Women's magazines distribution falling - Marie-Claire

There are regular threads on Style and Beauty about grammers/bloggers who are followed mostly by teenage girls and whose posts are basically undeclared advertising. I think grammers probably detest S&B as much as TRAs detest FWR. Once it’s pointed out you can’t unsee it. Mind you there’s a lot of undeclared product placement in magazines too. And in films. And pretty much everywhere else.

Floisme you're right and I can't quite believe that I was so blinkered to not have thought of that.

I think that is a good point Floisme. At least in a printed magazine I can tell the difference between an advertisement and content. Now a reality star is photographed wearing a product they were given which means that it is not exactly a Which best buy.

Re Private Eye, I was originally given a gift subscription. When it ran out, I took out an annual subscription and stopped buying a newspaper. Not sure how typical this is but Private Eye does some excellent journalism.

I wonder how his magazine Private Eye is going because he refused to put content online.

Interestingly, Private Eye is going extremely well - circulation is nearly 250,000. I think that's because there isn't anything else like it, either online or in print.

Print magazines are dropping like flies, tbh. Look at how many parenting magazines there used to be, for example - there were about eight or ten at one time. Now there's only Mother & Baby. All the parenting content you want is online, thanks to sites like this one and numerous others.

I’d be careful what you wish for. Printed magazines may soon be a thing of the past but that’s because young people are on Instagram instead (or whatever the latest platform is) which is even more dishonest - loads of them don’t even declare when they’re advertising - and it’s on tap 24/7. And at least the old magazine journos were for the most part proper writers who could string a sentence together.

When I read Marie Claire years ago, I did think its coverage was broader than other magazines aimed at women. Now I only read these magazines at the hairdresser and get irritated by the number of adverts.

I think they helped make women feel they were not good enough but I wonder if social media places even more pressure on young women now.

I loved women's magazines in my teens and twenties. And I was also filled with self loathing. Everything about them made me feel inferior. I felt fat (despite being 5ft 4 and weighing 8 stone) I felt like I had terrible skin, like I was the only female in the world who couldn't fit into a tiny pretty bra, and most damaging of all I felt like everyone had these fantastic glamorous careers, earning lots of money and being oh so successful. Cosmo was the worst for that, always full of made up bullshit about how Annie, 28, was working on an account with a client and did something amazing and everyone was blown away by it she got promoted ten times inside 6 weeks. And it was always 'a client' and 'an account'. Never any indication as to what field Annie might work in or what she did that was so innovative. And all that crap made me feel so bad about myself. I have a 13 year old and I really hope that women's magazines are a thing of the past by the time she is of an age to be the target reader.

Having said that, Marie Claire did have some fantastic articles years ago about women's lives around the world. It was through Marie Claire that I first read about the Taliban and the awful treatment of women in Afghanistan, or more specifically about how Kabul had been quite a modern westernised place in the 70s and within 20 years women's rights had been removed. Utterly terrifying and a very pertinent warning for the times we live in now. So for that I will always be grateful to Marie Claire.

This reminds me of an interview I saw with Ian Hislop with a load of students. Someone asked him about journalism as a career and he basically said don't go there as there is no money because no-one pays for it any longer. I wonder how his magazine Private Eye is going because he refused to put content online.

I loved magazines when I was younger. I stopped buying them as I read content on my phone and came to hate the consumerism as I got older.

It is a shame in a way that they are dying out. Not because people realise how damaging they can be, but because it shows the direction that journalism is going. Imho, tough times for journalists means that they become a lot more malleable for business and politicians.

Women’s mags* sorry so many typos. I give up

Yes Elliecam it’s a magazine of adverts. I hope advertising goes down with the mags. All those stick thin model pictures trying to tell women how to look and whats acceptable it not. It’s all nonsense and the clothes are to expensive. I hope it all just goes and the world as we know it is being reinvented. Not trying o sound negative but I grew up on women’s bags like this and I wanted to be like the models and believed for years I wasn’t good enough so it’s time for these mags to go.

