Locating Editorials and Advertising in Wedding Magazines

Abstract

Unlike other magazines, few people subscribe to wedding magazines and, as most are annual publications, their presence on the publishing landscape is relatively intermittent and unobtrusive. Nevertheless, these publications provide a rich context for examining intersections between advertisements and editorials. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic and textual analysis of wedding magazines produced in Australia. I argue that the distinction between advertisement and editorial is not a useful analytical tool in this context. This is because the vast majority of advertisements and editorial pages in a wedding magazine appear almost identical: page after page of glossy photographs of wedding dresses. Rather, what is striking is the manner in which the magazine editors and advertising clients, in their discussions as each magazine issue is produced, negotiate the fine distinctions they perceive between advertising and editorial content. At stake in these negotiations is not just the economic success of both editor and client, but also their reputations as expert manipulators of symbolic representations.