Inappropriate covers on magazines.

I love magazines but they are all trashy now, as a kid I would read my grans 'womans own' and 'home chat' and would find the recipes and home hints very interesting, I felt quite grown up reading them but there was never anything sordid in them like nowadays.
Anyone remember 'home chat', 'pins and needles' or the old style 'womans own' and 'womans realm'. ?

I agree Ana

What a lovely term - 'modesty bags'!
Trouble is, they use the shock-horror storylines on their covers because those are what sells the mags, which is rather a sad endictment of our celebrity and scandal-obsessed society...

The Coop stopped selling 'lads' mags' after public demand. They asked publishers to put them in 'modesty bags' and they refused so they refused to stock them any more. Shame a similar boycott not made on the salacious tittle tattle magazines too.

Unfortunately, yes!

Does that make sense?

I am just wondering if the positioning of magazines is similar to the positioning of products in supermarkets. Apparently, the more a producer pays to the supermarket, the nearer to eye level their product is placed. (And I never even knew manufacturers had to pay the supermarkets to 'display' their goods!).
If that is the case, then the newsagent would be reluctant to move these magazines with salacious headlines higher up out of eye level as the publishers would demand that they be placed in a more accessible place if they are paying a lot for positioning.

I get a year 's subscription to Good Housekeeping with my Tesco vouchers every year. Treat it as a free Christmas present to myself. I suspect I must be in their target reading population as I usually find something of interest and then pass on to friends or take to leave in hospital waiting rooms.
I know the name is cringeworthy but it dates back many years!
I do agree about the ghastly stories used to sell other magazines. Years ago I used to collect a friend's children as well as my own from school. Our path took us under a railway bridge and we used to run under it, otherwise those new readers would be using their phonics to spell out the messages scrawled there. "FU...." "Let's see who can run the fastest children."

I always buy the November edition of Good Housekeeping, it's full of good twists of festive food. I suspect the name doesn't do it any favours, but the mag itself is my only women's mag of choice

When I used to buy a mag [not often] I bought Good Housekeeping[which sounds awful, but is actually very good.]My daughter came to stay a few years ago and picked this mag up from the coffee table, and said with a curled lip 'huh' and then flicked through and sat down to read it.She then admitted it was a good mag after all.However I haven't bought any at all, for a while as they are so expensive and I can buy a book on my Kindle for that price. I do think that the pictures may be ok on womens mags but the shrieking headlines are certainly not! As others say, children can easily read them.

How true, it is my mag of choice, Love WW

I was recently invited to be part of a focus group at Woman's Weekly. One interesting point that came out was that they work more like a monthly magazine than a weekly and plan issues weeks ahead of printing. This means they completely by pass most "celebrity" stuff because it would be out of date by the time they published it.
What came over very strongly in the meeting was that readers buy the magazine because it does NOT have pictures of Katie Price or headlines about child abuse on the cover!

I am a big fan of bland and good natured,especially good natured !!

At least there are no salacious headlines on Womans Weekly,.

All fairly bland and good natured from what I can see !!

At least there are no salacious headlines on Womans Weekly,.

All fairly bland and good natured from what I can see !!

I read The Lady, it is well written, proper grammatical sentences, nice recipies, good gardening articles, and a puzzles for those who like them. The Ladygram is my favourite- I'm addicted to it.
I know it annoys me sometimes but I have it sent out to Germany and share it with an English friend.
It's film, theatre and book reviews are very good and I have ordered sone very interesting books from their comments.
When I'm in the UK nowadays and in WHSmith I feel shocked at the amount of rubbish on the shelves.

I only ever see women's magazines at the hairdresser's. I never really noticed that I had stopped buying them, so can't remember when it was - but I don't miss them at all.

To digress slightly - sorry -but is anyone else annoyed by those thick inserts that now litter glossy magazines. they are usually full page advertisements for some overpriced beauty product and the stiffness prevents you from flicking through the pages with ease. I now just cut them all out and throw them away before I start browsing. So put that in your pipes and smoke it, you advertising executives!

And yes I agree about the explicit references on magazine covers - wouldn't buy one on principle.

Nelliemoser - agree with you. I loathe this "salacious story telling". It's important that the reality of the risk of abuse within families is openly talked about/written about. Sadly, as the debate has opened up it's been followed by this kind of misery, sensational "real life" type stories as books, or in magazines. Salacious is a good word to describe it.
I agree with rose quartz about the issue of exposing children who either have or haven't had direct experience of the awful experiences that are being sensationalised as "entertainment", and for no other reason than for tawdry magazines to make a profit (at the expense of misery)

Flower This is a very good point. These "misery true life" magazines are dreadful.
Glamma Definitely Jeremy Kyle in print.

I think just tackling the newsagents is pretty pointless. This debate needs needs to aimed higher up in the Magazine industry production chain. Not so much headlining of theses graphic abuse stories. There is an element of salacious story telling going on here.

My mother used to read Take a Break. She had complained it had changed and was finding it difficult to find something to replace it as Woman's Own had already sensationalised itself. Is Peoples Friend next?

I gave up reading magazines when the price went over £2.50 and I was finding it difficult to spot the articles amongst the ads.

Not the only one! Read Vicky Beeching's blog on Christian Feminism.

Mumsnet indeed rosequartz ... thanks for clearing that up. I guess this is one of the few areas in which christians and feminists are as one.

Do any of you remember the 'Top Shelf' campaign in the 70s. I was very involved with that. We used to go into shops and point it out to the owners and ask them to put the offending mags on the top shelf.

www.christian.org.uk/news/whsmith-refuses-to-hide-lads-mags-from-children