Reader's Digest

Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine published monthly by The Reader's Digest Association, Inc.. As of 2004, the U.S. edition of Reader's Digest prints 12.5 million copies and reaches 44 million readers each month. Although its circulation has declined in recent years, the Audit Bureau of Circulations says Reader's Digest is the best-selling general magazine in the United States, exceeded only by the membership publications of AARP.

History

DeWitt Wallace conceived of the idea of a magazine containing condensed articles from many popular magazines while recovering from World War I injuries.

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DeWitt and his Canadian-born wife Lila Wallace (née Lila Bell Acheson) published the first issue on February 5 (some sources say February 7), 1922, starting out of their own home. It was available by mail for 25¢ a copy. The magazine first became available on newsstands in 1929. Circulation passed the 1,000,000-copy mark in 1935. The 10 billionth copy of the U.S. edition was published in 1994, and the 1,000th U.S. issue was the August 2005 edition.

Related Topics:
Lila Wallace - February 5 - February 7 - 1922 - 1929 - 1935 - 1994

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Types of articles

It includes original articles, condensed articles reprinted from other magazines, book excerpts, and collections of jokes, anecdotes, quotations and other short pieces. The magazine's mission as set out by the Wallaces is to include one article for each day of the month, each of "enduring value and interest."

Related Topics:
Joke - Quotation

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Articles in Reader's Digest cover a range of topics, including politics and government, health, international affairs, business, education and humor. Articles tend to be short to allow busy readers to keep up with a variety of topics without investing too much time. Regular features include "Word Power," a vocabulary-building quiz; "Life in These United States," a collection of humorous or profound reader-submitted anecdotes; and "Laughter, the Best Medicine," a collection of jokes submitted by readers.

Related Topics:
Vocabulary - Anecdotes - Laughter

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Editorial procedures

Reader's Digest is regarded as one of the most carefully edited magazines in the United States. Articles are fact-checked for authenticity and controlled by an elaborate editorial hierarchy to ensure that the final product is integrated into the Reader's Digest discourse. This discourse is highly homogeneous and articulates a very specific set of conservative values which the magazine deems to be important aspects of the dominant representation of American society.

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The resulting political stance is considered so pronounced that the University of Guelph stated publicly that its library carries the magazine only as an example of propaganda. The Reader's Digest model has been introduced in many countries around the world, in issues that are customized to a certain extent with local content, without presenting the magazine as an American product. The local Reader's Digest editions generally try to remain ambiguous about the American character of the magazine.

Related Topics:
University of Guelph - Propaganda

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Every issue has the same structure. There is, for instance, always one survival story (called "Drama in Real Life"), at least one individual achievement story, a medical article, several moralizing stories on human relations, several articles with practical advice, and some politically inspired stories in which bureaucracy, crime, radical ideologies and other behavior inconsistent with the dominant ideology of the magazine are exposed.

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The internal structure of articles also corresponds to an elaborate and fixed model. The survival stories, for instance, have a blurb presenting the drama in medias res, then return in time with an elaborate description of the initial situation. Rescue doesn't come at the very last paragraph: there is always time to restore the initial peace and formulate a lesson. The last sentences often thank the Lord or mention the medals awarded to the story's heroes.

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The Digest features three types of texts. A first group are the articles condensed from other magazines. Both their selection and condensation are done by two independently working editors, checked by a third, and approved or corrected by at least two senior editors. The same goes for articles written exclusively for the Digest: authors are asked to write articles of normal length, which then pass through the same condensation and editing procedures as other articles.

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Reader's Digest has, in certain cases, "planted" articles: it commissions articles it would like to print, donates them for free to other magazines for publication, and then reprints a condensed version. This practice of commissioning reprintable articles lends credence to certain political messages by attributing them to another source while allowing the Digest to claim political neutrality.

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Although for decades condensations from other magazines have constituted not more than 30 to 40 percent of the editorial pages, the Digest continues to position itself as a reprint magazine, as an overview of journalistic discourse in the United States and abroad.

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World view

The following are some of the basic values founding the discourse of the Reader's Digest.

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• Individual achievement. Digest characters are always struggling, against bad luck, against systems and regulations, against diseases, and their only weapons are their own courage, cooperation between individuals, and an occasional helping hand of God.
• Optimism. Most Digest stories have happy endings. There is only one other case: the article may acknowledge in the end that there are still many difficulties to overcome, and give advice.
• Moral conservatism. Though the Digest has from the beginning written very openly on sexuality, it has always been emphatically in favor of traditional marriage, loyalty to country, discipline and charity, and generally opposed to feminism, free love, positive discrimination and affirmative action.
• Free market economy. In almost every issue, the magazine opposes taxes, government regulations, budget increases, labor unions and, for many decades, the Communist system.