Do you enjoy magazines?

I had a subscription to Good Housekeeping for years but gave up on it after it became full of celebrity interviews and advertising. My dear late sister and I bought Family Circle for years and she never threw hers away. She could go to the stack and pull out one with a favourite recipe. I doubt if my brother in law has kept them!

Country Gardener is free from garden centres and National Trust properties in the South West. There’s Somerset, Dorset, Devon and Wiltshire editions. It comes out monthly. You can look it up and read some articles for free online. It has places to visit, events and general gardening articles and is a very interesting read.

I do enjoy magazines but am not keen on some modern ones which obviously cater for the younger, smarter women than me and are full of adverts. And they are so expensive.
But I do like Yours which is for more mature women. I used to subscribe but now just buy it when I feel the need.
Also, three of us neighbours here circulate two favourite mags, Saga and The Oldie, amongst ourselves before passing them on to charity shops.
At Christmas I always buy myself a little selection of magazines, Woman, Best, Take a Break, as a treat.

I'm not a fan of magazines anymore .
Apart from disliking the lay-out of most of them - I just find them expensive and disappointing :

I used to buy Prima for the free enclosed pattern .
I used to do the competitions in Good Housekeeping - but that was a long time ago .
I bought both of them at Christmas and they'll be passed on to a housebound person - pretty much unread .

The only magazine that I might buy is National Geographic , which I can read and re-read .
Perhaps , I've changed !

They are now too expensive and the content often irrelevant to me now, Good Housekeeping for example. I would still like computer and gardening ones, again, I don’t buy because of the prices. My only one now is BBC Science Focus which I have on subscription. No celebs or adverts and every page interesting. No, I don’t work for them!

I have taken Country Living for years and wouldn’t want to give it up, there’s a lot more in it than “shabby chic” GSM! But I do agree that there are far too many ads. I pass it on to a friend and hope she too passes it on!

I used to love when my Good Housekeepng arrived- it had so much in it which interested me. Then we planned a move to the country and I added in Country Living , but soon found that it was more Daylesford Farm Shop and Chiantishire than my muddy village.
But still.
Now I find them glossy and expensive, full of ads, dropping leaflets and flyers everywhere, stuffed with articles about women who have reinvented their lives /started a multi million pound business on the kitchen table or climbed Kilimanjaro with a ton of HRT on their back.
They mostly seem to have a lot in common - spiky heels, big hair, expensive frocks- oh and a failed marriage or two by the wayside.
I miss the old days!

I treated myself to a one-off prima sub this christmas, I don`t normally buy magazines but I enjoyed the one prima that I bought a few months ago. I signed up to get the free pattern every month. It is worth it for that alone. This months is a dress that I will make

I stopped buying magazine a while back. I used to take Gardeners World, Good Food and, later, Trout Fisherman and learned a lot from all of them, but take them for long enough and you see the same articles rehashed again and again. And of course, they mount up and take up lots of space. So I stopped.

In common with many others here, I used to enjoy magazines from childhood onwards but stopped buying them years ago because they became too expensive and most of the women’s magazines were full of celebrity interviews, sensational stories, dramatic weight loss and adverts. As a small child, I had Pippin and/or Jack and Jill. My grandparents owned a newsagents’ shop at this time so I was often treated to a comic. As I grew older, l liked Judy, Bunty and Diana and, as a teenager, it was, of course, Jackie. As an adult, I enjoyed Bella and Best when they first started but they are the same as the rest now. My grandmother liked Woman’s Weekly and my mother liked My Weekly. I used to enjoy reading them from the age of nine or ten - nothing to offend innocent eyes there! For a while, I enjoyed Classic FM magazine and BBC Music magazine but stopped when they became too expensive and I had enough CDs. Similarly, I occasionally bought writers’ magazines as I had delusions of writing a bestseller one day. Several years ago, I left a bag of magazines l had bought for myself and family members in the bank. I was able to get through to my branch and had to describe what was in the bag. As I went through the list of titles - Airliner World, Rail, BBC Music magazine - I could almost hear the person at the other end of the line thinking that we were a family of anoraks.

The Economist. I read it on my laptop.

I have two on subscription . Prima as a monthly one, Woman’s Weekly every week which I read from cover to cover , both have puzzles in which I enjoy .

