ABSTRACT
In their study of the business of women’s magazines in Britain, Joan Barrell and Brian Braithwaite (1988: 121) have observed that one of the best selling aids for a women’s magazine is the editor. The editor is not only responsible for producing a magazine that will be ‘in tune’ with their target readers, but also has to ‘relay the real sales message’ to advertisers (Barrell and Braithwaite, 1988: 121). Editors therefore need to convey a sense of the ‘atmosphere’ of the magazine to media buyers, which cannot be communicated through a spreadsheet of readership statistics alone. In this sense, magazine editors can be seen as intermediaries between advertisers and the target reader and they are frequently lauded in the trade press for their ‘sixth sense’ which enables them to understand the ‘mood’ of their potential readerships. Indeed, Marjorie Ferguson’s interviews with women’s magazine editors from the 1950s to the 1980s suggests that (1983: 128), far from seeing this ‘sixth sense’ as a marketing ploy, editors actually believe that they hold ‘special or sacred knowledge about the nature of their particular audience and the messages it wishes to read, listen to, or watch’.
