In Defense of Women's Magazines

Women's magazines "regularly break news" and have "created whole categories of news," according to Sheila Weller. Many people know that women's magazines published some of the classic exposes of the muckraking era, as well as important literary fiction... but there is an impression that (for all sorts of reasons -- including the fact that female journalists became less ghettoized and could publish outside women's magazines) this has largely ceased to be true. But as Weller points out, the old muckraking spirit has not died off completely and magazines primarily targeted at women continue to have a social and political impact. I suspect that women's magazines, which continue to be relatively healthy compared to the rest of the print media, may undertake more political reporting as traditional political media venues either die off or become increasingly frivolous and disinterested in long-form investigative pieces.