Jet Helps You Keep In Touch with African American Pop Culture

Reading about celebrities and other famous people takes little or no effort. With so many publications and web sites dedicated to entertainers and other famous individuals, there is no problem finding reading material to satisfy one’s cravings. One of the many magazines feature people is Jet, a magazine oriented toward the movers and shakers in the Black Community. Let’s take a look at what this magazine has to offer:

Basic Contents of This Magazine:

With about 67 pages in every issue, Jet can be counted on for the following sections (Listed Alphabetically):

Black History
Celebrities
Census
Cover Story
Entertainment
Health
In the Spotlight
Jet Beauty of the Week
Lifestyles
Love & Happiness
National Report
Newsmakers
Sports
Television
The Week’s Best Photos

Magazine Web Page/Pricing:

To find out more about this magazine, the place to visit on the internet is ebonyjet.com. Like the web site name tells you, Jet and Ebony Magazine share the same web page and both magazines are part of Johnson Publishing.

Jet Magazine is published weekly and it currently carries a cover price of $1.75. This is already less expensive than most magazines, but subscription discounts are easy to find and they can cut the rate down to a very low level. It is common to find Jet selling for only $26 for a full year- a 72% discount off the cover price.

Final Thoughts:

Founded in 1951 by John Johnson, in Chicago, Illinois, Jet Magazine is a pop culture publication dedicated to the Black Community. This magazine features numerous short stories about celebrities, athletes, businesspeople, and others who are prominent in the Black Community and who hold a claim to fame in some respect.

Jet is one of several magazines I pick up and glance through on occasion and it is also one of several race/ethnic- specific magazines that I receive in my mail box each month or week. Many people are surprised to learn that someone like me would read a magazine like Jet, but much like other magazines of this genre, I read it for the cultural enrichment that it provides. It is always a good idea to hear things from a different perspective, too, and Jet helps to satisfy my political and social interests with its short articles that cover black men and women who have made news headlines for their political aspirations and/or their social activism.

Jet is a little different from other magazines in several ways. The most obvious difference is the small physical size. Jet is published with digest- style dimensions, making it easy to hold in one hand and read. Another difference is the format. Instead of having a list of regular departments inserted between featured articles, Jet combines its features and departments into one. Each of the sections listed above is fairly consistent from month to month, like a department in a typical magazine. But Jet includes within these departments articles that are similar to the full- length features that you find in other magazines, only they are much shorter in length than those of a typical magazine.

Because Jet is so short in length and small in size, its articles are not as in- depth as I would prefer. Just when you think an article is going to get going and talk at length about an important topic, it ends abruptly, giving way to the next article. In this sense, Jet reads more like a newspaper than a magazine. One exception to this is the cover story, which can cover about four pages in each issue. But other than that (and a few other exceptions), the articles in Jet are over almost as quickly as you begin them. The magazine is just under 70 pages in length, and it tries to cover a large amount of material in a small amount of space.

Jet Magazine does offer a few surprises in each issue and one that grabbed my attention immediately is the “Love & Happiness” section. This part of Jet features wedding announcements for Black couples, complete with a photo of the happy bride and groom. This wouldn’t be so surprising except for one thing: The people in the pictures are not famous. They are ordinary people like you and me who just happened to submit their photos to Jet Magazine for inclusion in this monthly section. I remember the first time I saw this section in Jet. I looked at the pictures and the names of the couple and I couldn’t understand why I didn’t recognize them. I assumed that these were photos of famous people who recently got married (like one would expect in a magazine), but I quickly learned that isn’t the case at all. This inclusion of regular Joes and Janes is unique, and it expands Jet’s personality, helping to make the magazine more personal and friendly.

Overall, Jet is a pretty good magazine that could be much better if it was about twice as long and contained larger pages, like a standard magazine. The expansion would also make the articles more readable, because they would be much longer and more in- depth. But taken as it stands, Jet is still a pretty good magazine. The articles on celebrities, newsmakers, politicians, and social issues and concerns make Jet a timely publication that helps keep readers informed on the latest happenings in Black Community.