Who reads Dissent
Rule, James B.
Nobody reads Dissent but a bunch of old lefties." So said one of our friends in the course of discussions about the magazine's future after Irving Howe's death last year. The remark was...
...Dissent subscribers are not so old...
...Last summer, we set out to redress this neglect...
...We can report that our friend's seat-of-thepants analysis was, at the very least, highly exaggerated...
...The response was heartwarming, both in terms of the numbers who replied and of the wit and thoughtfulness of their comments...
...Nobody reads Dissent but a bunch of old lefties...
...More preponderately, we sense that it attests to a genuine skew in the readership—and, accordingly, an untapped source of new subscribers...
...To a question that asked people what they find attractive in Dissent that they missed in other periodicals, many pinpointed in-depth, analytical writing—though many of these same readers, like the one quoted above, allowed that there could be too much of this sort of good thing...
...culture (76 percent), Western Europe (54 percent), Eastern Europe (51 percent), and union affairs (45 percent...
...The remark was meant as a provocation, and so the editors took it...
...We polled a randomly selected seven hundred of our three to four thousand individual subscribers...
...These figures come to more than 100 percent because people were invited to choose as many topics as they liked...
...Or rather, in age, as in many other characteristics, they show far more diversity than we had imagined...
...Thoughts that don't fit the categories presented risk being lopped off or pushed out of any recognizable shape...
...We hope that our SUMMER • 1994 • 413 Notebook new coverage of feminist issues will bring the magazine to the attention of this under-reached constituency...
...We next turn to the more complicated task of surveying the larger number of readers who buy their copies of Dissent from newsstands and bookstores...
...Don't give up the struggle," one reader wrote, a sentiment echoed in different terms by countless respondents...
...The results were witty and varied...
...Surveys, as we all know, are Procrustean beds for ideas...
...we realized that, in the nearly forty years of Dissent's existence, no one had ever bothered to do a systematic study of our readership...
...To a degree, this finding may reflect a tendency among couples to take out subscriptions in the man's name, rather than the woman's...
...What do subscribers like to read about in Dissent...
...But fortunately, many respondents availed themselves freely of our invitation to characterize their reactions to Dissent in their own words...
...Older readers seemed to gravitate a bit more to the New York Review and the New Yorker, and the younger to the Nation...
...To all subscribers who participated in this survey, our sincere thanks...
...the rest are widely distributed across other occupations, with a concentration in the professions...
...But the irony wasn't lost...
...Forty-nine percent declined any religious identification...
...We now have returns to nearly 70 percent of our inquiries—a response rate that provides a statistically credible portrait of our subscribers...
...Yet, contrary to some of our expectations, only about one-third are university teachers...
...Median family income is about $65,000, with 12 percent of respondents reporting family incomes of less than $25,000 and another 12 percent incomes above $125,000...
...So said one of our friends in the course of discussions about the magazine's future after Irving Howe's death last year...
...Dissent subscribers are a well-educated lot...
...There was a slight tendency for older readers to express more interest in Western Europe and the Middle East...
...One question on the survey asked for religious identification: "Do you consider yourself as part of any of the following groups . . .?" encouraging respondents to check as many as they liked of a list of groups including "Protestant," "Catholic," and "Jewish...
...Leave that to the New Republic and Mother Jones...
...We could not completely exorcise such effects from the results noted above...
...Roughly half are below fifty, and about 18 percent are below thirty-five...
...To a question asking what changes the magazine should avoid, one respondent wrote, "Please avoid the cute and the trendy...
...In one striking note of nondiversity, we were astounded to find that virtually four out of five respondents were men...
...Nearly half hold doctorates or the equivalent, and another third have other advanced degrees...
...Thirty-two percent described themselves as Jewish, 12 percent as Protestant, and 7 percent as Catholic...
...414 • DISSENT...
...When they're not reading Dissent, our subscribers report reading the Nation (50 percent), the New York Review (48 percent), the New Yorker (41 percent), and the New Republic (32 percent), among many other journals...
...Other frequently chosen categories were articles on U.S...
...In response to an open-ended survey question asking respondents to cite anything they didn't like about Dissent, for example, one reader wrote, "A certain stodginess and a touch of hostility to multicultural ism...
...At the other end of that spectrum, some 9 percent are older than seventy-five...
...politics was the category most often chosen from the list we provided—by some 91 percent of respondents...
Vol. 41 • July 1994 • No. 3
