Case Study 2: Magazines 137
Case Study 2:
Magazines
Introduction
Which magazine do you think has the largest circulation in the world today? Is it a celebrity
magazine? A news magazine? A sports magazine? A youth magazine? Reader’s Digest? National
Geographic? Wrong. The world’s top selling magazine—with well over 20 million subscribers—is
a magazine you most likely have never heard of—AARP The Magazine.
AARP The Magazine (formerly Modern Maturity) is an American
publication aimed at people aged fifty and over, and carries
stories such as: ‘Look Who’s Turning 50’, ‘The Cruelest Funeral
Scam’ and ‘The New Midlife Crisis’, reflecting the large numbers
of baby boomers with surplus income.
But while a magazine for the baby boomers might have the
largest circulation in the world, the magazine has continued to be
Baby boomers: people born
between 1946 and 1964.
The term ‘boomers’ refers
to the significant ‘boom’ in
the birth rate that occurred
immediately after World
War Two.
Case Study 2: Magazines
N ic ol a G o c
a popular medium for all ages. At any given time, magazines mirror the age in which we live,
reflecting the cultural mores of the day (such as the current obsession with the private lives
of celebrities). While some magazine titles may fall by the wayside, monthly new titles appear
on the racks at the newsagents or online, with subject matters as diverse as rap dancing and
astrology. Magazines have come a long way from the days when they were marketed to the rich
elite and carried such wordy titles as The Town and Country Magazine or Universal Repository
of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment (England 1788) and American Magazine of Useful
and Entertaining Knowledge (America 1835), and had nothing more on their front covers than a
table of contents.
While the advent of the Internet has undoubtedly had an impact on magazine sales, particularly on news magazines, the impact has not been as dramatic as it has been for other media,
such as newspapers and television. The magazine continues to be a highly profitable medium,
which is reflected in data that shows the number of magazines in America in 1988 was 13,541,
while in 2005 it was 18,267 (ASME 2008).
Magazine history
It is not easy to define when the magazine evolved, as distinct from newspapers and pamphlets.
As we have already learned in Chapter 2: The First Mass Medium, the first newspapers looked
more like small books or magazines in format, but they were newspapers because of their news
content. Magazines began to be seen as separate from newspapers when they focused on a
particular subject matter, such as science. What is generally regarded as the first true magazine
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is the Journal des scavans (later renamed Journal des savants), a French scientific journal first
published on 5 January 1665, just a few months before the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London (6 May 1665). After the French Revolution, the Journal des scavans became
more literary, and less of a scientific journal with book reviews.
The first English magazine to attract a national circulation and a widespread readership was
the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731), which was founded by Edward Cave in London. It was the first
magazine to use the term ‘magazine’ in its title. By the middle of the century the circulation had
reached 3000. What set the magazine apart was its news and commentary on any topic that the
gentry and educated tradesman might be interested in. Cave relied on regular contributors,
including Samuel Johnson, who, when parliamentary reporting was banned, regularly contributed
parliamentary reports to the magazine under the title ‘Debates of the Senate of Magna Lilliputia’.
With the rise in female literacy, women’s magazines began to flourish around the mideighteenth century. Women’s magazines idealised motherhood, and placed women firmly in
the domestic sphere, educating women to become perfect homemakers, wives and mothers.
There were articles on such topics as ‘The Gentle Art of Entertaining’, ‘Hygiene of Girlhood’,
‘The Husband’s Silence’, ‘Marzipan Pudding’ and ‘Curious Marriage Customs in Constantinople’
(Home Notes 1896). The Female Spectator, produced by and for women, was a leading woman’s
magazine, while the Ladies Journal was a popular magazine for the middle and upper classes,
featuring the latest Parisian fashions in hand-coloured prints.
By the nineteenth century, the rise in literacy saw magazines, like newspapers, become
increasingly popular. The tradition of reading the Bible at family gatherings on Sunday evenings
now extended to the reading of magazines such as The Sunday at Home Family Magazine for
Sabbath Reading, which was published by the Religious Tract Society in London, and included
didactic tales in the form of short stories and serials, as well as essays on history, science and
the arts, and poetry and travel writing. This shift from intensive reading of the Bible to extensive
readings on a wide range of topics opened up the market for the mass circulation of popular
magazines.
