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Magazines are the most successful media format ever to have existed. This is a big claim when the apparent dominance of television in the last 50 years or the printed book across the last 500 are considered, but magazines are so ubiquitous and their consumption so engrained in habit that their importance almost ceases to register and is thus overlooked. As Buckminster Fuller once noted in a broadcast lecture, people place importance on food and water as the sustainers of life but on a day-today basis it's actually air that we consume most. That is our biggest fuel. Like air, magazines play an often disregarded part in our quotidian existence: the pleasure they bring, and the ways in which they bring it, give them a social value; their ability to influence patterns of behaviour or consumption or aesthetics a cultural one; and their role as educators and informers an intellectual one. What is more, when the magazine is in printed form this is achieved at a readily-attainable cost-and in the age of the internet the cost of consumption is sometimes zero. Yet compared with other cultural products such as television, newspapers, cinema and radio, magazines have generally not been taken seriously by either the (self-professedly) more high-minded 'fourth estate' branches of the journalism industries or the academy. 'Academic disciplines have almost routinely concentrated on the other legs of the print triad [i.e., newspapers and books]' notes American media scholar Dorothy Schmidt, '… but scant attention is given to the continuing role of magazines as reflectors and molders of public opinion and political and social attitudes' (Schmidt 1989: 648, in Abrahamson 1996b: 4). Laurel Brake argues that magazine journalism was not highly regarded in the nineteenth century, '… the low status of periodical literature is associated with many of the same factors which figure in the feeble welcome Victorian critics accorded the novel' (1994: 30), and in the twentieth century Liesbet van Zoonen observed that the 'traditional press' perceived magazine publishing as one of the 'low-status fields of journalism' (1998b: 39). 1 01-Holmes and Nice-4239-Ch-01.indd 1 14/10/2011 10:12:05 AM This general pattern of focus and engagement can also be found in studies of specific magazines, such as Valerie Korinek's thorough examination of Chatelaine, the Canadian women's magazine, which focuses on how readers connected with this in the 1950s and 1960s: These readers were not passive consumers whose interaction with the magazine was limited to writing their yearly subscription cheque to Maclean Hunter, but an engaged, and engaging, group. (2000: 8) Extrapolating from this material, the essential characteristics of the magazine form, a General Theory of Magazines as it were, might include the following:

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