Abstract: The Weekly Standard was one of the few "Never Trump" magazines yet still stated it was conservative when it closed late in 2018. This article examines how conservative and mainstream media framed the closing and investigates the Twitter conversation surrounding the closure. The article engages in a mixed method approach. The findings suggest that conservatives both in the media and on Twitter (now X) took pleasure in the closure of a contrarian conservative publication. This suggests that publications that step outside of the present acceptable conservative frames stand to be punished and ridiculed from within through a form of forced rhetorical hegemony.

Mag Men Charts the Successes (and Failures) of Legendary Designers Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser Carol Holstead (bio) Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines. Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser. Columbia University Press, 2019. 288 pp. $18.99 hardcover. At the beginning of Mag Men, Milton Glaser writes that when he and the legendary magazine editor Clay Felker were trying to decide whether to launch New York, they turned to the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text, for advice. As he notes, “It was the sixties, after all” (14). The I Ching returned an obscure response about a well—the kind with water, not the kind in a magazine. The essence was that “the superior man encourages people at their work and exhorts them to help one another” (14). Felker and Glaser interpreted the message as a positive sign, and so they went forward to create a magazine that continues to be a standard-bearer of exceptional journalism and design. Taken as an exhortation to collaborate, the message certainly makes sense in the context of how Felker, Glaser, and Walter Bernard worked together. A recurring theme in Mag Men is that great magazines are the result of a collective and not the efforts of one person. In the book’s opening Q&A, Bernard refers to a magazine’s art department as “the kitchen, where all the ingredients and cooks come together” (10). Magazine design in the twentieth century had a sinuous history, where the work of a relative few designers defined design style and then evolved, reacting to what came before. Landing squarely among those with influence were Bernard and Glaser (who, perhaps most famously, designed the logo for “I Love New York,” as well as the iconic Bob Dillon poster). Bernard was at Esquire when Glaser asked him to work with him [End Page 116] on New York. At the time, New York was one of the projects at Push Pin Studios, which Glaser owned with Seymour Chwast. Over fifty years, Bernard and Glaser, who died in 2020 at age ninety-one (New York Times 2020), designed, together and separately, dozens of magazines—New York, Time, AARP: The Magazine, U&lc, U.S. News and World Report, Fortune, and The Nation among them. In their marvelous book, Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines, Glaser and Bernard tell the stories of their careers and narrate their decisions, both successes and failures, on the design of the magazines they helped shape. The stories of their work are illustrated with magazine covers and interiors that exemplify the impact Glaser and Bernard have had on the art of visual storytelling and the making of magazines. Mag Men is divided into three chapters. The first chapter, which comprises about half the book, focuses on New York, Bernard and Glaser’s first collaboration and labor of love. The second focuses on magazines Bernard and Glaser redesigned during the six years after they left New York in 1976 and worked independently. The last chapter covers publications they designed together again, starting in 1982, when they formed the design agency WBMG. The book begins with a Q&A written by Ann Quito, a design reporter, that answers salient questions related to how Bernard and Glaser worked together, how they managed to produce a weekly magazine in the days before desktop publishing, their views on the viability of print, and how they handled criticism (they saw it as the means to doing better work). In the introduction, Glaser responds to a question about how they created a magazine for readers’ short attention spans by saying, “We designed [New York] features to be read by somebody with the temperament of the so-called ‘TV generation’” (11). New York was designed with “constant interruptions,” such as headlines, quotes, jokes, and drawings to keep readers from disengaging. Mag Men is formatted much the same way, although the “interruptions” are value-added pieces of information. Each chapter offers a series of one-page narratives. In the New York chapter, the narratives focus on creating specific issues or features within the magazine, while the narratives in chapters 2 and 3 discuss the rationale behind designing specific magazines. Each narrative is...

