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The readers are over 40. (Don't tell advertisers.)

The New York Times, 8/23/09

Abstract:

More, the magazine from the publisher Meredith for women over 40, ran an article in its most recent issue on how to seem younger. Among the advice: get your bikini line waxed, start text-messaging, and stop planning everything (the young people don’t bother with it at all).

Some readers were ruffled. “Is there only one way to be an acceptable ‘over 40’ woman?” a reader named Marla Miller asked on More.com. “Other magazines don’t tell you the content is for 40 or olders and then ask you to ‘act younger,’ ” a reader named Catherine Lee wrote.

That is the challenge for a magazine whose organizing principle, aging, provokes anxiety among its readers.

“Don’t take it seriously,” Lesley Jane Seymour, the editor in chief of More, said in a recent interview. “We’re making fun of ourselves. We don’t take aging seriously. It happens to everyone. You can’t avoid it.”

More certainly does not. Age infiltrates almost every article, and while it is a touchy subject for readers, advertisers are wary about it as well. More’s average reader is 51, among the oldest in the magazine business, making selling ads a challenge, More executives say. While it tackles ageism in its pages, it is getting a good dose of it from advertisers.

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