Magazines and Interpretive Communities: Approaching the Commercial Media Fan Magazine

This chapter considers how commercial media fan magazines have acted as community-building paratexts. It examines how specialist magazines have inspired and mediated interpretive communities. The chapter addresses questions such as how might magazine journalists themselves be analyzed as an interpretive community and what does this mean for the way in which fandom is addressed as an “insider” group or subculture. It focuses on commercially produced magazines targeted at media fandom – a grouping based around a cluster of film/TV genres (horror, fantasy, and science fiction) and franchises such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. By focusing on Doctor Who Magazine as an unusually long-running title, the chapter shows how fannish interpretive community is not only mirrored between specialist magazine producers and consumers, but can also be shared by media professionals placed within a franchise's different textual and paratextual production communities.