Life Judy Polumbaum (bio) With the possible exception of the Boston Globe’s Sunday funnies, Life magazine was the formative publication of my childhood. Our family, living in a small town west of Boston, was not just another household that subscribed to the old weekly Life. The most popular photo magazine of the era was also my father’s most important patron. Dad was a freelance photographer. He’d been thrust inadvertently into that occupation after defying congressional inquisitors during the period known as McCarthyism, which of course began long before and continued for a considerable time after Joe McCarthy’s three-year rampage. Ted Polumbaum had returned from World War II to finish college at Yale on the GI Bill. The blue bloods in his cohort, among them George H. W. Bush, joined secret societies like the Skull and Bones. My father, a secular Jew of progressive persuasion, joined the innocuous John Reed Club, whose main activity was inviting radical speakers to campus. Inevitably, the group would end up on the attorney general’s list of highly dangerous subversive organizations. Some years past graduation, Ted was married, with a toddler, another child (me) on the way, and a job writing for United Press in Boston, when a federal marshal arrived with a subpoena—on pink paper yet! His command performance before the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities to testify on “Communist subversion in education” ensued. He took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to discuss politics or name names, and accused the congressmen (all men at the time) of trampling on the Bill of Rights. United Press fired him. He returned to a childhood hobby, taking pictures. Time Life’s founder, Henry Luce, cared not a whit about the blacklist and empowered his editors to hire the best talent money could buy. From [End Page 4] the mid-1950s into the early 1970s, the Time Inc. empire, with its roster of magazines as well as books, was Dad’s most reliable client. He did about four hundred assignments for Life from his Boston base, as well as in other parts of the country and overseas, and countless more for other publications, from Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and People to Look, the Saturday Evening Post, the New York Times, and the Times Sunday Magazine. His work spanned the gamut: politics, literature, science and medicine, sports, weather, celebrity, and fashion. On the job, as well as on his own time, he covered the great social upheavals of the times—above all, the movements for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. Thus, in my childhood, I had a very special relationship with Life magazine. Upon the arrival of each weekly issue, I’d turn immediately to the table of contents and scrutinize the text near the bottom of the page, where photo credits were crammed into one paragraph using microscopic type, in all caps. Those were Life’s profligate days, when perhaps four out of five stories assigned and covered never ran. Ted got paid day rates and expenses, as well as publication rates for pictures that actually appeared, but one never knew until the issue arrived what had made it into print. One of Dad’s most heartfelt efforts—chronicling the ordeals of a small New Brunswick fishing village that lost dozens of men and boys to a storm at sea, the photos all laid out in New York and ready to go—got bumped because Queen Elizabeth visited Canada that week and the editors could not brook more than one Canada story. For all its many shortcomings, the old Life continues to astonish. As a professor at the University of Iowa, I’d sometimes send students from an intro course into the library stacks to look up the old rag. Each would fish out a bound volume pegged to some date of family note, perhaps a parent’s or grandparent’s year of birth, and then offer reflections in a short essay. Despite the outmoded reproduction, pallid by today’s standards, the students invariably were amazed by the magazine’s variety and visual impact. “Why don’t we have such a great big photo magazine now?” some would...

