Magazines in the Twentieth Century David Abrahamson Northwestern University FROM: Abrahamson, David. "Magazines in the Twentieth Century." In Blanchard, Margaret A., ed. History of Mass Media in the United States: An Encyclopedia. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997: in press. The origins of the twentieth-century magazine lie in the extensive economic and social changes of the latter portion of the preceding century. The result was the emergence of the newly commercialized form of national periodical which, for the ensuing fifty years, served as the dominant medium of popular culture. And while the centrality of magazines as shapers and reflectors of the nation's popular discourse began to diminish at mid-century, the form itself continued to prosper as new, more specialized types of magazines arose to serve the specific informational needs of more narrowly defined audiences. This progress of the American magazine through the twentieth century might, for the purposes of historical analysis, be divided into four major eras: The Magazine's Triumph as a Commercial Enterprise (1900--1920), The Golden Age of Mass Magazines (1920--1960), The Rise of the Specialized Magazine (1960--1990), Magazines as New Media (1990--present). This essay will attempt to chart the changing character of magazines in America during the twentieth century, as well as the forces, individual and institutional, which shaped them. The first twenty years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of modern magazine publishing. Inherent in this triumph of the magazine as a large-scale commercial enterprise was the widespread validation of the advertising-based model of magazine publishing developed during the 1890s. The rise of magazines as a national media, however, was driven by a number of broader economic and societal factors which gathered increasing force throughout the last half of the nineteenth century. Three of the more important included the success of the Industrial Revolution and the attendant urbanization of the nation, the rise of public education and the subsequent spread of literacy, and the emergence of a national consumer market. More specific technological and commercial developments also played a role in the transformation of the magazine industry. Economies of scale provided by new high-speed printing presses, as well as improvements in photo-engraving technology, made both larger press runs and higher-quality reproduction affordable. The prospect of marked increases in readership became a reality once distribution networks could be established based on a newly completed national railroad system, made possible by the national standardization of track widths in the mid-1880s. Circulation growth was also encouraged by favorable postal rates. Explicitly intended as a subsidy for magazines, the creation of the second-class mailing permit in 1879 and an additional lowering of its rates six years later, as well as the establishment of Rural Free Delivery in 1897, significantly reduced the cost of delivering magazines to their growing national readerships. It can be argued, however, that the most important factor in shaping both the form and content of the twentieth-century magazine was the advent around 1900 of national advertising. With the rise of nationally branded consumer goods and a significant shift from retailer advertising, largely the province of newspapers, to that placed by manufacturers, national advertising quickly became an essential source of revenue for magazines. Historical transformations within any industry can often be traced to success of specific individuals, and the journalistic professions have certainly enjoyed a cast of central characters amply blessed with both vision and visibility. Samuel McClure, Cyrus H.K. Curtis, Edward Bok, and George Horace Lorimer all played prominent roles in defining the nature of magazine publishing during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Possessing both a businessman's acumen and an editor's imagination, Samuel S. McClure (1857--1949) is credited with two contributions to the magazine profession: one economic and one journalistic. The success of his McClure's Magazine, founded in 1893, demonstrated the viability of a lively popular periodical aimed at a mass audience. His secret, quickly imitated by others, was a greatly reduced cover price, and within a decade the "ten-cent" magazines represented 85 percent of the total circulation of magazines in America. His second contribution, largely based on the reformist impulses of the Progressive Movement, was the advent of "muckraking" journalism. By publishing such widely read articles as Lincoln Steffens's "Shame of the Cities," Ida Tarbell's expose of Standard Oil, and Ray Stannard Baker's "Right to Work," McClure led the attack on the prevalent political corruption and business abuses of the day. Other magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Munsey's soon joined the fray, and, until shortly before World War I, the muckraking magazines set much of the agenda for the nation's political discourse. Three other individuals, a publisher and the editors-in-chief of two of his magazines, ensured the success of the commercial model which still characterized much magazine publishing one hundred years later. Cyrus H.K Curtis (1850--1933), founder in 1890 of the Curtis Publishing Company, understood as no publisher before him the reach and power of mass marketing. His advertising salesmen spread