No wonder, I used to read Marie Claire in the dentist’s waiting room and it was about 4 stories and a ton of adverts. I wouldn’t pay that amount of money to read 4 stories.

I used to like Marie Claire when I was younger.

Now I don't buy mags since I'm not spending £4 for glossy adverts with a couple of articles thrown in.

Im a Red reader Have been for 11 years, When i was Marie Claires age demographic i preferred New Woman. in the late 90s early 2000s. It was Eve once i felt too old for NW Where NW went wrong was becoming a monthly celebrity rag,

Eve had some great writers. I remember an article about coercive control before it was even widely acknowledged that it existed. I wish they would put some of these older articles online.

I think it's part of the larger publishing issue.

I did buy fashion mags sometimes when I was younger, I was interested in the clothes. What turned me off in the end was that vapidity in so much of the fashion industry, the constant trends and fads and lack of reflection, and the sense that they only existed to sell product. One year they would say, isn't X fresh and new, and the next season x was beyond the pale, no one would wear that. Not so much on good design.

I will say I bought one for my teen daughter last year, because I wanted to give her some proof that leggings and crop tops were not the only way to be fashionable, she didn't seem to believe me.

I still like a fashion magazine but I realise I’m a dying breed. I’ve no objection to transwomen writing about fashion and I’m happy to talk clothes with them. I only object when transwomen try and appropriate women’s experiences e.g. when Paris Lees muscled in on the women’s suffrage celebration in Vogue and I’ve not bought a copy since

I haven't bought a women's magazine in years, because they only exist to make us buy or covet things we can't afford. Am I fuck paying a fiver for someone to make me feel like I'm not thin/beautiful/perfect enough.

Switched to The New Statesman and The New Yorker. Much happier.

You'll want to add Vogue and Glamour to the list.

I only read knitting and history/genealogy digital magazines now.

I didn't ever buy women's magazines. I read my mother's Cosmopolitan until I left home at 18. I bought music magazines, both at school and university, and , slightly oddly, Punch . I still occasionally buy Mojo, Uncut or Q. I didn't feel traditional women's magazines had much to say to me.

I did go through a period about 10 years ago of buying In Style - entirely for clothes. The articles were always rubbish but I got bored as its focus was "what's new this season!!!" which isn't what interests me.

I wonder how long printed magazines and newspapers will last? I used to buy The Guardian every day and we used to buy The Scotsman and The Herald. My husband (goodness only knows why) still buys The Guardian. I have a Times subscription.

Used to love Marie Claire. Man of the month, who remembers? They had loads of proper articles but when I picked one up recently it was just full of empty headed shite about clothes, sex etc.

I was thinking of my teenage years, magazines were the only place you could learn about makeup and clothes. Now you'd never take advice from anyone with advertising to sell.

When magazines hype a product now, they know not one of their readers is going to buy it without googling for independent reviews.

I loved magazines so much as a girl - they were my only sex education. But 10 months working in the industry killed my love for them and I wont shed a tear for any of the women's magazines. Manwhohasitall on Twitter nails it.

It’s all print magazines. Here’s the trend across all titles.

I used to buy both Marie Claire and Grazia religiously, both covering articles of oppression around the world.

However, some time ago MC started to focus on shopping to the detriment of its articles so I stopped buying. Grazia was stopped due to lack of time but one ill still grab on occasion.

I think that good print magazines can fill a market but as long as they have intelligent articles to sustain them.

I loved Marie Claire and have read it for years, because I really enjoyed the excellent stories about amazing women. Once they decided to centre a man over the many amazing women out there, they lost my custom. I read enough misogynistic crap and I would like to read ONE female magazine that doesn’t encourage the eraser of women, so well done Marie Claire. You helped in your own eraser.

In the past they covered stories impacting women that no one else did and covered some real ground breaking stories

They really did some great woman centred reportage. It was my favourite magazine in my teens and early 20s. Sad.