Could a magazine that has a section devoted to answering the questions of its readers ever put in a question of their own simply because they know the answer to it and want to put it in for the readers?
Also should we be skeptical of the information provided by say a “Beauty” section in Cosmo that gives advice on what the best makeup to wear is? For example, could Maybeline say to Cosmo, “Here’s $50,000 to put us in the answer of one of your ‘questions’”?
No, and I’m sure all the letters to Penthouse Forum are authentic, too.
Who would ever check if questions from readers are authentic? But then again, why bother to fake a question? Why not just write what you want? (“A note to our readers: Many of you have probably wondered…”)
Could they do it? Sure. Would they do it? It seems like it would be simple enough to avoid the issue if you wanted to so for a reputable magazine, unless you had a good reason, probably not. I suppose some magazines are thrown together without much editorial oversight or concern for accuracy. I can imagine it happening because of sloppiness or laziness. Has it ever been done? Almost certainly. If you include things like advice columns in The Weekly World News it’s probably not very likely any of the questions are real.
I think Maybelline could take out a couple of full page ads for that kind of money. Is it possible the people who answer those questions would tend to mention their own advertisers? You betcha.
Making up questions for magazine columns has probably only existed from the time when magazines started running them as features.
It would be rather humourous if Cecil devouted a column to this question.
You mean like the reply to Lynne W. in this column?
A friend of a friend was he editor of the letters page in a UK teen magazine a few years back. She used to write almost all of the letters herself, mainly because those actualy sent in were of such poor quality. She did try and base them around issues brought up in the real leters though. She just wrote the letters she felt the readers would have had they been able.
I was once the editor of a medium-sized business magazine. We wanted to add a letters-to-the-editor page, but didn’t receive enough letters to fill it. So, we made up our own letters for a couple issues, and readers got the idea. The magazine now gets plenty of real letters-to-the-editor.
As a guy who’s been in publishing (the business side) for many years I can state that, in my experience, no pub that I’ve ever worked for has not made up the letters to the editor. Either we haven’t got enough or the quality or content hasn’t been something we want to run. We just make it up at the last minute.
On the subject of Q&A columns you can bet your sweet ass that who advertises influences which questions get asked and answered. We call it (God help us) ‘advertorial’ folks. Someone buys a big enough set of ads (say 6 months or more) and by God I’ll order a junior editor to write a feature or column about that industry and place it right next to our buyers ads. Alternately, we’d just feel a driving need to run a profile of that firm and it’s founder. Think of it as ‘vanity-press’, I suppose.
I’ve said it before. It’s a business. We’re in it to do whatever we can to make the bucks. Make sure you read commericial pubs with that in mind and remain skeptical.
-JC
I am an editor at a national magazine (a home-decorating/lifestyle title w/ 2 mil. circulation). At our magazine:
we do not make up “letters to the editors”–that, is the column where we reprint reader letters that comment on our magazine/stories. Sometimes we don’t get a lot, but we always have at least two decent ones (we never run more than a single page of them, anyway).
but we have made up questions for advice columns (cooking tips, furniture repair, etc.). Especially since these are all pretty irregular features that readers wouldn’t necessarily know to write in to, we just make them up ourselves (though we don’t go so far as to make up fake names/towns/etc. for the “readers”).
We also do not make up entries for our antiques appraisal column (where people send in photos/descriptions of their treasures and we tell them what we guess its provenance/value is–like Antiques Roadshow).
When I was a junior and senior in college, the editor of the band newsletter asked me to do an advice column for the newsletter. He passed on all the letters to me, and assured me that they were all genuine questions asked by the band members, and I know he wouldn’t lie to me. For example:
I’m just glad that I was able to help.
National Lampoon omitted the ambiguity and had a “Letters from the Editors” column. Funnier too.
Mr. Chance, you have defined the difference between “journalism” and “good business.” As a journalism student and would-be idealist, I’m a little disgusted by what you posted, even as I acknowledge its truth.
We’re not as blatant about things over here. We have never planned such a feature. But we do, for instance, run a pet column almost entirely because they can place ads for dog food against it.
It usually works in reverse–editorial comes up w/ an idea for a story, we tell advertising what we have planned, they try to sell ad space against it (even though they never claim toa ctually do so–sell against a specific story, that is–it happens all the time). The real problem comes when we have to pull a “run-at-will” story because of space concerns, but advertsising has already sold a story against it.
As for the business/journalism ethics of it all… in my opinion, there’s a big difference between the news media and entertainment magazines. Yes, our advice should still be sound, but we do not need to be as completely unbiased, esp. when it comes to what stories we run. After all, we’re not a primary information source; no one will suffer if we favor a certain news angle over others.
The other thing to consider is the editorial slant of the publication–something which my magazine TRIES to cultivate (much like Martha Stewart does–to create a certain image), but something which Newsweek or the New York Times tries to avoid having (so they can appear unbiased).
I once made up questions with an editor from playboy. He said at the time they were getting lots of questions from readers, but they were all three basic questions. A third were does size matter, another third were how to make it bigger, and the other third was whatever question-of-the-month was circulating around the bars of the country. At that time, early seventies, the QotM was “Do the stripes in silk ties indicate quality?”