Analysis of the Key Players in the Womens Magazine Market - Essay Example

During this time, Cosmopolitan started to become more of a literary magazine, with the introduction of serial fiction and book reviews being published in the magazine for the first time. During this time, Walker not only managed to triple the magazine's subscriptions, he also provided the magazine with a general direction that was continued when in 1889 John Brisben Walker purchased the magazine. During this time, top writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser began writing for Cosmopolitan regularly and it became one of America’s leading literary magazines.

From the early 20th century to the 1940s, the magazine continued to grow in nationwide circulations and became a full-fledged self-proclaimed “Four book magazine”, publishing a combination of a novella, six to eight short stories, serials, six to eight articles, and assorted features. However, during the late 1950s, the magazine began to lose some of its loyal readerships when the paperback and television started to become household commodities and took the focus off magazines. The Birth of the “Cosmo Girl” It was only in the ’60s that drastic change ensued and the magazine started out on its journey to becoming what it is today: a leading magazine catering to the “fun, fearless woman” of today who seeks information and advice about sex, relationships, fashion, and their well-being.

The magazine as it is today was reshaped at a point when it had become a general interest magazine, with rapidly declining profits and mass-market appeal. At the time this change happened, American society, on the whole, was going through a phase of tentative change, women all over the country were beginning to realize the power of their own femininity and were beginning to explore the limits of their own sexuality. The predominantly male-oriented society was becoming more open to freedom of thought and speech and women were starting to look at avenues of work that were previously dominated by males.

During that time, Helen Gurley Brown, a newly married copywriter, wrote a fictional account of a single girl who was living the kind of new and exciting life that women of that age wanted to live, a life where they had the freedom to do whatever they pleased and be happy without a stable man or relationship in their life. This new book, “Sex and the Single Girl” encouraged women to enjoy their sexuality without guilt, a topic which interested the woman of the 60’s so much that the book became an instant best-seller (Benjamin, J., 2009). The success of the book and the frenzy of thank you notes from women who wanted further advice on their personal issues gave Helen Gurley Brown the idea of creating her own magazine which would allow her to address these women directly and give them advice about their personal issues regarding sex, relationships, and health.

This idea leads her to Hearst Corporation’s aging “general interest” magazine for Men and Women, The Cosmopolitan. The owners of the magazine were already planning to close it down and gave her the reigns to try out her new format in the hopes that she could breathe new life into the magazine's declining circulation.