Periodically Speaking: Two Mags for Women with Careers

Women with strong career interests can turn to a couple of magazines for solace and advice: Pink and Working Mother. We've received new issues of each in the MagSampler.com newsstand, and have found that they are as different as boardroom and family room.

The more buttoned-down of the pair is Pink, a nicely designed and edited business bimonthly (seven issues a year) with oversize pages. You can tell a publication is for women when the letters section is titled "Femail." The magazine, now in its second year, is published in Atlanta, Georgia.

Pink is clearly for an executive audience, for women who are making high incomes or hope to get there soon. What high-finance story ideas do the editors come up for such a readership?

You'll find advice in the February/March issue of Pink that could be in any magazine for business managers and entrepreneurs: how to keep your employees from idle surfing on the Internet, ways to get your product or service talked about on television, ideas for diversifying your portfolio. But what other business publication has a profile of Gloria Steinem, an article extolling the virtues of meditation for busy executives, or a look at how women are advancing (slowly) to positions of prominence in a number of American churches?

I slammed on the brakes at an article titled "Alimony Blues," warning readers to get pre-nuptial agreements lest they wind up paying substantial alimony to their ex-husbands. The first example cited by writer Betsy Schiffman is 47-year-old businesswoman Kim Shamsky, who "is outraged at having to pay thousands of dollars a month to her ex." That this a magazine for women is obvious when that lucky ex-husband is identified simply as "a 65-year-old retired major league baseball player." I think he can only be Art Shamsky (I looked it up and he is indeed 65), beloved to New York Mets fans for his role in the team's 1969 world championship. To a baseball fan, omitting his name in the article is like writing that "Senator Clinton is having problems with her husband, a retired politician who declined to be interviewed for this article."

There are plenty of case histories of successful women, as well as ideas (and ads) on the stuff to buy with those big bucks. A feature in this issue focuses on the autos that such women are driving, and what their car choices say about them.

Article Author: Ed Rust

Ed Rust runs MagSampler.com, an Internet newsstand of hundreds of magazines on all subjects. MagSampler.com offers sample copies of any of its publications for $2.59 each. Publishers use MagSampler.com to get copies into the hands of potential …

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