Strategies of Forming a Newspaper Reading Audience

Abstract

This paper analyzes the editorial strategies of selected journals that formed and shaped the reading audience and textually objectified and concretized the implicit reader. The first part of the paper presents concepts important for understanding the reading instance in cases when it is the female reader (and not the male reader), and then refers to the definition of communication texts, as a specific periodic genre. The central part of the paper analyzes two magazines, Žena danas [Women Today] and Nedeljne ilustracije [Weekly Illustrations], as examples of the two poles of the readership. From the corpus of the magazine Žena danas (1936–1940), the advisory section Sa radnog stola [From the Desktop] was selected, while the focus of the analysis in the Nedeljne ilustracije (1925–1941) was the section Naša čitateljka [Our reader]. Both magazines had intensive communication with their audience and represent important places of the so-called transactional reader exchanges. The comparison of these methods of two poetically-politically-ideologically different journals indicates the similarities and differences of applied editorial strategies, but also the stratification and complexity of the interwar female readership, as well as possible and probable points of intersection of presumed groups within it.