Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Femina, Woman of Substance to Gen N

I have been reading Femina the magazine that used to be for the Woman of Substance, from my teenager days. Nowadays ofcourse they call themselves the magazine for Generation N, which I am probably already too old to be. Somehow lately I felt as though I was able to skim through the 150-odd-page magazine in about fifteen minutes. My mother manages it in even less time! I wondered how, when once upon a time I could read a Femina for an hour atleast. I don’t think my reading speed has gone up so much, atleast not as far as I can tell.

So, I decided to actually go through a recent copy of the magazine page by page, and put down what I was reading into different categories. Here is what I found:

Letters 2
Beauty Ads 12
Beauty/Fashion 37
Articles
Entertainment 11
Profiles 9
Features/Articles 34
Q&A columns 6
Other Ads 13
Editorial 3
Food 13
Fiction 3
Others 2

Total 145

Before doing this, I had an impression that cosmetics ads, especially for expensive brands I could never afford were overrunning the mag. Surprise, surprise! Beauty Ads actually covered only 12 pages. But add onto that the beauty and fashion articles and you get a total of 49 pages, roughly about a third of the magazine. Apart from this ofcourse, many of the Q&A columns and some of the features, profiles and entertainment pages also cover Fashion and Beauty.

Now I have no issues with free-market capitalism. (Or atleast thats for another post!) Femina is pretty much free to print whatever they like, but... why do they not call themselves the magazine for the Woman of Style instead??

6 comments:

alchemist said...

hey,
also - how many people have that much time to read anyway... and that too a magazine?
most magazines cater to browse value... things that catch the eye, even if it is not for much time... because there are a lot more things that require or clamour for ur time today then they would have been way back then, when u were a teenager...
:)

alchemist said...

hey apu
if u put write a comment on my blog and i reply to it... do u get to know thta i have replied to it? how does it work?

apu said...

well, i am fairly a newbie so dont know yet if there is some way to be updated...as of nw, guess only if someone checks the site..

Aran said...

Hi. Followed Kay here. :)

Alchemist, you'd be amazed how many of the good readers I know read magazines. And things I wouldn't be caught dead with like Filmfare and really silly stuff like Tinkle too. I mean they actually spend good money to buy these things. Actively seek them out in bookshops, as opposed to seeing it somewhere and buying on an impulse. But then there's a lot to be said for Calvin and Hobbes, which, everything said and done is still a comic strip.

And anonymous comments aren't allowed. I feel all exposed.

apu said...

Aran, I started out following anon comments but got bombarded by spam, so had to disable that...
I am a major C&H fan, and I dont have an issue with mags that are meant for light reading, but Femina pretends to be a responsible magazine...

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