A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combination of the three.
The first American magazines debuted in 1741, when Andrew Bradford's American Magazine and Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine began publication in Philadelphia a mere 3 days apart from each other.
All this changed during the 1830s when publishers began taking advantage of a general decline in the cost of printing and mailing publications and started producing less-expensive magazines with a wider audience in mind. Publishers took advantage of the expanded audience and began offering family magazines, children’s magazines, and women’s magazines.
The first truly successful mass circulation magazine in the United States was The Saturday Evening Post. This weekly magazine first began printing in 1821 and remained in regular print production until 1969, when it briefly ceased circulation. However, in 1971 a new owner remodeled the magazine to focus on health and medical breakthroughs.
The arrival of the 20th century brought with it new types of magazines, including news, business, and picture magazines. In time, these types of publications came to dominate the industry and attract vast readerships.
As publishers became interested in succinctly presenting the fresh increase of worldwide information that technology made available during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they designed the newsmagazine. In 1923, Time became the first newsmagazine that focused on world news. Time first began publication with the proposition that “people are uninformed because no publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend simply keeping informed.
Photojournalism, or the telling of stories through photography, also became popular during the early 20th century. Although magazines had been running illustrations since the 19th century, as photography grew in popularity so did picture magazines.
The most influential picture magazine was Henry Luce’s Life, which regularly published between 1936 and 1972. Within weeks of its initial publication, Life had a circulation of 1 million. In Luce’s words, the publication aimed “to see life; to see the world; to witness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things.” |
