Whose magazines?
The battle for shares of the women's magazine market is on. And the field is full — there's New Idea, Woman's Day, New Weekly, That's Life, Who Weekly (essentially a pure gossip column but, interestingly, classified as a women's magazine), Australian Women's Weekly, magazines for the "older woman" such as Ita and New Woman, magazines for the "younger woman" like Dolly, Cleo and Cosmopolitan and "fashion" magazines which include Vogue Australia, Elle and Mode Australia, just to name a few. Often you can hardly even tell the difference between their titles.
The market is defined as "crowded" by the Financial Review. No wonder, really. The "competition" between these glossies warranted recent articles in both that newspaper and the Sydney Morning Herald about how the contestants were faring.
The women's magazine market is definitely big business. The two leading women's magazines in Australia sell between them more than 2.1 million copies per issue. The top six sell between them about 4 million copies.
But exactly what do these magazines offer? What does this competition, this huge range of reading material, provide us with?
The plethora of magazines that exists is promoted as inherently "competitive", just like being able to choose between 13 different brands of toothpaste or 38 different shampoos on your supermarket shelf. It's supposed to provide us — the consumers — with a range to choose from and the ability to get what we demand and want.
The problem is that all of these magazines are virtually the same product, although dressed in different garb. You would certainly be hard pushed to find much difference in their content.
They all have their diet pages followed by their recipe pages, their stories about the rich and famous and the heart-warming stories about the family around the corner which suffered so many traumas that if they made it into an episode of Neighbours it would be unbelievable.
Beyond this, though, and more importantly, they are all owned by the same big businesses that own and control most of the print media in this country.
Australia has one of the highest levels of concentration of media ownership in the world, and the women's magazine market is no exception. Murdoch and Packer own this "market", and the establishment's ownership of the product determines its content.
The women's movement has always had on its agenda the creation of new forms of media, by and for women. Media which tell real stories of real struggles and which aim to go beyond the establishment stereotypes, media in which we create our own images and tell our own stories. The "women's" magazine market goes nowhere near being able to do this.
By Kath Gelber