Women's Magazines as Actual Journalism

When most people think of women's magazines they think of articles on sex and beauty and pages full of fashion spreads. While many of these popular magazines do still have these elements, some of them are actually producing real journalism and I think it's important to take note of this.

For a long time now my favorite magazine has been Cosmopolitan and I would love nothing more than to write for them one day. If I could change one thing about the magazine though, it would be it's lack of journalistic articles. I'm not necessarily talking about news stories, but I would like to see some more issue stories with investigative reporting. One magazine that is doing this great though is Glamour and lately I've found myself reading it a lot more than I have in the past.

The September issue featured stories such as "Cocaine Almost Killed Me", which talked about abuse and addiction, "Stop That Woman", which investigated the desire that some women have to be perfect and why it isn't actually possible, and "Are You a Nearlywed?", which looked at the trend of how more and more couples are forgoing marriage. Obviously these aren't hard hitting stories, but they're investigative and they're the type of stories that should be featured in women's magazines. They have substance to them and I believe that they are of journalistic quality.

Glamour also routinely features stories on rape, as well as other legal and social issues which affect women. I think it's important for women's magazines to feature these type of stories because they keep women informed of the issues going on around them. These stories are interesting and they are the kind that I would like to write one day.

With all of that being said about Glamour though, I would like to point out that I do believe Cosmo is getting better, especially since Joanna Coles became editor-in-chief. In the September issue, they had issue stories such as "I Fought for the Right to Get Married - and Now I'm Divorced" and "I'm Too Young...For Parkinson's Disease." In the October issue there was "I'm Too Young...For a Brain Tumor" as well as a special report called "The Ambition Gap." The report spanned ten pages and explored how many women are earning more than men and have more ambition, and how this affects relationships.

I think that women's magazines are a great place to feature journalistic and investigative pieces and I think that these magazines should be doing it more. Stories on fashion and sex can only be appealing for so long and women's magazines should work on incorporating more feature articles into their pages. Cosmo claims to focus on woman empowerment but I want them to realize that this shouldn't be done only through articles about pleasing men. I believe that featuring more investigative journalism could actually help to up their readership.