“This is Very Much Not On-Message for DWM”

This talk will build on Matt Hills analysis, in the Wiley Handbook of Magazine Studies, of the commercial fan magazine as a type of publication marked by fan-journalists’ “double-time” (Hills 2020). He also addressed the “intra-franchise fandom” characterising the officially-licensed Doctor Who Magazine’s production team (ibid). DWM is unusually long-running, and can be traced back to Doctor Who Weekly (1979-80). The Magazine has variously been analysed as a space in which fan interpretations became more sophisticatedly auteurist (Booy 2012), and as the beginning of official, TV-production attempts to paratextually orient fan readings (Sandifer 2014). The tension between these two types of reading illustrates how the commercial fan magazine remains caught between priorities of branding and giving a voice to “grassroots” fandom. This splitting has been widely testified to in fan studies, with its binaries of affirmational/transformational fandom (Hills 2014); of “new industry-driven” and “traditional” fans (Busse and Gray 2014); of “brand fans” versus “traditional fans” (Linden and Linden 2017: 37), and discussions of “corporatized fandom” (Booth 2019: 29). 

However, the commercial fan magazine has to continually find ways of hybridising or combining these versions of “fandom” and “brandom” (Guschwan 2012) in its address. Considering this duality, Matt Hills will focus on the magazine’s 2022 rebranding after it was announced that Russell T Davies would be returning to show-run the TV programme for a second time, and that Disney would be Doctor Who’s co-producer and global distributor outside the UK. Along with undergoing a re-brand, DWM also welcomed a new editor from issue 595 in 2023. Different editorial eras have been a focus of fanzine analysis (see e.g. Kilburn 2017 and Kibble-White 2017), though the current ‘era’ has yet to receive sustained fan commentary. I will consider how the “Disney Doctor Who” or “RTD2” incarnation of DWM under Jason Quinn’s editorship has distinctively engaged with contemporary norms of branded, franchised cultural production. 

Bio: Dr. Matt Hills is an honorary Professor at the University of Bristol, and formerly a Professor of Fandom Studies at the University of Huddersfield. He is the author of a number of monographs, beginning with Fan Cultures (Routledge 2002), and has co-edited collections such as Adventures Across Space and Time: A Doctor Who Reader (Bloomsbury 2023) and, most recently, Theatre Fandom (University of Iowa Press 2025). Recent publications include 2025 book chapters in the following edited collections: The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom: Second Edition, Entering the Multiverse (also Routledge) and Affect in Fandom (Amsterdam University Press), with work forthcoming in further collections such as Bridging Design and Fandom (Emerald) and Acquiring Fan Lifestyles (University of Michigan Press).