out across the country to promise the nation's largest consumer advertisers a national audience, which his editors duly delivered. Edward William Bok (1863-- 1930) at Ladies' Home Journal created the first modern women's service magazine, and his Curtis colleague George Horace Lorimer (1869--1937) turned the previously moribund Saturday Evening Post into the largest weekly magazine in the world. The second major era in the twentieth-century history of the magazine, beginning after World War I and ending in late 1950s, might be termed a "golden age." Indeed, in the brief span of fifteen years between 1922 and 1937 a large variety of significant magazines were established, many, but not all, of which still flourish at century's end. These included Reader's Digest (founded 1922), Time (1923), Liberty (1924), the New Yorker (1925), Fortune (1930), Esquire (1933), Newsweek (1933), U.S. News (1933), Life (1936), and Look (1937). Viewed in historical perspective, three aspects characterize the evolution of American magazine publishing between 1920 and 1960. The first has to do with business strategy. Most magazine publishers used the commercial model pioneered by Curtis, and sought large circulations attractive to national advertisers. To accomplish this, newsstand and subscription prices were kept low, and readers were rarely charged the full cost of producing the publication. Instead, a majority of the revenue came from advertising sources. The reason this was possible was that, despite the travails of the Great Depression, the prominence of the consumer economy, fueled by the new willingness of Americans to buy on credit, increased markedly during the period. Acting as both a cause and effect of this increase, the importance of national advertising grew exponentially. The emergence of a number of unique types of magazines is the second important aspect of the 1920--1960 period. As the potential for new audiences expanded, publishers devised new magazine genres to serve them. The Reader's Digest of DeWitt and Lila Wallace (1889--1981; 1889-- 1984) spoke to America's faith in uplift and self-improvement. Time, conceived by Briton Hadden (1898--1929) and Henry R. Luce (1898--1967), offered busy readers the news in brisk, capsulated form, and before long other newsweeklies were founded on similar formulae. Luce also oversaw the creation of three other important titles. In the depths of the Depression, Fortune debuted to shore up the nation's shaken faith in the promise of market capitalism. Life, with its pioneering photojournalism, celebrated both the power of the visual image and the marvels of modernity --- and was soon imitated by Look. With the 1954 founding of Sports Illustrated, Luce and his colleagues clearly foresaw the heightened role of sports in the national consciousness. Never intended as a mass magazine, the New Yorker of Harold Ross (1892--1951) redefined urbane intellectualism, and, in the process, challenged long-standing dominance of much older elite publications such as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. In the men's magazine field, the Esquire of Arnold Gingrich (1903--1976) offered a new sort of Hemingwayesque urbanity, concerned with style, fashion, and other matters of the moment, yet also introspective and often certifiably literary. Founded in 1953 by Hugh Hefner (b. 1926), a former Esquire staffer, Playboy pursued a similar editorial strategy, generously leavened with the mild eroticism of idealized "pictorials." Two other magazines reflected the particular changes reshaping America during the era: The 1945 debut of Ebony, founded by John H. Johnson (b. 1918), mirrored the nascent prosperity of the emerging African-American bourgeoisie, while the first appearance of TV Guide in 1953 followed the success of the ubiquitous new broadcast medium. The last notable aspect of their mid-century "golden age" is the degree to which magazines came to serve as markers of the prevailing social realities. The United States emerged from the Depression and World War II posed on the cusp of unparalleled affluence; an unprecedented percentage of the population --- over two-thirds, by most measures --- would soon claim membership in an expanding middle class. As both a product of and a catalyst for this sociocultural transformation, magazines, particularly the general-interest publications serving mass audiences, enjoyed a special place in American life. By helping to both define and reinforce the communal, consensual, and conformist values of postwar society, magazines became the dominant medium for the popular discourse of the nation. Beginning shortly before 1960 and lasting until the 1990s, the third major historical era might be termed "The Rise of the Specialized Magazine." A number of interrelated factors, larger social forces as well as changes within the media industries, influenced this trend. For example, it can be argued that, as the conformist verities of the 1950s gave way to the heightened individualism of the 1960s, a shift from communally defined values to more personal ones took place. Further than that, ever-increasing levels of affluence, education, and leisure time both enhanced social mobility and greatly expanded the range of life choices available to many citizens. As a result, a large number of magazines devoted to specific personal interests, particularly those related to leisure pursuits, blossomed. All founded in the late 1950s and early 1960s by less prominent magazine publishers such as