A Portrait Of The New American Family

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Sept 15, 2001 by Jimmy Guterman, John Fetto

Since boomers are more likely to have been divorced than the previous 50-plus cohort, and as they live longer and produce more widows and widowers, the single senior market (and all the relationship angst that will bring) will produce topics worth more scrutiny. And boomers will be everywhere. By 2005, more than 85 million Americans will be older than 50. The median age of Americans will be 36.6 years, the highest ever.

If nearly one-third of Americans are boomers, how is targeting a new magazine at boomers different from launching a new special-interest magazine? Boomers voted for political parties in nearly identical numbers last year, indicating that the group is as divided and complex as all others. Perhaps the way to reach more segments of such groups in more persuasive ways is to reach them under the radar, relatively speaking, a little bit at a time.

That's the plan of Aurelian Communications, a firm founded by William Reilly, former chairman and chief executive of media conglomerate Primedia Inc. (Primedia is the owner of this magazine.) Aurelian doesn't intend to launch one blockbuster magazine that reaches all aging boomers, but rather to collect a series of publications, each emphasizing different aspects of boomer interests and aspirations. In the estimation of Reilly and fellow principal Eric Baum, the magazines that have pursued the older demographic simply because the wealthiest generation in American history is aging have misjudged the market. The key to success with this demographic, they say, is to pursue already established editorial niches, like antiques and health, that happen to attract older readers.

AMERICANS HAVE A MORE FLEXIBLE DEFINITION OF "FAMILY"

But there are 20-year-olds who care about antiques and health, too. So it's dangerous simply to identify a demographic group that's growing and then build a magazine around them. Ask Dorian Solot, executive director of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, a national organization for unmarried couples. "There's nothing out there for our audience," she says. "We're way larger than the gay and lesbian community, and they have hundreds of publications."

The population of unmarried couples living together is large: 7.6 million individuals or 3.8 million households, according to the Census Bureau's 2000 Current Population Survey. And these households look more and more like "traditional households": 41 percent of them include at least one child under the age of 18. What publisher wouldn't want to reach such a large and growing market?

Solot has an answer. Although she bemoans the lack of a magazine for unmarried couples, she admits that, "This community of unmarried people doesn't identify itself as a constituency. It's a transitional identity for a lot of people." Still, she says, "There's a running joke among our board of directors that we should start a lifestyle magazine for unmarried couples--a mix of profiles, stories of other people's lives, plenty of unmarried celebrity couples to keep people appropriately titillated, legal information, practical ideas about answering questions at your child's school, dealing with the pressure to get married, and so on. But what about advertising? There is no natural set of companies that wants to reach unmarried consumers, except maybe dating services."