relatively small number of service magazines for men. Some observers have suggested that the traditionally "macho" role for males in U.S. society has made it less acceptable for them to share intimate parts of their lives with one another, in person or in print. In fact, although magazines for men about men may not be plentiful, periodicals on traditionally male subjects certainly are. SRDS links several magazine subject areas to men—for example, Automotive, Fishing and Hunting, Fitness, and Sports - and each of these areas has many titles. Take a look at the periodicals listed under any one of these topic categories, and you'll see how specialized many magazines are. There aren't just one or two or ten magazines about automobiles—there are more than a hundred.

Literary Reviews and Academic Journals This category includes hundreds of publications with small circulation figures. Literary reviews (periodicals about literature and related topics) and academic journals (periodicals about scholarly topics, with articles typically edited and written by professors and/or other university-affiliated researchers) are generally nonprofit; funded by scholarly associations, universities, or foundations, and sold by subscription through the mail. Examples are the Journal of Communication (a scholarly journal from the International Communication Association), The Gettysburg Review (a literary review of short fiction, poetry, essays, and art), Foreign Affairs (a journal of opinion from the Council on Foreign Relations), and Harvard Lampoon (the oldest humor magazine in America).

Because their readers are often quite highly placed in academia, politics or business, these periodicals often have clout that far exceeds their small circulation. Moreover, journalists often look to some of these publications for fresh ideas that they can discuss in broader-reach newspapers and magazines. Some of the most influential ideas in history have come from scholarly journals and reviews—for example, the first mapping of DNA in the journal Science; key theories about humans' apelike ancestors in the journal Nature; weighty discussions at the start of the cold war about how the United States should deal with the Soviet Union in Foreign Affairs.

In recent years, controversy has swirled around what you might imagine is the rather scholarly arena of academic journals. Seeing captive markets (because every field has just a few key journals) and low labor costs (because most academic editors volunteer their time), big companies have moved into the business. They have raised subscription prices enormously, to the point that college and university libraries have been painfully squeezed as journal costs rose far faster than inflation.

Newsletters A newsletter is a small-circulation periodical, typically four to eight pages long, that is composed and printed in a simple style, unlike the large, sometimes glossy-page periodicals we have discussed until now. Part of the reason is cost. Newsletters typically go to small numbers of people at a frequency that would make a more production-heavy publication too expensive. The rather plain look of a newsletter often matches its editorial purpose: to convey needed information in a straightforward way. People receive these publications by mail, by fax machiine, or, increasingly, online.

When we hear the term newsletter, many of us may think of the information bulletin of a church or school. We are less likely to know about the large number of newsletters that are used in business. They often center on specific areas of an industry, and they are published frequently; most come out weekly or biweekly, but a few are daily. They address decision-makers in those areas and provide statistical trends and gossip about that area of the business. The aim is to help these decision-makers do their jobs better. Executives pay a lot of money for those newsletters, from a couple of hundred to a few thousand dollars per subscription.

Zines Somewhere between the business newsletter, the consumer magazine, and a hobby are periodicals called zines (pronounced zeens). Derived from the word fanzines, zines are homemade journals and newsletters that focus on various aspects of popular culture. They number in the thousands. Even trade magazine journalists who are paid to report on the subject can't keep count of how many zines exist, partly because many of them appear and close quickly, and partly because the ones that stay around often do not appear with predictable frequency. Some zines are sold by subscription, but many are peddled in music stores and bookstores, at concert venues, or on the Internet.

The range of subjects covered by zines and their specificity can be truly astonishing. Sonic, for example, is devoted to electronic music, fashion, and culture. The New City Songster (published by famed folk singer Pete Seeger) is about folk music and politics; 2600 aims at computer hackers. Alice calls itself a feminist zine for "women outside the mainstream"; Hip Mama calls itself "a magazine bursting with political commentary and ribald tales from the front lines of motherhood." Both 2600 and Hip Mama have web site versions - 2600.com and hipmama.com. There are, in fact, many zines that exist only on the Web; sometimes called electronic zines or e-zines.

Comic Books As you may well know, many comic books are neither comical nor books. The term comic book for a periodical that tells a story through pictures as well as words developed in the 1930s as publishers of cheap ("pulp") magazines that presented detective, romance, action, and supernatural-science stories tried to take adventage of the popularity of newspaper comic strips to boost sagging sales. They put their material into comic-strip form and sold it in a complete story unit as a comic book.

Today, comic books run a wide gamut of topics. The label covers Alvin and the Chipmunks a s well as Green Lantern, Blade, and Conan.. Although historically most comic books were aimed almost exclusively at preteens, nowadays many tilt toward far older readers. Harvey Comics is traditional, aiming at girls and boys aged six to eleven with Alvin, Casper, The Flintstones, and the like. Dreamworks Productions is among the new breed. In its monthly comic books, it targets teens and young adults with heroic adventure and science fiction tales such as Neon Cyber, Dark Minds, and Warlands. Other companies produce pro­ducts that are clearly aimed at adults. The Kitchen Sink Press publishes Gay Comics, an anthology of the American homosexual experience, and Twisted Sisters, another anthology that includes comic tales depicting the romance problems of both heterosexual and homosexual women.

By far the largest firms in terms of overall circulation are Marvel Comics Group and DC Comics. Marvel alone turns out more than fifty different comic book titles, limited series, quarterlies, and special editions that feature more than 3,500 characters and together reach about 5.7 million people a month. Marvel also has different targets for its superhero books. Some, such as Fantastic Four, aim at youngsters, whereas others, such as X-Men and Spider Man, go after teens.

Some executives in the magazine industry don't consider comic books part of their industry; Folio doesn't report on them. The reasons for this attitude vary. Some people cite the comic books' mostly pictorial emphasis and note that real magazines are more text-oriented. Some note that comic books are distributed in special stores, not in the places where magazines can usually be found. Others mention the much cheaper paper that many comic books use.

These criticisms don't really hold water. For one thing, many children's periodicals and "nudie" publications emphasize pictures, and magazine executive consider them to be in the fold. For another, comic books were sold on newsstands for most of their existence; it is only in the last couple of decades that producers have built up new distribution and exhibition routes. As for paper, the quality of paper varies across the vast world of magazines. Finally, the comic book industry has seen greater growth in the past ten years than any other category, with close to 300 new comic book ventures springing up between l999 and 2000.

It is true that comic books today use a broad spectrum of formats. Some, the more traditional, look like small magazines with inexpensive newsprint and stapled bindings. Others have wider, heavier, more glossy pages; glued bindings; and sometimes even rigid nonmagazinelike covers. We must conclude that history and custom lead magazine and comic book people to view one another differently.

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