Mass Comm 9

• Like radio magazines specialized to survive television example TV guide
• Developed market niches to cope like cable- appealed to advertisers who wanted specific audiences, defined by gender age race etc
• More than 23,990 commercail alternative and noncommercial publications and newsletters are published in the US today-average age= 6 months

• Defoe's Review 1704- for elites, political commentary, looked like a newspaper, was the first magazine in the US
• Gentleman's Magazine 1731- Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope

• No middle class-often unaffordable
• No widespread literacy
• Served political commercial and cultural concerns
• Ben Franklin in Philadelphia- General Magazine-ruthlessly suppressed competition, used privileged position as post master to get the magazines out
• By 1776 about 100 magazines in colonies

• Stopped and restarted
• longest running magazine in US history
• Started by Alexander and Coate 1821
• First major magazine to appeal directly to women
• First important general interest magazine aimed at national audience

• Better cheaper technology
• Fed growing literacy and education
• better distribution and transportation
• Most aimed at Women- Sara Josepha Hale: Ladies' Magazine, Godey's Lady Book
• E.L. Godkins Nation 1865- oldest continuously published magazine

• Harper's New Monthly Magazine 1850- extensive wood cut illustrations, elaborate battlefield sketches of civil war
• Photographs- Matthew Brady and colleagues, 3,500 photos documenting the civil war, helped popularize photography by 1860's, 1890's saw magazines and newspapers possess the technology to reproduce photos in print media

• More industrialized around 1890
• Postal Act of 1879 lowered postage rates so equal footing with newspapers delivered by mail
• Improved technology reduced production costs
• By late 1800's advertising revenues soared and captured customers attention and built national marketplace
• The magazine became an instrument of emerging American Nationalism- readers no longer maintained only local or regional identities

• Began in 1883 by Cyrus Curtis
• Including content for women and the latest consumer ads
• Understood the growing, lucrative female readership market
• Readership reached over 500,000 by the early 1890's- the highest circulation in the country
• First magazine to reach one million readers in 1903

• Way of appealing to more people
• Teddy Roosevelt coined term in 1906
• Early form of investigative reporting
• Journalists discouraged with newspapers sought out magazines where they could write in depth about broader issues
• not without personal risk to reporter
• Famous American Muckrakers- Ida Tarbell takes on Standard Oil, Lincoln Steffens takes on city hall, Upton Sinclair and meat packing

• Popular after WWI fromt eh 1920's to 1950's
• combined investigative journalism with broad national topics
• rise of photojournalism plays a prominent role in general interest magazines

• Saturday Evening Post- 300+ cover illustrations by Norman Rockwell
• Readers Digest- applicability and lasting interest
• Time- interpretive journalism using reporter search teams, increasingly conservative as it became more successful
• Life- oversized pictorial weekly, pass along readership of more than 17 million

• Original film has qualities that make it easy to determine whether it has been tampered with. Digital images, by contrast, can be easily altered- Christoper Harris
• Photoshopping magazine covers

• Advertising money shifts to TV- tv guide is born
• Changing consumer tastes
• paper and postal costs rise in early 70's- Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post, all with at least 4 million subscribers and still fail, Women's magazines tended to survive
• People, 1974, first successful mass market magazine in decades

• Divisions by advertiser type: consumer magazines, business or trade magazines, farm magazines
• Other magazines rely solely on subscription or newsstand sales and accept no advertising-consumer reports, rating system so they aren't biased, Cooks illustrated

• Men's and Women's- Playboy, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan
• Leisure, sports, music- Soap opera digest, sports illustrated, National geographic
• Age-group specific- Highlights for Children, Teen People
• Elite magazines and cultural minorities- The New Yorker, Ebony

• National Enquirer founded in 1926 by Hearst
• News Corp. launches Star in 1974
• Early 1990's tabloid circulation numbers start to decrease

• Webzines- magazines that appear exclusively on the web
• Legitimate sites for breaking news and discussing culture and politics- still haven't found great financial success- readers aren't likely to pay for subscriptions

• Production- machines and paper, layout and design
• Editorial- content, writing quality, publication focus, and mission
• Advertising and sales- manage the income stream from ads
• Circulation and distribution- either paid or controlled

• Cosmopolitan- Walmart, Winn dixie, right to review and reject
• Fortune- Louis Gerstner Jr. not very flattering picture caused him to pull Lotus advertising costing the magazine 6 million a year

• Oligopoly
• Hearst
• Advance Publications
• Time, Inc.
• Hachette Filipacchi
• Meredith
• *Five of the biggest publishers

• Fewer than 90 US magazines sell to more than 1 million readers
• The other nearly 19,000 US magazines struggle to find niche

Magazines can offer more analysis of and insight into society than can other media outlets. Unfortunately, they often identify their readers as consumers first and as citizens second