The TOC Is for the Reader—Isn't It?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June, 2000

In some magazines, particularly women's magazines, finding the Table of Contents is a game; the reader has to go hunting for it. It takes a TV celebrity, unfamiliar with the way magazines are put together, to point out that the TOG is for the reader--it's not a page marking the end of an ad section, however far back that may be.

According to The New York Times, when Oprah Winfrey was confronted with the fact that ads had already been contracted to appear before the TOC in her new magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, and that "certain advertisers refuse to appear after the TOC," she replied: "Of course we're not going to have the Table of Contents so far in you can't find it and people think the whole thing is about ads. I'm here to represent the reader, and we don't want to go to page 18." She insisted the TOC be on page two. "The request by an advertiser to be in a magazine before the TOC is a make-believe request," Roberta Garfinide, director of print advertising at McCann-Erickson, told FoLIO:Plus. "Yes, some say they want to be before the TOC. Having said that, does it mean anything? Not really. If an advertiser says it will run only ahead of the TOC, it won't run in many magazines. You can't say the TOC is on page 20 or 30 because of ad requests. What Winfrey says is interesting and a valid point, but I don't think you'll see a lightbulb go off over editors' heads. And I don't know if readers are frustrated by it. I tend to think not." Ellen Levine, editor in chief of Good Housekeeping (where the TOC appears about page 7), who is shepherding O for Hearst, says, "In general, the decision about where the TOC appears is a discussion and a negotiation." Not at Oprah Winfrey's magazine.