Ferial Haffajee
`What could women’s magazines be like if they were as editorially free as books? As realistic as newspapers? As creative as films? As diverse as women’s lives? We don’t know” – wrote Gloria Steinem in 1990, The article is reproduced in ms magazine’s October issue because its editors believe her argument still stands today.
If the authors of the Social Affairs Unit report (above) on Magazine Women had asked Steinem why magazines do not fulfil these ideals, she would have told them to look to their research on the demands of the advertising industry for an explanation.
“In recent years,” wrote Steinem, “advertisers’ control over the editorial content of women’s magazines has become so institutionalised that it is sometimes written into `insertion orders’ or dictated to sales people as official policy.”
But is the advertising industry not just a convenient target for Steinem’s ire? Local women’s magazine editors point out that if, in fact, magazines lived up to her wishes, there is simply no way that they would be able to secure the same circulation figures as they do.
Yet it certainly is true that, in the United States, for example, De Beers will not advertise its glittering diamonds near an article deemed to be “hard news” or “anti-love/romance”. Procter & Gamble will not have its products “placed in any issue that included any material on gun control, abortion, of the occult, while the bra company Maidenform does not want its adverts to be placed near any articles on “illness, disillusionment and large-size fashion”.
However, local editors report no such censorship. “Our advertisers are very tolerant,” says Cosmopolitan editor Vanessa Raphaely, adding that “advertisers are not the enemy”.
In the world of magazines, it seems, the line between advertising and editorial is far less antagonistic than in other print media.
It is common for newsrooms to fight the good battle to claw back editorial space from advertising departments who want to sell, sell, sell, regardless of any editorial compromises.
In magazines, advertising is generally seen as a more integral part of the product, with more and more agencies starting to tailor-make adverts for particular magazines.
“We work hand in hand with the ad industry; but they don’t dictate to us. Often it’s just rational – you wouldn’t want a perfume article next to an article on child pornography,” says Nic Jamison of Megaspace, a company that sells advertising space in Marie Claire magazine.
In the umbilical relationship between editors and advertisers, there seems to be a certain amount of lean-to. “I give our advertisers the right to reply before publication should we carry a critical article on their product. It’s my way of squaring up a desire to be free with the knowledge that this is a commercial business,” says Raphaely. But her magazines does not accept ads for diet pills, crash diets and skin lighteners.
And some advertisers, particularly those in the beauty industry, expect a certain number of “mentions” of their product in articles in the magazine.
“[Encouraging readers] to use products is part of what a magazine is about,” says Jamison, adding that “it’s all at the discretion of the editor”.
Besides “mentions”, most advertisers will try to win ordinary editorial space for their products because this is deemed to be more independent than ad-space.
Vusi Mona, Tribute magazine’s new editor says he detects no advertising interference, though he recently had to politely decline a request from an advertiser for editorial copy thinly disguised as “advertorial” – promotional material that often looks like an article, but should be headlined as “advertising” or “promotion”.
And it is here that the lines blur even further. Page through a magazine anywhere in the world and you will notice that the amount of space given to such advertorial is growing steadily as circulation figures continue to drop in the television age.
It is no different in South Africa, where the number of supplements carried inside publications is growing steadily and the ratio of advertising to editorial is rising.