In a customarily excellent post, this time considering Tony Abbott’s “virgingate” debacle, Andrew Elder asks an exceptionally good question about the monthly magazine in which it broke:
Why is The Australian Women’s Weekly such a political graveyard? Cheryl Kernot’s feather boa, Mark Latham’s first wife, Tony Abbott fretting over daughters he barely knows - all underestimated the Weekly and all came an absolute gutser because of it. So much for broadsheets, Sunday morning talk shows and talkback radio, not to mention the national broadcaster and the utterly otiose press gallery. Watch out for the mighty Weekly, ye media advisors and image consultants, and tremble when they come for you.
He’s right to point it out: despite such a catalogue of woe, many political operators and journos don’t appear to take this giant-killing magazine seriously. But looking at the figures, you’d take a good run in the Weekly over favourable broadsheet coverage any day.
I was interested enough to look at the readership figures and demographics for the Weekly, and they tell an interesting story. Their readership is a staggering 2.2 million, meaning that about 13% of the population reads it - not even the Herald Sun comes close.
According to the figures in their press kit, the Weekly has a remarkably trans-demographic appeal, as well. There’s no major difference across the different demographic categories (A, B, etc.) , although they do pick up more older readers than younger ones. It gets its fair share of readers across different occupational classes. Although most readers are women, 465,000 men per month read it, which is up there with the total Monday-Friday readership of the Australian.
By the way, the magazines that many of us focus on (and occasionally obsess about) as organs of public affairs are utterly trounced by the Weekly. Morgan has The Monthly, for example, at 100,000 readers. (That figure - around 100-200K - keeps coming up when we look at audiences for those media products which we might see as appealing to media/news junkies.)
The Weekly is a colossus, that really does reach an incredibly wide sweep of Australian voters. Looking bad in it means looking bad to a lot of people. For a man who is struggling with women voters, Tony Abbott has at the very least taken a huge risk with his comments. If they really were off the cuff, and really do hurt him, he will come to regret going unprepared to an encounter with the Weekly, one of Australia’s most important political publications.
To reiterate Mr Elder’s question - one that of course many feminists asked before either of us did - why aren’t magazines like the Weekly taken more seriously, more often,by more journos, scholars and political junkies, as both public sphere institutions, and as places where politics happens?
media, politics
TonyAbbott, WomensWeekly
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