The environment: A tough sell? The appeal of green magazine covers on the newsstand (2009)

Undergraduate: Deborah Neffa

Faculty Advisor: Jane Brown
Department: Journalism & Mass Communication

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For the past few years, magazines have released annual “environment-themed” issues to help spread information about the environment and the evolving green movement. However, not all green magazine issues have performed well on the newsstand—a factor that could be due to the cover’s presentation. This thesis sought to answer the question “Do green issues that apply traditional cover design elements (as suggested by industry norms) perform better on the newsstand?” A sample of 53 green issue covers from 31 national consumer magazines were collected and coded, and monthly single copy sales figures from 2005-2008 for the 31 magazine titles were analyzed for trends. The findings were: for the years analyzed, green magazine issues performed overall worse on the newsstand compared to the magazine’s average single copy sales figure for the same year; and the environment issues with increasing newsstand sales did not always apply traditional cover design elements suggested by industry norms. However, a few visual cover elements made a difference in helping green issues perform well on the newsstand: using blue, red, white, and/or orange as the dominant color, placing green cover lines on the left side of the cover, using large font sizes for prominent green cover lines, and including solution-oriented words (i.e., “you,” “solution,” and “future”) in the cover lines.