Influential American magazines
The 1850s saw the birth of two literary and cultural commentary magazines in America which
have remained influential to this day: Harper’s Monthly and Atlantic Monthly.
Harper’s Monthly
Harper’s Monthly was first published in 1850 by the New York book publishing firm Harper and
Brothers, and is the second oldest continually published American magazine after Scientific
American (a popular science magazine first published in 1845). The early editions relied on
material that had been previously published in England, but before long Harper’s was supporting
American writers and artists, and even published commentaries by President Woodrow Wilson.
Perhaps its most influential journalism was Seymour Hersh’s report of the My Lai massacre
in 1973.
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Atlantic Monthly
The Atlantic Monthly (first known as The Atlantic) was founded in Boston in 1857 as a literary
and cultural commentary magazine owned by a group of writers that included James Russell
Lowell (the first editor), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth
and literature, in philosophy and politics. Despite their limited audience, both magazines have
survived through innovative writing (such as that produced by the New Journalists: see Case
Study: New Journalism), and their influence has remained significant.
Today both magazines have an online presence. In 2006 Harper’s began publishing a blog,
Washington Babylon, by Washington editor Len Silverstein, which acts in the traditional role of
the fourth estate (see Chapter 3: The Fourth (or Fifth) Estate), examining corruption in American
politics.
Another influential American magazine came into being in 1925 with the launch of The New
Yorker. Founded by Harold and Jane Ross with the aim of providing a sophisticated satirical
commentary on American life, it also established itself as a preeminent forum for fiction and
serious journalism, and attracted some of America’s most important journalists and fiction
Case Study 2: Magazines
Longfellow. Both Harper’s Monthly and the Atlantic were aimed at those interested in the arts
writers. Not long after the end of the Second World War, journalist John Hersey’s essay
‘Hiroshima’ (an account of the effects of the dropping of an atomic bomb on the Japanese town
of Hiroshima) filled an entire edition, and became one of the most important pieces of journalism
ever published.
National Geographic
National Geographic is an institution. Like that fabulously successful baby boomer magazine,
AARP The Magazine, National Geographic is also a sponsored publication that is delivered ‘free’
to its members. It was first published in October 1888 by the National Geographic Society,
which was founded by a group of civic leaders intent on ‘promoting the increase and diffusion in
geographic knowledge’. Part-time volunteers from the society wrote and edited the magazine for
the first decade, until it became a monthly in 1896. In the early years the magazine was not a great
success, with its rather dry coverage of topics such as geology, meteorology, oceanography and
the history of exploration, and its uninspiring red-brown cover. The readership rose when the
society began reporting on expeditions it sponsored, beginning with the 1890–91 expedition to
the St Elias Mountains along the Canada–Alaska border, which led to the discovery of Mt Logan,
Canada’s highest mountain.
The public became captivated with reading stories of these expeditions, as well as travel and
adventure tales from exotic places. In 1898, Alexander Graham Bell (of telephone fame), the then
president of the society, hired a twenty-three-year-old school teacher, Gilbert H. Grosvenor,
as a full-time editor. This decision would change the magazine forever. Grosvenor introduced
pictures and pioneered the photo essay, opening up news vistas of cultural awareness and
understanding. By 1908, images occupied half of the magazine’s editorial space. Two years later,
the first colour photographs were published, in a twenty-four-page series on Korea and China.
It was the largest collection of colour photographs to have been published in a single magazine
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issue. In 1911, the National Geographic again broke new ground, when it featured a seventeenpage, eight-foot foldout panorama of the Canadian Rockies.
In 1900 Grosvenor married the boss’s daughter, thus creating the Bell–Grosvenor dynasty,
which has guided the society and the magazine almost continuously since. Gilbert Grosvenor’s
son, Melville Bell Grosvenor, was society president and editor from 1957 to 1967, and editor-inchief until 1977, and his grandson, Gilbert Melville Grosvenor, is currently vice-president and
editor.
To mark the magazine’s hundredth anniversary, the cover featured a three-dimensional photograph (hologram), which was the first published in a mass-audience magazine. The National
Geographic Society continues to use proceeds from the magazine to pursue cultural and wildlife
research, and to produce documentary films.