I used to subscribe to two others but cancelled them as not such a good fit and decided to save the money. I pass them on to a friend

My DH gets the TV & Satellite magazine each week. I subscribe to Lovatts puzzle books and enter the prize puzzles. I've had a few wins but nothing amazing. We get the Christmas Radio Times as we love the Christmas picture quiz.
I never buy anything else as they are just a waste of money.

Forgot to mention I get the Waitrose magazine free with the Waitrose card.

I read the magazine with the Saturday Times, my weekly newspaper and bought the Christmas Radio Times, other than that the occasional freebie from M&S.
I was given a subscription to Gardeners World many years ago but I now get information online.

Haven't bought a women's magazine for years - too much stuff about clothes, makeup and cooking - but I do like The Oldie which I used to get on subscription. I would also buy Private Eye if only the print was not so small.

Up until recently Ibought the Artist Magazine. As I had so many and I found that a lot of the articles were not really new to me I cancelled the subscription I had for so many years. We do subscribe to the Total tv magazine. Other than that I find the majority of other magazines tend to be banal and not of interest to me. In the old days I enjoyed The Woman, Woman’s Own and Woman’s Realm.

Haven't bought a women's magazine for years - too much stuff about clothes, makeup and cooking

Isn't that what magazines aimed specifically at women have always been about? Although, thumbing through magazines at the hairdressers, I would suggest that magazines like Marie Claire and Good Housekeeping and others have plenty of contnt that goes well beyond the range you mention.

I bought Good Housekeeping and Womans Journal when first married and for years Then Woman and Own. Now they no longer seem to relate to my life style. No recipes for one or two they are often highly spiced. Clothes my Dd's would think twice about wearing and good pieces way out of price range,
I think if someone brought out a magazine for 60+ years they would make a killing.
I agree with all that Maw says.

Used to love a magazine but haven’t bought one for years, the Christmas Radio Times apart. Have fond memories of collecting School Friend from the newsagents and reading it as I walked to school; the Children’s Newspaper and the short lived Young Elizabethan were my mother’s preferred and improving choices!

I love magazines. Vogue, the New Yorker, Grazia, Mslexia, any and all home design publication.

I buy Chat, That's Life!, Love It! Pick Me Up, but I buy them once monthly instead of weekly because it'll be costing me a fortune!

RosiesMaw

I used to love when my Good Housekeepng arrived- it had so much in it which interested me. Then we planned a move to the country and I added in Country Living , but soon found that it was more Daylesford Farm Shop and Chiantishire than my muddy village.
But still.
Now I find them glossy and expensive, full of ads, dropping leaflets and flyers everywhere, stuffed with articles about women who have reinvented their lives /started a multi million pound business on the kitchen table or climbed Kilimanjaro with a ton of HRT on their back.
They mostly seem to have a lot in common - spiky heels, big hair, expensive frocks- oh and a failed marriage or two by the wayside.
I miss the old days!

Re all those leaflets, a Swedish friend who was staying once picked up the newly delivered Sunday paper and promptly exclaimed, ‘Oh, what are all these falling-out things?’

We’ve called them that ever since.

I subscribe to Prima (with the free pattern) though I haven't even opened the last one.

I used to read Good Housekeeping / Woman and Home every month but the articles seemed to be very repetitive. I usually buy one when we are going on holiday. They are too expensive now and seem to be more adverts than content.

We get the National Trust magazine as we are members.

I also have a subscription to Style at Home. It is one of the cheaper magazines and I get it because I am into interior design. It is more realistic than the more expensive glossy house mags.

Like many other posters, I have read magazines throughout my life, starting with Mandy, Bunty, June and Schoolfriend. Then progressing to Petticoat before going onto the grown up magazines. What was the one with Burt Reynolds as a centrespread?

I pick up the Tesco and Asda's own free magazines. It is mainly advertising their own stuff but they have some really good recipes

I used to buy Woman and Home some years back but stopped when the cover celebrities photos were so enhanced you could hardly recognise them.
Also a life improvement story by a woman who recommended a particular CD (it was sime time ago) said that it had helped her turn her life around. It turned out I knew someone who knew her....and the woman involved actually owned the business producing the CDs. So hardly unbiased!

Also the fashion styles didn't apply to me pricewise and style wise. I agree there is a gap in the market for my age group 70+ but not fuddy duddy. And in a paper format. Unlikely though.