ABSTRACT
In June 1998, Olga Craig (1998: 26) reported in the Sunday Telegraph on a ‘quiet revolution’ on the periodical shelves. Women’s magazines, she observed, had ‘lost their readers in droves’, and women had become ‘disenchanted with magazines that [. . . assume] their interests begin and end with shopping, sex and cellulite’ (Craig, 1998: 26). Craig spoke to Bridget Rowe, former editor of Woman’s Own, who argued that the women’s magazine industry was burdened by a lack of innovation. If you cover up the mastheads of the leading glossy magazines, Rowe declared,
you can’t tell them apart . . . [t]hey have gone flat, they produce no surprises. From reading them you would never believe women drive cars or buy stereos or laugh. Or that they have any interest in current affairs or foreign news.
