![]() ![]() While the radical feminist group Redstockings distributed newsletters and working papers-“mimeographed thunderbolts,” they called them-at its consciousness-raising meetings, Ladies’ Home Journal was publishing a regular advice column-“Can This Marriage Be Saved?”-in which male editors advised unhappy women, some of whom were stuck in abusive relationships, on how to be better wives. If the newsletter was the preferred form for revolutionary feminist publishing in the late 1960s, the glossy magazine was the form of the prevailing social order. The project was ambitious, quixotic, and, historically speaking, unusual. Letty Cottin Pogrebin thought a slick magazine could be “a stealth strategy to ‘normalize’ or ‘mainstream’ our message.” As a riposte to The New York Times, which until 1986 refused to refer to a woman by anything other than “Mrs.” or “Miss,” they decided to call their magazine Ms. But others hoped that a glossy magazine might strengthen the feminist movement. When it became clear that Steinem and others “wanted a glossy that would appeal to the women who read the Ladies’ Home Journal,” Gornick and her radical sisters bowed out. As Vivian Gornick recalled forty years later, “Radical feminists like me, Ellen Willis, and Jill Johnston…had a different kind of magazine in mind,” one that might argue against the institutions of marriage and motherhood. But the lawyer and activist Brenda Feigen suggested something different: “We should do a slick magazine,” something colorful and glossy that could be sold on newsstands nationwide. ![]() ![]() But what kind of publication would they create, and for what kind of reader? Steinem proposed a newsletter, the kind of low-budget, low-circulation flyer that many feminist groups in New York City favored. General-interest publications, also edited by men, were no better: according to Steinem, her editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine rejected all her pitches for political stories, saying “something like, don’t think of you that way.’” Fed up and fired up, the journalists decided to start their own publication. When a group of female journalists gathered at Gloria Steinem’s uptown Manhattan apartment in the winter of 1971, they were facing a common problem: none of them could get “real stories about women published.” The male editors of the major women’s magazines-called the “seven sisters,” like the colleges-would not accept pitches that did anything other than advise readers to be better, happier, more productive housewives and mothers. "It's on growth.Nearly all revolutions start with a meeting. "The emphasis is not on revenue," he said. "My hope is that roughly 10 days before they get totally used to it and kind of blasé about it, before the honeymoon ends, bam, we hit them with a new feature," he said.įor example, Sifton said that Cooking is experimenting with a new "notes" feature that would seemingly straddle the line between a comments section and a Genius-style annotation platform.Īsked about the business side of things (there has been talk of possibly monetizing Cooking in some form), French said that focus is still on growing its audience across platforms. Sifton, the former Times restaurant critic, said that he wants to keep the app fresh, and to not stand still. The iPhone app, French said, "is much more practical in the way we designed it." Whereas the iPad app regales users with big, pretty pictures of food (some would call it "food porn"), the iPhone app has been optimized for search, and is intended make the task of deciding what to make for dinner, and actually making it, easier. "It just seemed like the next logical thing to do was to deliver an iPhone app to match the iPad app," Sifton said in an interview.īen French, who serves as product lead for Cooking and the NYT Now app, said that his team has carefully studied user behavior for both the website and the iPad: Users tend to use the desktop site during the day, and switch to the iPad version at night and on weekends, when they're presumably doing the bulk of their cooking. ( boasts three million unique visitors a month, a spokesperson said.) That app, and that website, have been successful, according to the Times. The Times debuted its dedicated Cooking website in beta in May, and released an iPad app as part of the official launch in September.
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