Ziff- Davis, Times Mirror, and Hearst, magazines like Car and Driver and Road & Track, Boating and Sail, Flying and Pilot, Skiing and Ski, all spoke directly to this new, more individually defined view of the "good life," and soon surpassed older, more established rivals. Another factor in the success of the smaller, more targeted magazines was the changing nature of marketing and advertising during this period. Mass-market advertising revenues, long the lifeblood of the large general-interest magazines, were being siphoned off by television. First introduced in 1947, commercial television's advertising revenues surpassed those of magazines in 1954; by 1963, its ad income was double that magazines. Unable to compete, the three flagship mass-audience magazines, the weekly Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post all ceased publication between 1969 and 1972. Yet at the same time, computerized techniques for finely focusing marketing efforts at specific groups of prospective customers made the more narrowly defined audiences of specialized magazines particularly attractive to advertisers, and smaller magazines prospered. Moreover, advances in production and printing technology reduced costs, eliminating many economies of scale and improving the profitability of smaller circulation publications. In concert with the ascendancy of television in the 1960s, this advent of "niche" publishing, with its increasing emphasis on the segmentation of audiences, removed magazines from their central place in popular culture. For the next thirty years, however, by explicitly striving to serve the specific informational needs of particular niches, the magazine industry as a whole prospered. Trade magazines or "business-to-business" publishing, for example, did notably well during this period, and by the early 1990s there were more than ten thousand titles published regularly in America. Similarly, consumer magazines flourished. In some cases, established magazine genres benefited; both religious periodicals of all denominations and "handyman" magazines for the do-it-yourselfer proliferated. In others, whole new categories of magazines emerged. These included a new breed of city/regional magazine, largely modeled on New York founded in 1967 by Clay Felker (b. 1925), featuring a unique combination of investigative journalism and shopping advice; a wide variety of self-awareness and self-improvement magazines ranging from Ms. to Psychology Today to Self; magazines such as PC and PC World which earned record revenues from microcomputer craze of the late 1980s; and narrowly focused magazines offering everything from insights into right-wing cultural politics, e.g. New Criterion, to relief for baby boomers' parental angst, e.g. Family Life. By the early 1990s more than two thousand consumer titles were being published. The fourth and final historical era of the twentieth-century progress of the American magazine began in the early 1990s. Tremendous advances in both computer and communications technology suggested that newly efficient ways of distributing greater quantities of needed information to readers would be both possible and profitable. By the mid-1990s, it was clear that much of the innovation in these "new media" areas would be led by magazine firms. With their expertise at editing for and marketing to specific audiences, they were uniquely positioned to explore the potential of what has been termed electronic publishing. By mid-decade it was still mostly a matter of investigating possibilities, for it was not yet certain which technology --- CD-ROM, interactive disc, proprietary online database, World Wide Web site on the Internet, or some as-yet-uninvented delivery system --- would prove the most commercially attractive. Though the commitment by magazine publishers large and small to the promise of new media was amply illustrated in the 1990s, much uncertainty still characterized the field. For the foreseeable future well into the twenty-first century, it is likely that the contemporary magazine, in its printed form, will continue to demonstrate its efficacy as a source of information and pleasure for its readers, its utility as a marketing vehicle for its advertisers, and its viability as a business enterprise for its publishers. Bibliography: Abrahamson, David. Magazine-Made America: The Cultural Transformation of the Postwar Periodical. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1996. Cohn, Jan. Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989. Janello, Amy and Jones, Brennon. The American Magazine. New York: Harry Abrams, 1991. Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5 Volumes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938. Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956. Schact, John H. A Bibliography for the Study of Magazines. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986. Schneirov, Matthew. The Dream of a New Social Order: Popular Magazines in America, 1893-1914. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Taft, William H. American Magazines for the 1980s. New York: Hastings House, 1982. Tebbel, John W. The American Magazine: A Compact History. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1969. Tebbel, John W. and Zuckerman, Mary Ellen. The Magazine in America, 1741-1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Wood, James Playsted. Magazines in the United States. New York: Roland Press, 1971. Copyright 1996 David Abrahamson. All rights reserved.