Books
Charles P. Daly, Patrick Henry, and Ellen Ryder, The Magazine Publishing Industry (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1996) Three magazine professionals provide an overview of today's magazine industry.
Helen Damon-Moore, Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) A look at the commercialization of gender, and the gendering of commerce in these early magazines.
Michael MacCambridge, The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine (New York: Hyperion Press, 1998). Examines the magazine's first 43 years, which coincided with the rise of sports to a multibillion-dollar industry. Also depicts what it is like to deliver more than a hundred pages of quality sports journalism every week.
Ann Gough-Yates, Understanding Women's Magazines: Publishing, Markets and Readership, 1st ed. (Paperback)(Oxon, U.K.: Routledge, 2003) Explores the changing landscape of the women's magazine market. Gough-Yates relates the revolution in the women's magazines' market to a consumer culture which has brought an increasing focus on consumer "lifestyles," and shows how magazines have tried to "get close to the reader" in their attempts to identify and target the "new" women of the contemporary world.
Films, Videos, and DVDs
Killing Us Softly 3: Advertising's Image of Women (1999, Documentary) This update to 1979's Killing Us Softly, reviews if and how the image of women in advertising, including magazine advertising, has changed over the last 20 years.
LA Confidential (1997, rated R) Kevin Spacey plays a 1950's police officer who works hand in hand with the publisher of a sleazy magazine, played by Danny DeVito.
The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996, rated R) Woody Harrelson stars as the notorious publisher of Hustler magazine, who constantly fought off censorship of his magazine on First Amendment grounds. It might be the only socially beneficial thing he ever did. As Flynt was fond of pointing out, "If the First Amendment will protect a scumbag like me, then it will protect all of you. Because I'm the worst."
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994, rated R) Jennifer Jason Leigh stars as Dorothy Parker, one of the charter members of the Algonquin Round Table of the 1920's. This boozy bunch of wits and writers were the mainstays of the early days at The New Yorker. Shattered Glass (2003, rated PG-13) Dramatization of the true story of fallen journalist Stephen Glass, and how he fooled editors, fact checkers, and copyeditors, while he wrote numerous fake news stories for the New Republic magazine in the late 1990s.
