Woman's World

• 1. Introduction

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  Woman's World sold 77 million copies in 2004. At that point it was the best-selling women's magazine on American newsstands. It never relied on glossy fashion spreads or celebrity scandal to get there. It was an American weekly sold at the supermarket checkout, built for a particular reader. This documentary asks who launched it, and why a European publisher bet on an American audience. It asks who actually appears on its covers, and what readers find when they open an issue. It also asks how a magazine with a famously ordinary face became a newsstand giant.

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• 2. Hamburg To New Jersey

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  In 1981, a German company called Heinrich Bauer Verlag, based in Hamburg, decided to launch a magazine in the United States. To do it, the publisher set up an American subsidiary named Heinrich Bauer North America. Its home was Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Woman's World was that company's first American release. Its first target audience was middle-class mothers.

  The name has caused some confusion over the years. A different magazine called Woman's World ran in the United States from 1884 to 1940, and it has no connection to the modern title. A local television series with the same name aired on WKRG-TV in Mobile, Alabama. It is also unrelated.

  The 1981 launch took off quickly. Within ten years, the magazine had a circulation of 1.5 million readers. It was bringing in US$15 million in annual revenue by then, all from a weekly that people picked up while waiting to pay for groceries.

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• 3. The Cover Model Next Door

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  A typical issue runs about 60 pages in a large tabloid newspaper format, and roughly 12 percent of those pages are advertisements. The cover carries several headlines pointing to stories inside. Beside them is a cover model who is usually an ordinary woman instead of an actress or professional model.

  That woman earns her place through something she has done. She may have written a popular recipe. She may have contributed an article on a health story or an exercise routine. She may have lost weight and kept it off, and the magazine tells her story. Celebrities do appear on the cover now and then, but they are the exception.

  Gossip is largely absent from the pages as well, which leaves room for a very different mix of stories inside.

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• 4. Inside The Issue

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  Weight loss, relationship advice and cooking fill most of the short articles in Woman's World. Alongside them, the magazine runs feature stories about women working in the STEM fields and in academia.

  The reader has shifted since 1981. Today the magazine aims at middle-class women over 50, rather than the mothers it first courted. Its association with tabloid magazines shows in its price, which is set to match. The magazine also publishes articles online.

  Its competitors are more traditional general-market titles, such as Woman's Day and Family Circle. Family Circle is now defunct. Woman's World, meanwhile, still reaches a circulation of 2.2 million readers.

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