Magazines and the American Experience Captures the History of This Country One Cover at a Time Jeff Inman (bio) Magazines and the American Experience: Highlights from the Collection of Steven Lomazow, M.D. Steven Lomazow and Julie Carlsen, curators. Grolier Club, 2021. https://grolierclub.omeka.net/exhibits/show/american-magazines. Steven Lomazow used to have a very particular hobby. It was 1972. He was a medical student in Chicago. He had a penchant for rare books—more specifically, medical atlases, the kind filled with detailed diagrams of parts of the human body most of us hope to never see. When time allowed, he’d pop into the bookstores, looking to find old and rare copies. On one such trip, his eye drifted. He saw what was supposedly the first issue of Look magazine, the Des Moines–based publication that, much like its competitor Life, chronicled the country through carefully curated photos and human-interest stories. Except, it wasn’t the first issue. On the cover it said, “Vol. 1, No. 2.” He asked the shopkeeper what happened to volume 1, number 1, and the shopkeeper replied that no one knew. Lomazow decided to find out. That quest quickly became an obsession, with Lomazow not only searching for that particular lost issue of Look but also collecting as many debut issues and rare magazines as he could find. Over the course of nearly fifty years, Lomazow, now a neurologist, amassed roughly eighty-three thousand issues from seven thousand different titles. He has debut copies of some of America’s most important periodicals, like Time, Scientific American, and the Atlantic Monthly, precursor to the Atlantic. He also has some of publishing’s most inconsequential titles, like 1845’s American Lady’s Album and Gentleman’s Parlor Miscellany. [End Page 160] Taken together, though, the collection documents the American story, from its politics to its morals to its aspirations. Which is what Lomazow, along with librarian Julie Carlsen, tried to capture with Magazines and the American Experience: Highlights from the Collection of Steven Lomazow, M.D. Originally an early 2021 exhibition at the Grolier Club, the New York bibliophile society that revels and preserves all things print, Magazines and the American Experience featured nearly three hundred years of periodicals. There were copies of Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine and Andrew Bradford’s American Magazine, the first two publications in the colonies to use the term “magazine” to describe themselves, as well as copies of modern titles like Macworld and Wired. There was a section dedicated to African American magazines, covering both forgotten titles like the Voice, a short-lived early 1900s magazine from Chicago, and stalwarts like Ebony, which launched the Johnson Publishing Company and its slew of titles. There were even displays focused on niche topics, from humor and pulp magazines to the titles that chronicled the rise of film and television. While the exhibit closed in April 2021, the Grolier Club created an online version of the Magazine and the American Experience for those who couldn’t trek to New York during the pandemic. Like the real exhibit, it’s a treasure trove, though a limited one. The online exhibit is broken into eleven sections. The first six cover distinct periods in American history, including the colonial era, the early days of the nation, and the Civil War. The five other sections focus on topical categories: the aforementioned pulp and African American magazines, baseball, art, and magazines dedicated to nonprint media. Each section has an introduction and scanned covers accompanied by a brief explanation of the magazine’s or issue’s importance. You can even expand and zoom in on each image—great if you want to actually read the contents listed on the cover of 1828’s Ladies’ Magazine, which was edited by Sarah Joseph Hale, the first female magazine editor in America and who would later be recruited to edit Godey’s Lady’s Book. Like any sampling, the Grolier Club exhibit isn’t comprehensive. Instead, for those wanting to use it as a part of a classroom discussion on the history of the medium, it should serve in tandem with Lomazow’s own website, AmericanMagazineCollection.com. Lomazow’s...

This exploratory examination of journals comprising periodical studies provides an intellectual and disciplinary topography of periodical studies as a scholarly field. It addresses the need to ascertain which academic disciplines and disciplinary journals comprise this specialization; major subjects of research are also covered in a general discussion. Among disciplinary specializations, periodical studies appears as protean, capable of incorporating and transforming different disciplinary perspectives and approaches with its scholarly toolbox. Whereas recent scholarship suggests that periodical studies is embedded within literature departments, bibliometric analysis of academic journal keywords over the past twenty years reveals that periodical studies is far more inter- and multidisciplinary than accounts of its “rise” claim.

School Age Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin The magazine that made me doesn’t exist. But it might have. The process of its promising beginning and untimely end profoundly affected me, personally and professionally. Back in 1994 I was senior editor at Vegetarian Times, which had recently been purchased by Cowles Enthusiast Media. We were now part of a magazine group, along with titles like Teddy Bear and Friends and Civil War Times—magazines for people who cared deeply about specific areas of interest. At the time, I was pregnant with my second child, and my first was almost old enough for kindergarten. There were plenty of parenting magazines, both national and local; but their focus was primarily on the pre-school years. There was no magazine for parents of school-age children to help them navigate their children’s education. So I proposed one, calling it School Age: A Parent’s Guide to Elementary Education. My publisher was interested, and I was given a sabbatical from Veg Times, along with a raise, to work on the editorial mission and architecture. I was repeatedly flown to Cowles’s headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut, to meet with circulation and advertising managers. Suddenly, I went from kicking off my Birkenstocks to pad around barefoot in the low-key, Chicago-area office of Veg Times, where people’s kids and pets wandered past my desk, to putting on makeup and grown-up clothes to talk with people in suits about whether we might partner with the National PTO to boost circulation and how we might lure lucrative brands to advertise in our pages. I created a prototype with the help of some talented designers and chose a cover image for the launch issue. And then Cowles decided not to launch the magazine. I’ll never know exactly what went into that decision, but I believe School Age died of a circulation disorder. The company ultimately didn’t have confidence that it [End Page 27] could reach and convince a significant target audience to subscribe and, without that, land enough advertisements to make the magazine profitable. There was no category of magazines for parents about education, they reasoned, so perhaps there was no market for one. That turned out to be a pivotal moment for me. I had long fantasized about what it would be like to work for a well-heeled magazine company, in contrast to the humble and heartfelt Veg Times. But the longer Cowles owned the magazine, the more I felt that heart slipping away. And while my disappointment with the decision not to launch School Age wasn’t a turning point, it reinforced my understanding that while mission drives the editorial side of magazines, money determines the rest. Under the new ownership, Veg Times began to be more about meatless eating and less about what motivated people to give up meat—concerns about the environment, animals, agriculture, and nutrition—because that’s where the money was. We began to lose our alternative edge, and I started looking for another job. Had it not been for School Age, I might have looked downtown, or even to New York, still dreaming of a prestigious magazine job in a glass tower owned by a corporation that catered lunches and hired limos to take editors to the airport. But instead, I looked at my kids and my life and realized I didn’t even want to be that kind of editor at that kind of publication. Instead, I took the top editor job at Chicago Parent, a regional parenting publication, where I was able to pour my heart into producing a broadsheet magazine on a shoestring budget for a devoted subscriber base of 125,000—laughably small by national standards. My kids came to the office after school, dogs roamed the hallways, and my work felt meaningful on a deep level. I wanted to create School Age because it was the magazine I wanted to read, and I believed that many other parents would too. That’s a familiar motivation for many editors—a deep affinity for the content and the readers. School Age’s failure to launch reinforced my commitment to being the kind of editor...

