Accentuating the Positive

International publishing giant Gruner+Jahr entered Russia a few years ago with their popular magazine GEO. In September 2001, they launched Gala, “an elite women’s monthly magazine about famous people.”

Gala’s editor-in-chief,Yulia Vasilieva (inset), said that, in Russia, it is upper-middle class married women who are the most active readers of magazines. “Many of these married women are part of the middle class, not just because of their husbands’ income, or that of their relatives,” she said, “but also thanks to their intellectual level and to the possibilities they acquired from their education and training. Our readers are 25-40, have higher education, with strong motivational goals in life, and have specific financial and social achievements. It is quite a concrete audience which knows what they want, what they want to read, and what information they want to get out of it.”

“As a result of long, meticulous work with our French colleagues, who gave us great assistance in terms of layout, concept and staff training, we created this concept of Gala as a monthly, while in Germany and France and Poland it is a weekly,” Vasilieva said. “Our distinction from other magazines jumped out at readers from the very beginning: we have many people on the pages of our magazine. In other words, with any story you open, these are people, it is people’s lives in all their manifestations, naturally the positive ones.”

For Gala magazine is a magazine of “positive” events.  “We write about either accomplished stars or about young talents who are recognizable to our readers. The angle of approach is also important. You can write lots of ‘touchy-feely’ texts; you can write lots of biographical facts. But if you find the right angle that other publication have missed .. then your success is guaranteed. That’s why we are so meticulous about researching every personality we write about. To find the right angle is sometimes more difficult than even setting up an appointment for an interview with a glamorous star. Gala’s task is to show a celebrity from an unknown, but of course, a positive angle.”