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"      The Twitterverse blew up recently over a magazine cover: specifically, the cover of Port that touted &amp;quot;A New Golden Age&amp;quot; of print media over a photo of six white male magazine editors. There were a few, um, interest groups who took issue with it, and the assertion that this was a definitive list of who was doing the most significant work between the sheets was challenged by no less than the venerable New Republic, under the headline &amp;quot;Can Women&amp;#039;s Magazines Do Serious Journalism?&amp;quot; The article nicely pointed out that ELLE is the only magazine edited primarily for women that&amp;#039;s been nominated in the Columns and Commentary category for an ASME (American Society of Magazine Editors) award in the past decade. Unfortunately, Sid Holt, the chief executive of ASME (and one of my oldest friends\u2014we worked together at that good ol&amp;#039; boys magazine Rolling Stone in the prior millennium), said, basically, that serious journalism is not the &amp;quot;mission&amp;quot; of women&amp;#039;s magazines.   It reminded me of when I gave a lecture at Columbia University and showed the students several of our stories\u2014including a nearly 7,000-word piece on Barack Obama by Laurie Abraham, one of a handful of journalists to accompany the then senator on his historic trip to Kenya\u2014and a (male) student raised his hand to offer, &amp;quot;I had no idea you did such important stories. How does it feel to know nobody reads them?&amp;quot; He meant you, dear reader, the some 8 million smart, educated, chic, interesting women who consume ELLE in print, online, and on tablets each month. It&amp;#039;s your status as a woman that makes you &amp;quot;nobody.&amp;quot; When I pointed that out to him, he apologized. He was referring to the fact, he said, that ELLE doesn&amp;#039;t get much media attention for the good writing and reporting you take for granted\u2014I wrote off his attitude to his youth and narcissism. But it&amp;#039;s shocking, and painful, that the director of an organization devoted to promoting American magazines isn&amp;#039;t familiar enough with the content of one of the biggest magazines in the country (ELLE produces more editorial than 90 percent of magazines published in the United States), not to mention the other fine magazines out there published for women, to be able to intelligently answer the question with yes, in fact, we do publish &amp;quot;literary journalism&amp;quot; and long-form reporting. Of course the men on the cover of Port are lauded for doing really loooonnnnggg pieces, but then men have always confused length with quality. (Though we regularly break the 2,000-word mark, which seems to be the bar for where &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; writing begins.)* All of this is to say that it might be time for some nonwomen to crack open a magazine edited for half the population, so that they can be conversant about what we&amp;#039;re actually doing over here before they comment on it. And more to the point, they might want to know what women are actually talking about. As Emily Nussbaum, who covers television for The New Yorker and formerly at New York, tweeted: &amp;quot;It was a recurrent frustration that few male editor peers of mine read ELLE, so they weren&amp;#039;t aware of certain key bylines/topics.&amp;quot; Indeed, only when a general-interest publication (a category that includes men&amp;#039;s magazines because, as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out long ago, men are the subject, women automatically &amp;quot;other&amp;quot;) takes on an issue does it become broadly important or relevant. In just one of many examples of this, we ran a (3,740-word) piece about expectant mothers choosing selective reduction in pregnancies with twins, but it only became Topic A in the national conversation a year later, when The New York Times Magazine did virtually the same piece. But then, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. To celebrate this type of ambitious magazine writing (and show the less-enlightened out there what they&amp;#039;ve been missing all these years), the ELLE team is sharing some of our best longform pieces on Twitter via #WomenAtLength, and we hope you&amp;#039;ll join us by posting your favorite women&amp;#039;s magazine journalism from ELLE and elsewhere under that hashtag.  *I feel compelled to do a little fact checking here. New Republic writer Jessica Grose says that based on our 2010 issues\u2014why she went back that far, to a year marked by a recessionary downturn in pages industry-wide, I have no idea\u2014 ELLE&amp;#039;s longest features were &amp;quot;under 4,000 words.&amp;quot; Quickly perusing our 2010 issues, however, I found at least three stories longer than that. More recently and importantly, from May 2012 to May 2013, we&amp;#039;ve run eight stories that broke that admittedly artificial threshold, two of which were positively boyish: one coming in at 5,979 words, another 5,532. Not that anybody&amp;#039;s counting. Adapted from ELLE Editor-in-Chief Robbie Myers&amp;#039;s August 2013 editor&amp;#039;s letter.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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