Letter from the editor Kevin M. Lerner (bio) When I told the executive board of the Magazine Media Division that I planned to step down as editor of the Journal of Magazine Media at the end of 2021, there was a unanimous choice for a successor: Dr. Joy Jenkins of the University of Tennessee. When she applied, you could hear the sighs of relief from Oxford, England, to Anchorage, Alaska. The journal will be a better, stronger, more inclusive publication under her stewardship than it ever was in mine. That said, I am proud of what this journal has accomplished in the last six years. When I took over as editor in 2016, the Journal of Magazine and New Media Research—as it was then called—was a scrappy, self-published journal hosted on the website of the University of Arizona and maintained by my predecessor, Dr. Carol Schwalbe (who has remained a mentor to me and to Joy). Over the course of five years, the journal has changed its name, signed a contract with the University of Nebraska Press, begun the publication of printed issues, ported all its back issues into the ProjectMUSE database (where they are available under an open-access agreement), has been indexed by SCOPUS (under the leadership of our reviews editor, Miglena Sternadori), and has even begun earning a very small profit for the division. I have been honored to work with Miglena, with Joy, and with our current associate editors Leander Reeves and Alexandra Shakespeare. It has also been a pleasure to work with several talented editorial assistants as well. Caroline Chan set up our manuscript tracking process, and she was succeeded by Analisa Caso and Kristen Conti—all undergraduate students at Marist College. I want to particularly thank the former dean of the Marist College School of Communication and the Arts, Dr. Carolyn Lepre, for her support of the journal in my time as editor. Lyn, who is currently serving as interim president at Radford University, is a longtime Magazine Media Division member and a mentor for me in the division. Joy has spoken at some length about her vision for the journal, and as much as I have loved editing the journal, I will be even more excited to see where she takes it in her time at the helm. [End Page vii] For this final issue as editor, I am particularly proud to present a feature called The Magazine That Made Me. The section comes from an idea from Dr. Susan Keith, who is currently the president of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, which sponsors this journal (and a member of my dissertation committee, years ago). More than a dozen scholars, from graduate students to emeriti, have contributed their memories of magazines (including one that never quite existed) that helped shape who they are. We also present five original works of research, which get to some of the core ideas of what makes a magazine a magazine—including a history of Edward Cave, the editor who coined the term “magazine” to describe a periodical. As the editor of a journal about magazines, it has always been important to me that the journal not just present important scholarship but also be readable. I hope you will agree that this issue is an incredibly readable one. Over to you, Joy! [End Page viii] Kevin M. Lerner kevin m. lerner, Marist College, kevin.lerner@marist.edu Copyright © 2022 Magazine Media Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication

Today, many women suffer negative thoughts about their body appearance and want to lose weight. Mass media are a major influence on women's body dissatisfaction; thus, the present study content analyzes female models' body sizes in magazines to better understand what today's women are exposed to and compares results to past studies to see if new bans on ultrathin models and the body-positivity movement have impacted body size. The results showed that media models have generally increased in body size, albeit in different ways, depending on magazine genre, individual magazine titles, models' race, and image type.