News magazines
Time
Following the First World War and the success of pictorial newspapers, magazines were launched
devoted entirely to news. One of the first to see the potential in a news magazine was Henry
Luce who, in 1923, not long after graduating from Yale, borrowed $86,000 from family and
friends to start Time magazine. His venture was not immediately successful, and it was four years
before Time saw a profit. Time established a distinct style of reporting. The term ‘timespeak’
was coined for the magazine’s no-nonsense, sometimes irreverent, but always authoritative,
approach. In 1933, Newsweek magazine was launched by a group of wealthy Americans that
included Ward Cheney, John Hay Whitney and Paul Mellon, who paid $2.4 million to establish a
rival to Time.
By the turn of the century, the advent of cable TV and the Internet had had an impact on the
content of news magazines; like newspapers, they had started to move away from hard news
towards celebrity news, human interest stories and soft news. This new trend saw a proliferation
in celebrity news magazines, which are now among the highest-circulation magazines in the
world, taking revenue away from the news magazines. The State of the News Media 2005 report
(Glaser 2005) showed that the big three American newsweeklies—Time, Newsweek and US
News—had lost one million readers in combined circulation over the past sixteen years.
Life
Life magazine represents the heyday of photojournalism from 1936 to 1972. Henry Luce, convinced that pictures could tell a news story as effectively as written reports, launched Life
magazine on 23 November 1936, thus establishing photojournalism as a profession. Life
attracted the best news photographers of the day, and became one of the world’s preeminent
pictorial news magazines. The first issue included the works of Margaret Bourke-White (who took
the front cover photograph), Peter Stackpole, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Thomas McAvoy. Other
photographers to have their work published in Time were Robert Capa, Larry Burrows, Alfred
Stieglitz, Dorothy Lange, John Dominis and Martha Holmes.
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One of Life’s most controversial issues (although it’s hard to believe today) was not a graphic
photo-essay on the horrors of war or a natural disaster, but still images from a film called Birth
of a Baby, which had been banned in New York. Life published a five-page article, including
dozens of frames from the controversial film—leading to the banning of the issue in 33 cities in
ailing fortunes round. The magazine closed in 1972, but returned as a monthly in 1978.
The Bulletin
In January 2008 Australia’s iconic news magazine, The Bulletin, which for more than a century
had defined what it meant to be Australian, closed due to the pressures of the modern media
business. During its 128 years The Bulletin featured the writing of some of Australia’s most
celebrated authors from Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson to Booker-prize-winning author
Peter Carey. With the announcement of its closure the magazine cited pressures from new media
as playing a significant role in its demise.
Case Study 2: Magazines
America. The ban turned out to be a huge publicity boon for Luce, and turned his magazine’s
Magazine covers
Today’s frenzied front cover layouts, with their multiple sensational cover lines—’Prince Harry
Romances Nude Calendar Girl!’, ‘Shock New Evidence: Lindy Tells “I will get Azaria back”’, ‘It’s
Official! Britney Reveals “I’m Having a Baby”’ plus ‘Is Gwen Pregnant Too?’—that transect images
of celebrities (usually pregnant or dieting women) reflect our web-surfing, channel-hopping,
consumer culture, where competing values vie for our attention. The format of magazine covers
today is said to reflect our
ambivalent dance with language, categorical thought, global media, the ubiquity of advertising and
spin, the colonization of our thinking by culture, and the supermarket of proliferating but limiting
choices brought to us by multinational corporations … the picture of a cover model cheerfully or
seductively immersed in a forest of words may seem to us a mere depiction of daily normality—a
normality both reflected by and fueled by the words on the covers of magazines (Grow 2002).
But magazine covers did not always look like this, and magazine content was not always
so varied. In the 1700s, the first magazines looked more like books, with tables of content and
demure mastheads on their front covers. One of the world’s most popular and enduring magazines, Reader’s Digest, used the table of contents as its cover until 1998.
Women’s magazines: Australia’s New Idea
On 1 August 1902, the first edition of The New Idea: A Women’s Home Journal for Australia was
published. The magazine told its readers:
The New Idea is a new departure in Australian journalism. No publication worthy of mention had
hitherto been published devoted exclusively to the needs and problems of the Australian home
and its mistress (New Idea, 1 August 1902).
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The New Idea, readers were told, was a ‘perfect reflexion of local affairs and interests’, with such
regular features as ‘Marriages of the Month’, ‘Social Chit-Chat’, ‘Pretty Fashions for Women’ and
‘Doings for Noted Women’. Translated into today’s vernacular, the magazine now titled New
Idea arguably continues to reflect some of the same interests, with its social pages, lifestyle
trends, fashion and celebrity stories—although of recent years celebrity stories have taken over
from the focus on lifestyle and home.
