Good Housekeeping Article (Blog #3)

Janes, B. (January 2015). The Biggest Winner. Good Housekeeping, 260(1), p. 82-87.

This article focused on personal improvement and getting the most out of life. Jillian Michaels offered her “Seven Steps to Success”, which included, define and detail very specific goals, do your homework, take responsibility, and use mistakes; reframe failure, amongst others. 

This article was honestly pretty inspiring. I’m not the biggest fan of “Steps to Success” and similar  “checklists for life” type of articles and web posts, a fact that I think I stated in my first blog post. Regardless of my personal feelings towards them, these articles are EVERYWHERE right now. Life does not follow any specific formula, you can’t plan for everything. That being said, this article was so loosely constructed that I did not mind it. I wouldn’t really say that it was useless, but I think much of what the article had to offer was fairly straightforward. 

I chose this article because I borrowed two magazines from my grandmother, Better Homes and Gardens and Good Housekeeping. I felt that my options were limited, so I chose the article that I felt would have the most “meat” to it. It was between the inspirational Biggest Loser star or a mom who developed and produced an alternative peanut butter. It happened to be the cover story of the Good Housekeeping. To say that my choice was not based on convenient would be a lie, however, my grandmother offered me about seven magazines to choose from (my parents stopped subscribing to magazines years ago). 

After finding and reading the article, I flipped through the pages in the magazine, curious about what else was in it, which served me well, I found a recipe for a chicken soup that sounds divine. I found that there were 44 pages of ads in the magazine, out of 145 pages, if you count the back cover, which is one huge ad. I did the math, that’s 30.4% of the magazine’s pages with advertising on them. I chose, however, not to count the pages that have clothing or home decor items pictured, listing where they are from and price. I felt that these images were the magazine’s stories, and not advertisements for these companies. 

I thought that this was a low number for ads in a magazine, I’m used to seeing one on every page, it seems. I honestly am not sure, though. I, like a lot of people my age, stick to mostly online sources of articles like these, in the era of buzzfeed.com, I think that in some ways, magazine use is dying off, and so is advertising being paired to the subject matter of the website and article. I know that these days there are different online advertising services that advertise things that fit your interests or your search history, and that’s something that magazines don’t do, but I am okay with that. 

I felt that these ads were all appropriate to the magazine. Advertisers seem to really know the magazine’s clientele and are advertising for them specifically. Most of the ads are for health products, or healthy foods. This really seems to follow the overall theme of the magazine, as well as many of the points in the article that I read. Everything felt very cohesive.