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The New York Times covers the entrance of Nick Friedman into the parenting magazine frays:
Though 85 percent of Scholastic Parent & Child readers are
women, they will now be getting advice on parenting from a man:
Scholastic named Nick Friedman the first male editor of the magazine
last month.In the magazine world, gender roles still hold strong: men tend to edit magazines read by men, and women those for women.
Mr. Friedman said that although he added a male perspective, with columns titled Dad’s Home, for example, he also understood mothers.
“More
and more dads are involved in child-rearing today,” he said. With two
children, ages 13 and 19, “I have a built-in research department. And
my wife is a preschool teacher in Brooklyn, so there’s a lot of
child-rearing conversation that occurs at the dinner table every night.”Mr.
Friedman is still something of a rarity in the parents’ magazine world.
Parents and American Baby were both founded by men, but Patrick Taylor,
a spokesman for the Meredith Corporation, the publisher of the magazines, said a check of the archives had not turned up any male editors in chief.
The article goes on with some other data about who heads up the parenting publications.
I've been writing for a regional parenting publication, Cleveland Family, since 2003 and its editor has always been female (there have been three or four since I started) but its publisher is a man. I've also had work published in other regional parenting pubs and most have had female editors but at least two - one in CT and one in PA - had male editors.
What do we think? Does this really matter? Of course the audience is key, and we're not talking about magazines that have the word "mother" or some version of "mother" in them but rather definitely have the more generic "parent" or some version of "parent" in the title.
It would be great to hear from the male BlogHers especially.
