Week 10 Reading Response

The essay, “On Covers of Many Magazines, a Full Racial palette Is Still Rare” by David Carr on page 649 of Everything’s an Argument, was full of facts and figures. This was an essay that, in my opinion, was fully evaluative. David Carr’s essay is explaining certain racial trends in today’s magazine industry. In addition to David Carr’s facts and figures, he also provided visual statistical graphs specifying different magazine’s racial tendencies.

This essay did not surprise me in anyway. The facts, as they are shown in this article, seem understandable to me. It seems that many magazines are out purely for sales, and that makes perfect business sense to me. There are magazines, as this article explains, that are specifically designed for the black female audience. One could then assume that a magazine, such as Cosmo, is designed for the average white female. Surely the African-American targeted magazines wouldn’t feature a white person on their cover, so shall we assume that they are being biased?

The article was featured in a newspaper’s business section rather than the lifestyle section, because it is more about the demographics and sales aspect of the topic. The lifestyle section would be more geared toward the articles that are usually provided inside a magazine, and not the information researched about those who are reading, and which audience is being targeted more so.

If this article had been featured within the pages of a lifestyle section, it would have had a different tone to it. I don’t think it would have gone into so much depth of the sales and statistics covering the race of the cover models. It would have been more based on how racial targeting is affecting its readers.