Welcome Back! I thought it would be a good idea to read up on the origins/history of magazines. Understanding the history of the magazine industry and how it changed over time will help me to better comprehend it today! So in today's blog, I'll be providing a bit of bulleted key information that I researched on magazine background.
- Between 1663 and 1668, Johann Rist, a German theologian and poet, published the first true magazine. Rist's publication, Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen, or Edifying Monthly Discussions, inspired a number of others to begin printing literary journals across Europe.
- The first American magazines appeared in 1741, when Andrew Bradford's American Magazine and Benjamin Franklin's General Magazine both began publication in Philadelphia just three days apart. However, neither magazine lasted long: American Magazine folded after only three months and General Magazine after six.
- During the 1830s, publishers began producing less-expensive magazines with a wider audience in mind, taking advantage of a general decline in the cost of printing and mailing publications. Magazine fashion has also evolved. While early magazines focused on development and reasoning, later editions focused on entertainment. The elite class was no longer the focus of magazines. Publishers capitalized on their newly expanded audience by launching family magazines, children's magazines, and women's magazines.
- The Saturday Evening Post was the first truly successful mass circulation magazine in the United States. This weekly magazine began printing in 1821 and continued in print until 1969, when it briefly ceased circulation. Also widely credited with reshaping the magazine's appearance, the publication was the first to feature artwork on its cover, a decision that The Saturday Evening Post described as "connecting readers intimately with the magazine as a whole".
- With the arrival of the twentieth century came new types of magazines, such as news, business, and picture magazines. These types of publications eventually came to dominate the industry and attract large readerships. The introduction of online technology in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries began to have a significant impact on both the magazine industry and the print media as a whole. Magazine publishers, like newspaper publishers, have had to rethink their structure in order to reach out to an increasingly online market.
- During the nineteenth century, literary magazines flourished, publishing some of the period's most important fiction. Almost every significant American writer contributed to literary magazines at some point in their careers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Ernest Hemingway.
- A new type of magazine emerged in the late 1800s: the pulp magazine, an all-fiction publication named after its rough wood-pulp paper. At the time, dime novels were not eligible for the same low postal rates as magazines, but pulps were. Individuals suddenly had access to popular genre fiction in these low-cost magazines, such as Adventure, Horror Stories, Weird Tales, etc.
- The success of the pulps paved the way for another major shift in mainstream journalism: the rise of entertaining fan magazines. Fan magazines, which typically focused on television, film, and music, emerged as a form of national entertainment in the early twentieth century.
- During the 1940s, many publishers began to target teenagers, a previously untapped demographic. Seventeen magazine debuted in 1944, paving the way for later publications such as Tiger Beat and Teen People. These magazines catered to young women, with stories about fashion, makeup, celebrity news, and lifestyles.
- Celebrity gossip isn't just for teenagers anymore. A stroll down a supermarket checkout line reveals a plethora of celebrity magazines, also known as gossip magazines, aimed at adults. These celebrity magazines, which first gained popularity in the 1970s, provide readers with an inside look at the lives of the famous.
Now enough of talking your ears off! With this information that I collected, I hope to retrieve a deeper understanding and desire for magazines as a whole! See you on the next blog! <3
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