Race in Popular Magazines- Part 2

After my trip to Barnes and Nobles, I became curious about how magazines choose who to feature on the cover of their magazine. I thought that maybe this could help explain the discrepancy between the actual racial make-up of the U.S. and the races of people on magazine covers. I know that editors need to make magazine covers alluring and intriguing in order for people to buy the issue. On Forbes.com,I found a list of celebrity's deemed " Most Valuable". In 2008, they analyzed the six most popular celebrity magazines: People, Star, US Weekly, In Touch Weekly, Life & Style and OK and found which celebrities sell the most copies. They found that the 10 most valuable celebrities were:

1) Angelina Jolie
2)Jennifer Aniston
3)Heath Ledger
4)Jamie Lynn Spears
5)Nicole Richie
6)Jessica Simpson
7)Suri Cruise (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's daughter)
8)Shiloh Jolie Pitt ( Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's daughter)
9)Heidi Montag
10)Owen Wilson

I understand that this is a limited sample, because Forbes only looked at six different magazines. However, 90% of the "most valuable" celebrities on the Forbes list are white. The only exception is Nicole Richie who is multiracial. This could potentially explain why I found that celebrity magazines were the least racially diverse ( in terms of the races of the people on their covers). Is the celebrity magazine readership primarily white? Are celebrity magazine editors marketing towards white readers?

I found an interesting paper online entitled: Printed in "Black" and "White": Effect of Readers Race on Magazine Advertising Rates that helped answer some of my questions. The author of this paper looked at how the racial composition of a magazine's readership affects their advertising rates. They focused on 78 mainstream magazines ( magazines that are not targeted to a particular racial group). They found that how much advertisers are willing to pay for advertising space in a magazine is dependent upon the race of the people who read the magazine. According to the paper, advertisers have access to the racial demographics of each magazine. In fact, they found that a 1% increase in minority readership of a magazine caused a $1202.70 decrease in advertising prices. But a 1% increase in white readership causes a $1202.69 increase. In other words, they found that if a "mainstream" magazine markets towards non-white readers, their revenue will fall. This shows that advertisers are more focused on the racial composition of the readership rather than the sheer number of readers.This really surprised me because I assumed that advertisers would simply be interested in how many readers the magazine had. The difference in advertising prices could explain why certain magazines feature a disproportional percentage of white people on their covers. The author of the paper proposes a solution at the end of her work: that the advertisers should not be able to see the racial demographics of magazine's readerships.

What do you think about her solution? Do you think that the advertising prices based on the minority readership of a magazine are fair?