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Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine published monthly by the Reader's Digest Association. As of 2004, the U.S. edition of Reader's Digest prints 12.5 million copies and reaches 44 million readers each month. It is also published in a large-type edition called Reader's Digest Large Type, and in a Spanish language edition called Selecciones.
DeWitt and Lila Wallace published the first issue on February 5 (some sources say February 7), 1922. It was available by mail for 25¢ a copy. The magazine first became available on newsstands in 1929.
Circulation passed the 1,000,000-copy mark in 1935. The 10 billionth copy of the U.S. edition was published in 1994.
Reader's Digest includes original articles, condensed articles reprinted from other magazines, book excerpts, and collections of jokes, anecdotes, quotations and other short pieces. The magazine's mission as set out by the Wallaces is to include one article for each day of the month, each of "enduring value and interest."
Articles in Reader's Digest cover a range of topics, including politics and government, health, international affairs, business, education and humor. Articles tend to be short to allow busy readers to keep up with a variety of topics without investing too much time.
Regular features include "Word Power," a vocabulary-building quiz; "Life in These United States," a collection of humorous or profound reader-submitted anecdotes; and "Laughter, the Best Medicine," a collection of jokes submitted by readers.
In contradistinction to its somewhat old-fashioned image, Reader's Digest is one of the most professionally made magazines in the world. E.g., in every article, every single "fact" mentioned is verified by a special research department. Every step in the process of selecting, condensing and translating articles is performed several times by different editors, and controlled by an elaborate editorial hierarchy, which guarantees that the final product is fully integrated into the specific Reader's Digest discourse.
This discourse can be characterized as follows. It is highly homogeneous, and articulates a very specific set of conservative values, some of which are important aspects of the dominant representation of American society. This political stance is considered so pronounced that at least one university, The University of Guelph, stated publicly to a query about carrying the title that they would only have the magazine as an example of propaganda. Secondly, this model is introduced all over the world, but without being presented as "American". The local Reader's Digest editions quite consistently attempt to create ambiguity about the American, international or local character of the magazine.
The homogenisation procedures leading to the specific Reader's Digest discourse have various aspects. First of all, every issue has the same structure. There is, for instance, always one survival story (called "Drama in Real Life"), at least one individual achievement story, a medical article, several moralizing stories on human relations, several articles with practical advice, and some politically inspired stories in which bureaucracy, crime, radical ideologies and other behavior inconsistent with the dominant ideology of the magazine are exposed.
Secondly, the internal structure of those articles also corresponds to an elaborate and fixed model. The survival stories, for instance, have a blurb presenting the drama in medias res, then return in time with an elaborate description of the initial situation. Unlike what one would expect, rescue doesn't come at the very last paragraph: there is always time to restore the initial peace and formulate a lesson. The last sentences always either thank the Lord or mention the medals awarded by the story's heroes.
Thirdly, homogenisation also dominates the editorial procedures. The Digest features three types of texts. A first group are the articles condensed from other magazines. Both their selection and condensation are done by two independently working editors, checked by a third, and approved or corrected by at least two senior editors. The same goes for articles written exclusively for the Digest: authors are asked to write articles of normal length, which then pass through the same condensation and editing procedures as other articles. Finally, the Reader's Digest has a policy of what is called "planting" articles. It commissions articles it would like to reprint, donates them for free to other magazines for integral publication, and then publishes a condensed version itself. Thus even what is presented as non - Reader's Digest is controlled, or, in other words, the target system produces its own source texts.
This practice of "pseudo-reprint" makes it possible to "innocentize" messages by attributing them to another instance. However, this strategy gets a specific significance in the Reader's Digest. Indeed, it seems that the Digest makes conscious attempts to present itself as a faithful representation of legitimate public discourse, as the truthful incarnation of generally accepted Western civil values. Firstly, although for decades the condensations from other magazines constitute not more than 30-40 % of the editorial pages, the Digest continues to present itself as a reprint magazine, as an overview of journalistic discourse in the United States and abroad.
Secondly, Reader's Digest consistently de-historicizes its own discourse and values: every article in the Digest is by definition presented as being "of lasting interest". It avoids printing articles which risk to be outdated after a year or so, and even very specific events are described as instances of general situations and features of society and mankind. And thirdly, the Digest never acknowledges that society is divided in often conflicting interest groups: it always defends the citizen, the nation, mankind and morality in general against specific groups dividing and threatening them, thus imposing its specific viewpoints by transforming them into transcendental values.
