“Service for my at-home readers” Redbook’s EIC Stacy Morrison Responds
January 14, 2008
Those of you who have been following my blog may remember that I have written more than once about Redbook magazine and the way it changes the word SEX to LOVE on the subscribers’ editions. Click here to read that blog.
Well, today Stacy Morrison, Redbook’s editor-in-chief responded to my blog with the following:
Hey there, Mr. Magazine. I wish I had seen this when you first posted it. I must have not read my Bloglines very closely that week.
In any case, I wanted to assure you that the switch between sex and love is a service for my at-home readers, who are constantly requesting that we “soften” our sex coverage on our covers because many of our readers have teenagers and other such types at home whom they don’t want perusing our sex content. Of course, I personally think that teenagers *should* peruse our sex content, but as an editor and a journalist and a person, I definitely know that my job is working for my readers and channeling their lives and desires, not telling them what those lives and desires should look like. So yeah, I guess that’s a marketing ploy, doing what my customers request.
We are very honest with our lives at Redbook, which is why our recent updates to the magazine have driven three record-breaking years in a row for the title. You’re not quite our target audience—that’s young women who are reinventing what it looks like to be a grown-up, aged 27 to 47—but we are flattered just the same.
Stacy Morrison
Editor in Chief
Redbook and redbookmag.com
Thank you Stacy for taking the time to respond and all the best. Samir
Mr. Magazine 
*Should editors be marketers too?*
Yes. Marketing is publishing’s core discipline and it sounds as though Stacy from Redbook is responding to letters or other contact she from readers wanting to ‘protect’ their children at home.
But believe me, the average teenager needs no such ‘protection’. That is simply a euphemism for ’embarrassing parents’.
But Stacy’s answer goes to show that editors are thin-skinned and so highly, sometimes overly responsive to their readers. Is that ideal from a marketing point of view?