SPORTS MAGAZINES ARRIVE FOR WOMEN.Byline: Michele Kort Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service A few years ago, I was contacted by a woman eager to start a new sports magazine for women. Besides the fact that she had no background in journalism, I thought she was hopelessly naive. Other than a few distaff diehards like myself, nobody wanted to read about women in sports. As an example, the magazine Women's Sports and Fitness, started in the 1970s by Billie Jean King Noun 1. Billie Jean King - United States woman tennis player (born in 1943) Billie Jean Moffitt King, King , had been conceived as a publication trumpeting trum·pet n. 1. a. Music A soprano brass wind instrument consisting of a long metal tube looped once and ending in a flared bell, the modern type being equipped with three valves for producing variations in pitch. b. women's achievements on court, track and field. By the 1980s, though, it had inexorably in·ex·o·ra·ble adj. Not capable of being persuaded by entreaty; relentless: an inexorable opponent; a feeling of inexorable doom. See Synonyms at inflexible. moved into the aerobics aerobics (ârō`biks), [Gr.,=with oxygen], system of endurance exercises that promote cardiovascular fitness by producing and sustaining an elevated heart rate for a prolonged period of time, thereby pumping an increased amount of oxygen-rich studio, adding ``and Fitness'' to its moniker (1) A name, title or alias. See alias. (2) A COM object that is used to create instances of other objects. Monikers save programmers time when coding various types of COM-based functions such as linking one document to another (OLE). See COM and OLE. . Female magazine buyers, it seemed, were far more concerned about looking slim and trim than how Martina fared at Wimbledon last week. Other magazines designed to promote personal workouts, like Shape, Self, and Fitness, had the legs (and advertisers) that a strictly sports magazine didn't. Now I look back on that woman with the magazine idea and consider her a seer. Suddenly, women's sports has become a hot new publishing trend. Conde Nast - publisher of high-fashion magazines like Vogue - plans to launch a women's sports venture this fall. Sports Illustrated Sports Illustrated is the largest weekly American sports magazine owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. It has over 3 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men, 19% of the adult males in the country. - which actually held a year's option on Women's Sports and Fitness in the mid-1980s but didn't exercise it - is coming out soon with a female SI. And Weider, publisher of Shape, is launching a teen girls' fitness title, Jump, which will certainly have a strong element of sports-related content. |
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