Measuring Up American Journalism Miglena Sternadori (bio) Provoking the Press: [MORE] Magazine and the Crisis of Confidence in American Journalism. Kevin M. Lerner.1 University of Missouri Press, 2019. 277 pp. $35.00 hardcover. Reading a US student’s critique of North Korea’s state news agency made me profoundly sad recently. “I am disgusted with the mainstream media in the United States,” the student wrote, while praising Kim Jong-un’s mouthpiece for “positive remarks about President Trump. Even if it is for the sake of diplomacy, I think they do a better job.” Since reading this and other misguided assessments of news in low-freedom environments, I have been mulling two questions: How did we as educators fail so deeply in explaining journalists’ watchdog role? And why is bashing “the media” the prerogative of critics who lack even a minimal understanding of how the press operates? Some clues lie in author Kevin Lerner’s thorough investigation of the history of [MORE], a 1970s magazine meant to uncover, expose, and ultimately correct various journalistic missteps. The publication’s name, referring to how newspapers in those days signaled that a front-page story continued on an inside page, implied that there was more to the news than what readers saw in print. Behind the scenes, some stories were (and still are) killed or never assigned because they could erode profits. Many others were (and are) rewritten beyond recognition in pursuit of that ever-elusive mirage: objectivity. As we discover in Lerner’s book, [MORE] ruthlessly exposed mistakes of omission and context that had gone uncorrected and sided with gutsy reporters fired for challenging their superiors. The magazine had ambitions to reach a wide audience, becoming the press criticism equivalent of the New York Review of Books. But even in an era known for wokeness and post-Watergate glamorization of journalism, [End Page 146] few people outside the newsroom staff cared enough about the quality of American journalism to read a press-criticism magazine. Founded in 1971, [MORE] floundered after a takeover in 1978 by its competitor, the Columbia Journalism Review. It never reached a circulation beyond twenty thousand or an audience beyond mettlesome journalists seeking to effect change. A self-described gadfly, [MORE] was especially keen on critiquing the New York Times, which saw the most change as a result of its stings. Lerner explains how the magazine may have contributed to the Times’ decision to place its daily corrections on the second page rather than haphazardly throughout the paper. Further, a [MORE] article decoding an obscure academic book about the flawed operations of the Daily Planet (a pseudonym for the Times) embarrassed its leadership, forcing it to consider changes that the study alone would not have elicited. [MORE] appears to have been a trendsetter among magazines in using events— in its case, conventions for social-justice-minded journalists— to supplement its revenue and build its brand. A publication critical of corporate America would not have viewed such events as brand management, of course, but the concept is remarkably similar to some magazines’ contemporary practice of running festivals, fashion shows, and charity galas (though this comparison is not specifically explored in Lerner’s book). [MORE]’s conventions, named after the late New Yorker press critic A. J. Liebling, started as counterevents to the meetings of the American Newspaper Publishers Association. Journalism students and small-town reporters got a dose of inspiration and a chance to meet their icons (including Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee at the second gathering, in 1973), but the Liebling conventions failed to prevent [MORE]’s ultimate demise. Lerner succeeds in contextualizing the significance and need for press criticism in the 1970s against the backdrop of major events (e.g., Nixon’s resignation) and sociocultural currents— such as conservative hostility against the supposedly liberal press, the anti-intellectualism permeating the US news industry, and the white, male, change-resistant hierarchies of most newsrooms. It is easy (and disheartening) to notice the similarities between then and now. [MORE]’s legacy in instilling journalistic self-reflexivity lives in the columns of press critics such as Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post and Jack Shafer at Politico, along...

This study addressed food advertising in US magazines with a content analysis of food advertisements from fifteen magazines across five genres, to determine the different product categories and tactics (claims, endorsements, seasonality, and product interaction) used. Findings suggest that foods high in fat and sugar were the most frequently advertised food category overall; that consumer-focused claims were most common; and that more than 15 percent of ads featured individuals interacting with the food product being advertised. Also, magazine genre and season-based differences were present in the types of food products advertised. The paper concludes with implications for magazines and advertisers when promoting food-orientedproducts.