The celebrity focus is the dominant subject matter for most women’s (and news) magazines
today. The days of unknown fashion models gracing the covers are long over, replaced by
celebrities such as Nicole Kidman, Katie Holmes, Victoria Beckham, Angelina Jolie, Lindsay
Lohan, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears appearing on the front covers, either in posed publicity
shots—or more popularly and profitably—in candid shots depicting their ‘bad’ behaviour. The
idealised woman has given way to the celebrity.
Zine
A zine is a small-circulation (under 5000), non-commercial publication of original or appropriated
texts and images. The word is an abbreviation of fanzine, originally a duplicated magazine circulated among science fiction fans (from the 1930s on), and
Zine: an abbreviation of the
word fanzine, which originated
from the word magazine, a
small circulation (under 5000),
non-commercial publication of
original or appropriated texts
and images.
Fanzine: an amateur magazine
produced for fans of a pastime
or celebrity; the concept
originated among science fiction
fans in the 1930s, and spread
gradually among other interest
groups during the 1960s.
Ezine: A fanzine, or zine,
published in electronic form.
Webzine: an ezine that appears
on the World Wide Web.
later by other interest groups, such as fans of comics and rock
music (in the 1960s).
Zine, or fanzine, is now the universal word for small-printrun non-profit publications. The zine format has long attracted
graphic artists, designers and fans, but is also used by those
wishing to promote alternative political or social agendas.
Topics covered are broad, including fan fiction, politics, art
and design, ephemera, personal journals, social theory, single
topic obsession, or sexual content far enough outside of the
mainstream to be prohibited from inclusion in more traditional
media.
An online zine is called an ezine. The first ezine is believed
by many to be the publication Cult of the Dead Cow, which
started publishing online in 1984. Online-only magazines are
called webzines—Salon and Slate are the best known of the
first online-only news magazines.
Conclusion
The magazine industry has remained relatively healthy because of the continuing rise of niche
publications and the staying power of glossy entertainment news, but what the future holds for
magazines in their traditional hard-copy format in the world of new media is uncertain. While
there has been a shift to celebrity news, overall the reading trends of magazine readers have
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not altered greatly since the advent of the Internet. A study of the ten most popular magazines
in America in 2006 showed that magazines still focus on the home and leisure activities. The
top ten magazine subjects listed are: interior design and decoration, lifestyle, travel, golf, dogs,
architecture, boats and boating, automotive, construction and building, guns and firearms
podcasts and on-the-scene video blogs. Nina Link, the president and CEO of the Magazine
Publishers of America, believes readers still want the experience paper-based magazines offer.
She says magazines have been in business for 260 years, and that ‘paper-based magazines are
a timely and timeless medium. We’re certainly moving to an era where there are exciting digital
platforms. Magazine content, the power of magazine brands and the communities of magazine
readers will be part of this evolving media transformation as well’ (Link 2008).
KEY REFERENCES
Glaser, M. 2005. ‘Future of Magazines: Net Could Empower Readers’. USC Annenberg Online
Journalism Review. 24 May. Accessed 12 January 2008 <http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050524
Case Study 2: Magazines
(ASME 2008). Like newspapers, magazines are adapting to the new environment, providing audio
glaser/>.
Grow, G. 2002. ‘Magazine Covers and Cover Lines.’ Journal of Magazine and New Media
Research.
New Idea. 1902. The New Idea: A Women’s Home Journal for Australia, vol. 1, no. 1, 1 August.
WEBSITES
AUSC Annenberg (2008). Online Journalism Review <http://www.ojr.org/>
ASME Magazine Publishers of America: (2008). Editorial Trends and Magazine Handbook 2007–
2008.
<http://www.magazine.org/Editorial/Editorial_Trends_and_Magazine_Handbook/>
accessed 14 January 2008.
National Geographic <http://www.nationalgeographic.com/> accessed 14 January 2008.
Time <http://www.time.com/time/magazine> accessed 14 January 2008.
Life <http://www.life.coxm> accessed 14 January 2008.
Newsweek <http://www.newsweek.com/> accessed 14 January 2008.
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