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for Working Mother
A new editor freshens up title for moms who work
By Lisa Schneider
In 1979, Working Mother was a pioneer of sorts as the first magazine to speak to mothers in business suits.
It has remained a one-of-a-kind publication in terms of serving that target audience, with no other magazine solely devoted to working mothers of all types, from moms who work part time to work-at-home moms to high-heeled moms in high-profile executive jobs.
Now, under a new ownership led by Carol Evans, a former publisher when the magazine was a part of McDonald Communications, Working Mother is getting a makeover under new editor Jill Kirschenbaum.
The new Working Mother will offer mothers a more narrative approach to dealing with the issues of raising children while attempting to forge ahead in their careers, in place of service-based articles in which the experts expound clear-cut solutions to specific problems.
The tone will be lighter.
"We would like the magazine to be fun and irreverent and practical, as any mother's group would be, not just homework," she says.
Kirschenbaum, who came over from Fast Company, says a primary goal is to make the magazine more attractive to younger readers.
"I think that this approach will attract younger readers and will resonate with our current readers as well."
She believes the generation of mothers in their 20s is notably different from those in their 30s and 40s.
"They want work that is professionally and spiritually rewarding, and a deeply involved home life," she says of the younger generation.
"They don't make a distinction between who they are at work and who they are at home as older women have done, and they expect to be able to find jobs that accommodate that."
The magazine's current readers have a median age of 37.2 and an average household income of $56,068.
Working Mother has a circulation of 925,000, up from 923,000 in 2001, and will come out with 10 issues in 2002.
The publication was down 21.37 percent in ad pages for 2001.
Kirschenbaum says the new Working Mother will also include more provocative articles that address tensions in the workplace as well as among mothers themselves.
"We can be our own worst critics," says Kirschenbaum.
"There are tensions among full-time, part-time, and stay-at-home mothers. It doesn't serve women at all to be in conflict with one another."
The magazine also plans to launch a new initiative called the Best Companies for Multicultural Women, which would be similar to the title's 100 Best Companies, a listing that comes out every October in which Working Mother ranks various self-nominated companies according to specific family-friendly criteria.
The details of the new feature will be announced in a conference in June, and the list is expected to come out in 2003.
Working Mother's editorial change, from service-based parenting articles to more empathetic narratives, will land the book in competition with magazines such as Hearst's O-The Oprah Magazine and Time Inc.'s Real Simple, magazines with circulations of 2.75 million and 784,307, respectively, for the quarter ending in June 2001.
Time Inc.'s Parenting and Gruner + Jahr's Parents, two more traditional competitors, had circulations of 1.6 million and 2 million, respectively, for the same quarter.
Carol Evans did away with Working Mother's long-standing sister publication, 25-year-old Working Woman, immediately upon buying the two publications, thus eliminating any chance of internal competition.
Working Mother Media, the entity that Evans bought, now includes only one other publication aside from Working Mother: the National Association of Female Executives' newsletter, Executive Female.
February 13, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Lisa Schneider is a New York writer and a contributor to Media Life.
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