AARP's magazine takes aim at the new 50

When Nancy Perry Graham, editor of AARP The Magazine, attended a Bruce Springsteen concert at Giants Stadium in New Jersey last October, she and several editors on her staff wore black T-shirts with the words “AARP The Magazine — Rocking Generations of Readers” printed on the back.

On the front was an image from the cover of the September/October 2009 issue, the rocker on stage with the headline “The Boss Turns 60.” But as Graham, who is 55, said in a column in a subsequent issue, not everyone encountered at the concert shared her staff's enthusiasm, most notably a woman in her 60s who asked, “But why would you want people to know you're old?”

For Graham, being born before the Kennedy administration is nothing to be ashamed of, and celebrities like Springsteen are increasingly happy to appear on the magazine's cover. (“I used to be on the cover of Rolling Stone,” Graham quotes Springsteen saying from the stage of the concert, “but now I'm on the cover of AARP The Magazine!”)

There was a time when editors at the magazine — published bimonthly by the organization that advocates for Americans over 50 — fully expected AARP-eligible celebrities to reach for a 10-foot pole when invited to appear on the cover. But Graham said in a recent interview that the magazine has in the past few years “reached a tipping point where we've had A-list celebrities coming to us to be on the magazine.”

Publicists for the current cover model, actor Dennis Quaid, 56, approached the magazine, said Graham, saying that Quaid was primarily interested in speaking on behalf of victims of medical errors after his own 12-day-old twins nearly died when both were inadvertently given overdoses.

It turns out that the AARP magazine, which assures readers that they are in their glory years, is itself remarkably spry, never mind the economic downturn. The magazine sold $23.9 million in advertising in the second quarter of 2010, compared with $20.9 million during the same period in 2009, an increase of 14.5 percent, according to the Magazine Publishers of America.

During that same period, among roughly 235 major magazines, revenues grew 6.2 percent. As for the number of advertising pages sold, the AARP magazine was up 10.4 percent in the second quarter over last year, compared with an average page increase of 1.1 percent for other magazines.

Mailed free to AARP members, it has the largest circulation of any magazine, distributing 24.4 million copies of each issue in 2009, more than three times that of Reader's Digest, which has the third-largest distribution, with 7.6 million.

(An issue-oriented AARP publication, AARP Bulletin, had circulation of 24.2 million.)

AARP now includes within its eligibility range the majority of baby boomers — those born from 1946 to 1964 — making them, in an odd bit of symmetry, 46 to 64 years old. And the magazine, which in an earlier incarnation was called Modern Maturity and struck a more geriatric tone, now tends to feature on its cover celebrities on the younger side, including actress Valerie Bertinelli (50) and Dr. Mehmet Oz (50).

Formerly known as the American Association of Retired Persons, the organization started going solely by its initials a decade ago, and to say it represents retired people today is largely a misnomer: about half its 40 million members still work. (Membership exceeds the magazine's circulation because only one copy is sent to a household.)

The current issue of the magazine (September/October) unveils a redesign that is decidedly contemporary, with more white space, short articles that tend not to jump to another page, and numerous referrals to the website (aarp.org/magazine), which also has been revamped.

Channels on the website recently expanded to 13 from seven, including one channel for technology, debunking the perception that older Americans are not computer literate.

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