The most important factor about the worldview Reader's Digest propagates, again, it that it is homogeneous and permeates every single article. The following are some of the basic values founding the discourse of the Reader's Digest.
Although Reader's Digest was founded in the U.S., its international editions have made it the best-selling monthly magazine in the world. The magazine's worldwide circulation including all editions has reached 21 million copies and over 100 million readers.
The first international edition was published in the United Kingdom in 1938. Reader's Digest is currently published in 48 editions and 19 languages and is available in over 60 countries.
Reader's Digest presents itself as representative of mankind as a whole by creating ambiguity about its American, international or local character. In reality, its 48 foreign editions, which account for about 50 % of its trade volume, are all controlled from the American headquarters. Except for 2 or 3 articles in every issue, they are entirely composed of articles taken from the US edition. The local editorial boards comprise only a handful of people. They make a selection from the US edition, which however has to be approved by the American office. Those articles are then translated by local translators, and the translations are edited by the local editors to make it match the obligatory "well-educated informal" style of the American edition. However, every significant change in the article has to be approved by the US editors.
Still, the foreign editions also comprise a limited number of local articles. But again, whether written for the Digest or taken from local magazines, the selection of those texts has to be approved. They are then all translated into English, condensed and edited in the American office, and retranslated into their original language.
Conscious attempts are made to give the foreign editions a local look, or to hide the American origin. A local Reader's Digest edition will never be seen as a threat to the local cultural identity, as imported American cultural products often are. For instance, all editions have the table of contents on the front cover. Whereas the American edition, however, mentions the authors of the articles or the (American) publications they have been taken from, the foreign editions only mention the titles. Equally important is that the publicity in the foreign editions is entirely managed by the local staff and therefore refers at a high degree to local products or situations.
But there are more elaborate ways. Many American articles are integrated within the local context. For instance, in an article on air travel, Kennedy Airport will be replaced by a local airport, data on American Airlines by information on local companies. Local statistics may be added, currencies and measures will be adapted. Local names, quotes or pictures of local sights will sometimes replace the original ones. All those operations are called "localisation" by the Digest editors: they are performed by the local editors according to general central rules but without specific US control.
Other interventions are more far-reaching: they aim at adapting a text completely to the local situation. For instance, a quiz on American national history may be adapted by various foreign editions. The questions will then be replaced by questions on local history. However the structure of the game will be maintained, and questions will have to be of the same type (politics, sports, etc.) and of the same degree of difficulty. These kinds of adaptations are performed in close collaboration with the American staff. Another, similar intervention is to complement the numerous sections featuring short anecdotes (such as Quotable Quotes, Points to Ponder, Humor in Uniform etc.) with local anecdotes.
An easy way to give the foreign editions a local touch is to select articles from the American edition which deal with phenomena in the receiving culture - the French edition may for instance reproduce an American article on French impressionist paintings. Local editions also avoid reprinting articles which may hurt sensitive spots in the receiving culture - for instance, the Italian edition will not select articles which are critical of Catholicism. In general, the local editions will also avoid to select texts which are too closely linked to very specific American situations. On the other hand, the few articles written by local authors always deal with local topics.
In short, Reader's Digest constructs an international, or better, a general world, cut loose from specific historical constellations. This world is based on a very specific, unacknowledged set of Western, even American values, but is given a local surface representation.
John Bainbridge, 1945: Little Wonder. Or, The Reader's Digest and how it grew, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock.
John Heidenry, 1993: Theirs was the Kingdom. Lila and DeWitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader's Digest, New York / London: WW Norton.
Clem Robyns, 1994: "The Internationalisation of Social and Cultural Values: On the Homogenization and Localization Strategies of the Reader's Digest", in Jana Králová & Zuzana Jettmarová, Translation Strategies and Effects in Cross-Cultural Value Transfers and Shifts, Prague: Folia Translatologica, 83-92.
Samuel A. Schreiner, 1977: The Condensed World of the Reader's Digest, New York: Stein and Day.
James Playsted Wood, 1958: Of Lasting Interest: The Story of the Reader's Digest, Westport Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
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