Yoga Journal is a magazine on yoga as exercise founded in California in 1975 with the goal of combining the essence of traditional yoga with scientific understanding. It is associated with a website and regular conferences, and produces materials such as DVDs on yoga and related subjects. The magazine has repeatedly won Western Publications Association's Maggie Awards for "Best Health and Fitness Magazine". Yoga Journal has been criticized for representing yoga as being intended for affluent white women; in 2019 it has attempted to remedy this by choosing a wider variety of yoga models.
Beginnings
Yoga Journal was started in May 1975 by the California Yoga Teachers Association, which included William Staniger, Chairman, Rama Jyoti Vernon, President, Janis Paulsen, Secretary/Treasurer, and board members Ike and Judith Lasater, Rose Garfinkle, and Jean Girardot. Staniger was the founding editor. Judith Lasater was Copy Editor, Paulsen, Elmer Brunsman, and Girardot were Assistant Editors, and Ike Lasater was Business and Advertising Director. Their goal was to combine "the essence of classical yoga with the latest understandings of modern science." The journal grew from the CYTA's newsletter, which had been called The Word. Initially, the journal was staffed by volunteers, and contributors were unpaid. The first issue's 300 copies were personally distributed by the founders.
Growth
By the mid-1990s, as yoga's popularity in America grew, circulation for Yoga Journal reached 66,000. During these years, key figures at the magazine included Michael Glicksohn, Stephen Bodian and Rick Fields and Linda Cogozzo. In the fall of 1998, John Abbott, a former investment banker at Citicorp and a yoga practitioner, bought the magazine and brought in Kathryn Arnold as editor-in-chief. In January 2000, they redesigned and relaunched the magazine. Since their arrival, the paid circulation grew from 90,000 to 350,000 by 2010; the readership reached over 1,300,000. Yoga Journal has won major media awards including eight Western Publications Association's Maggie Awards for "Best Health and Fitness Magazine," and the Award's top honor for "Best Overall Consumer Publication." Forbes magazine has called the Yoga Journal website "the Web's most expansive and impressive Yoga site."
Coverage
Yoga Journal runs features on the themes of yoga, food and nutrition, fitness, wellness, and fashion and beauty. Early in the journal's history, in 1976, it published the guru Ram Dass's confession. The journalist Stefanie Syman calls its language that "of science and physiology, of diet and blood pressure". In her view, the journal uses "highly clinical-sounding language" even when covering "more mystical topics"; it stressed the use of yoga as therapy. Syman notes that the journal's coverage was "eclectic", especially noticeable in its calendar and classified advertisements. Yoga Journal's 2012 survey, Yoga in America found the yoga market to be worth more than $10 billion per year. The data, collected by the Harris InteractiveService Bureau, shows that 20.4 million people practice yoga in America. Yoga Journal has 12 international editions, published in Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Thailand and Turkey.
Criticism
The social historian Sarah Schrank records that co-founder Judith Lasater "made waves" with her public criticism of the magazine in 2010; in Lasater's view, "photos of naked or half-naked women... do not teach the viewer about yoga practice or themselves. They aren't even about the celebration of the beauty of the human body or the beauty of the poses , which I support. These ads are just about selling a product." The journalist Rosalie Murphy, writing in The Atlantic in 2014, stated that Yoga Journal and similar yoga magazines are illustrated in "nearly every spread" with a thin woman, nearly always white; the image of yoga that is conveyed is, she argues, that yoga is intended for affluent white women. Murphy notes that the apparent stereotype is grounded in reality: in a 2012 study by Yoga Journal itself, over 80% of American practitioners of yoga were white. In January 2019, Yoga Journal exceptionally published two covers for the magazine, one showing a slim white woman, the other showing a larger black woman, both accompanied by a headline "The Leadership Issue", intended to examine the evolution of yoga and the part played by "lineage, social media, and power dynamics." The pair of covers drew a strong response, leading the journal's brand director, Tasha Eichenseher, to respond with an apology that "we caused harm" to "communities that have been disproportionately excluded from yoga", and an explanation that she was "working to make Yoga Journal more representative—regarding age, race, ability, body type, yoga style, gender, and experience."
