Innerworkings of the Move from 'Steel' to 'Industry Week" (Kathleen L

DOCUMENT RESUME ED 349 620 CS 507 967 TITLE Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (75th, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 5-8, 1992). Part XIII: Magazines. INSTITUTION Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. PUB DATE Aug 92 NOTE 195p.; For other sections of these proceedings, see CS 507 955-970. For 1991 Proceedings, see ED 340 045. Light type in first paper. PUB TYPE Collected Works Conference Proceedings (021) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC08 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Audience Awareness; Cartoons; Change Agents; Classification; Content Analysis; Foreign Countries; *Media Adaptation; Media Research; *Periodicals; Popular Culture; Sex Differences; Sex Stereotypes; Social Action IDENTIFIERS Trade Journals; Womens Magazines ABSTRACT The Magazine section of these proceedings contains the following six papers: "An Analysis of 'Magazine Type': Toward an Empirically Based Typology of Magazines and Non-Newspaper Periodicals" (Marcia R. Prior-Miller); "'Redbook': Changes in Attitude and Advice 1965-1990" (Jennifer Harbour); "A Quantitative Analysis of U.S. Consumer Magazines: Baseline Study and Gender Determinants" (David Abrahamson); "'You've Gone All the Way, Baby': The Portrayal of Women in 'Playboy' Cartoons" (Leah Grant); "A Life Cycle Study of Two Social Movement Magazines: 'The Mother Earth News' and 'Ms.'" (Patricia Prijatel); and "Inside a Repositioning: The Innerworkings of the Move from 'Steel' to 'Industry Week" (Kathleen L. Endres).(SR) *********************************************************************** AeprouucLions supplieb Dy LOAJ are Crie best tnat can oe made ,c * from the original document. * *********************************************************************** PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR EDUCATION IN JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION (75th, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 5-8, 1992). Part XIII: Magazines. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS Once of Educational Rinsarcn and Improvement MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION / CENTER (ERIC) document has been reproduCed as received from the person or organIzation originating .1 C Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction quality Points of view or opinronS stated in thiS C/OC u. TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES went do not necessarily represent ott.c.ai INFORMATION CENTER (ERICI.- OE R; POSitiOn or policy BEST COPY AVAILAILE 2 Magazine Division 1992 Convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Montreal, Quebec, Canada AN ANALYSIS OF 'MAGAZINE TYPE': TOWARD AN EMPIRICALLY BASED TYPOLOGY OF MAGAZINES AND NON-NEWSPAPER PERIODICALS By Marcia R. Prior-Miller Associate Professor Department of Journalism and Mass Communication Iowa State University Ames, Iowa Presented to the Magazine Division at the National Convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, August 1992. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to thank Carol Reuss, University of North Carolina, and Sammye Johnson, Trinity University, for the intellectual contributions and support they gave to the development of this paper. The author is also deeply indebted to Kellie Esch, senior undergraduate research assistant, for her contributions to the research upon which this paper is based. Partial funding for the research was provided by Faculty Research Incentive grants from Iowa State University. ANTABALYSIS OF 'MAGAZINE TYPE': TOWARD AN EMPIRICALLY BASED TYPOLOGY OF MAGAZINES AND NON-NEWSPAPER PERIODICALS Classifying the media into groups with similar characteristics in order to simplify processing information about the media has long been prac- ticed by media professionals. Media scholars similarly have recognized the need to cluster the media for the systematic study of communication phenomena. The most common and "the most obvious level of simplification"' has been to divide the media into general classes::adio, television, magazines and newspapers.` There are times when this general division of the media does not adequately differentiate among media channels, but identifying a means for sub-dividing the gener7' classes of media has proven more nettlesome. The body of marketing and advertising literature provides several efforts to subdivide the media beyond the four primary categories. Cannon and Williams concluded from their review of this literature that the majority of studies about television classifications have been relatively unproductive because of the complex theoretical problems facing those studies.3They did not, however, find the same problems existing for similar efforts to classify newspapers and magazines. They wrote, "Considering magazines in particular, an examination of the taxonomies developed during the past two decades suggest common threads that point to the existence of relatively stable classifications based on editorial appeal."4 Johnson and Schmidt reached a different conclusion from two inde- pendent reviews of the communication literature. They found that media scholars do not agree on the number of categories of magazines or the labels applied to those categories. Neither do media scholars agree on definitions 2 for, or the basic characteristics that differentiate among, magazines, for the most commonly used methods of categorizing the universe of magazines. These findings hold even when authors appear to be classifying and defining magazines for similar purposes. Johnson wrote, "Look at any current magazine study or mass media text- book and the problem becomes evident.There is no agreement on how to categorize magazines, much less how to determine the exact dimensions of the industry."5 Schmidt wrote, "Not only content but form and frequency of publication have been used as criteria for differentiating between magazines and other periodicals."6 The classification systems offered by the advertising and marketing literature do not provide solutions to the problems Johnson and Schmidt identified. There appear to be two key reasons: The advertising and marketing studies focused almost exclusively on magazines that carry advertising for consumer products. Second, titles of a wide range of magazines that do not carry consumer advertising or advertising of any kind were absent from the studies. The communication literature, while universally assuming the existence of subgroups of magazines, offers neither empirical tests nor systematic explorations of the underlying characteristics for defining and classifying the universe of magazines, journals, and other non-newspaper periodicals. Neither does the communication literature provide a broad base of empirical explorations of differences between commonly differentiated groups of magazines and how those differences impact communication phenomena. An exception is Compaine's theoretical exploration of the relationships between audience size and the orientation of editorial content in magazines.8 Unlike some of the advertising and marketing studies cited above, 6 Compaine provided no test of the theory he proposed. Neither did he attempt to reconcile his theory with other commonly used approaches to categorizing magazines. Instead, his study, like the advertising and marketing studies, focused solely on the so-called "consumer magazines." The failure to identify an empirically based method of classifying magazines that meets accepted scientific criteria for typologies is a problem that has both theoretical and methodological implications central to the study of magazines as a medium of communication. It can be legitimately argued that there is no single method of defining and classifying magazines that will be applicable to all research questions.9 Yet while Reynolds points out that ". any set of concepts can be used to organize and classify the objects of study," a fact that leads to the problem of "determining which typclogies . are the most useful," he also argues that organizing and categorizing the "things" that are being studied is one of the most basic tasks of scientific knowledge.1° An examination of the literature evidences a need to reconcile the most commonly used methods 'of classifying magazines to provide, at a minimum, a common starting point for research on magazines. The failure to articulate the relationships between the existing approaches leaves open the question of where a given study logically fits in the body of knowledge about magazines as a medium of communication. The articulation of such a framework is thus needed to assist scholars with positioning new studies while simultaneously defining subgroup(s) of magazines that will be the focus of the study on which they are embarking. In the absence of a clear articulation of such a framework, scholars (especially those whose primary interests focus on the study of the non-news- 4 paper print media) are hampered in their efforts to make solid contributions from research on magazines to the growing body of knowledge about the mass media and the processes of mediated communication. Similarly, such a framework is needed if future magazine research is to overcome the several weak- nesses identified by Gerlach and Reuss in this subfield of communication research. It might also prove useful in exploring questions posed by industry leaders The purpose of the present study is to draw on data from an examination of the use of magazine type in the literature to determine both the most commonly used

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