NEW MAGAZINES

Magazines for the Affluent

After the recession of the early 1980s, most of the decade was marked by increased prosperity and a slowdown in the rate of inflation, leaving many Americans with disposable income to spend on magazines that addressed their interests in topics such as fashion, celebrities, children, health, fitness, lifestyle, travel, and new technologies. In a period when style seemed to count for more than substance, the magazines of the 1980s even imparted a new glamour to subjects such as dieting, gardening, and exercising.

Science and Computer Magazines

In 1980 two new magazines were launched to capitalize on Americans' interest in new scientific discoveries. Time, Inc., introduced Discovery geared for an educated audience interested in the effects of science on daily life, and the Litton Publishing Group brought out Next: The Magazine of the Future, which purported to forecast breakthroughs in science and technology. By 1983 the advent of relatively inexpensive and user-friendly home computers had spawned several new magazines for computer owners, including Family Computing (Scholastic, Inc.); Microkids: The Magazine for Kids Who Love Computers (Warner Software/Cloverdale); and Enter: The World of Computers and Electronic Games (Children's Television Workshop), for ten-to sixteen-year-olds. Of these five magazines, only Family Computing was still in existence in 1995.

Magazines on Parenting

By the 1980s many members of the baby-boom generation were beginning belatedly to have children of their own, having postponed childbearing until their careers were well established. Publishers targeted this affluent segment of the population with magazines such as Families, introduced in 1980 by the publishers of Reader's Digest; Child (Taxi Publishing, Inc., 1986); Parenting (Time, Inc., 1987); Fathers (Fathers, Inc., 1988); and Baby Times (Busch Publishing, 1989). Only Parenting was still around in the mid 1990s.

Health and Physical Fitness

As trendy fitness clubs, expensive workout clothing, low-fat and organic foods, and "designer" bottled waters captured an ever growing share of Americans' disposable incomes, publishers of another crop of new magazines sought to cash in on the market. In 1982 Rodale Press, publishers of Prevention magazine, introduced a physical-fitness magazine, Spring, while Oppenheimer and Company spent $5 million to launch another physical-fitness magazine, American Health. No publisher had ever spent so much money to start a new magazine, and neither it nor Spring was successful. The publishers of Southern Living had better luck with Cooking Light, which in the 1990s continued to attract readers interested in losing weight and lowering their cholesterol levels.

Targeting Specific Markets

The success of EM Ebony Man (Johnson Publishing, 1985), a magazine covering fashion, fitness, and personal finances for the black male, spawned other magazines aimed at minority "yuppies" (young urban professionals). Yet Emerge (Emerge Communications), for upwardly mobile African Americans and Que Pasa (Edrei Communications), for Hispanics—both founded in 1989—quickly faded into obscurity. Other magazines targeted readers in specific regions. New England Monthly (New England Monthly, Inc., 1984) covered business, politics, sports, food, and gardening for residents of the New England states. Time, Inc., introduced Southern Travel (1987), and the publishers of Southern Living produced Southern Living Classics (1986), which covered art, interior design, and travel for affluent southerners. None of these regional magazines was successful, nor were most other magazines that went after wealthy readers. Of Millionaire (Douglas Lambert), Veranda (Lisa Newsome), and Tiffany (Tiffany Publishing)—all launched in 1987—only Veranda was still around in 1995. Another travel magazine, National Geographic Traveler (1984), with the reputation of its parent magazine to help it get off to a good start, had increased its frequency of publication from quarterly to bimonthly by 1995.

A DECADE OF DOCUMENTARIES

Documentary maker Ken Burns's eleven-hour documentary The Civil War (1990) attracted an estimated audience of thirty-nine million viewers, the largest audience ever for a Public Broadcasting System program. The foundation for Burns's remarkable success was laid in the 1980s with six previous PBS documentaries. Burns was twenty-seven when he made his first nationally broadcast film, The Brooklyn Bridge. Working with Yale historian David McCuIlough, who had written a highly regarded book about the structural wonder, Burns developed his technique of moving his camera along still photographs to give them a quality of motion. For his efforts, he was offered membership in the Society of American Historians. In 1985, Burns produced The Statue of Liberty for the centennial of the erection of the statue, and The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God, which he followed with a book on the subject, co-authored with his wife. Huey Long followed in 1986, featuring dramatic readings by Robert Penn Warren, whose All the King's Men was the best known novel about the demagogue from Louisiana. In 1989 Burns worked on two projects, a ninety-minute portrait of painter Thomas Hart Benton commemorating his one hundredth birthday, which featured Burns's camera-sweep technique, and The Congress, a history of the legislative body in conjunction with the national bicentennial. The premiere was before a joint session of the House of Representatives and the Senate. By 1990 Burns was ready for his masterwork, and he drew heavily on his work of the 1980s to produce it.

Source:

David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, Prime Time, Prime Movers (Boston: Little Brown, 1992).

The College Market

Publishers also overestimated the potential magazine readership among college students. Newsweek on Campus and Campus Voice (Gates Communications) were among several such magazines that failed to get off the ground in 1988. In View (Whittle Communications, 1989), for coeds, and Career Vision (InterVision, 1989), covering career choices and lifestyle for college students, never garnered much attention, but Campus Scene (Stamats Communication, 1989), tailored to individual campuses, attracted enough advertising and a large enough readership to keep it going into the mid 1990s.

Fashion and Lifestyle

New fashion and lifestyle magazines in the 1980s also tended to target specific audiences. Lear's (Lear Publishing), a magazine for women over forty, which was launched with much publicity in 1988, was short-lived, as was It's Me (Lane Bryant, Inc., 1981), billed as "Not for Little Women." In 1989 Murdoch Magazines, owned by Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch, launched Mirabella with a lavish advertising campaign. Edited by Grace Mirabella, formerly the editor of Vogue, the new magazine was aimed at women between the ages of thirty and fifty. By 1995 it had changed hands and was being published bimonthly instead of monthly. Sassy (Petersen Publishing, 1988) successfully carved out a niche for itself in the crowded field of magazines for adolescent girls by offering a hip, slightly irreverent approach to teenage life and fashion. M (Fairchild, 1983), which covered upscale men's fashions and lifestyle trends, was less successful than its counterpart, W, for women.

Sports and Entertainment

Despite ever growing audiences for televised football, Pro (National Football League, 1981) was not long-lived, but Spring Training (Merle Thorpe, 1988), which covers mainly baseball, continues to find a market. The Dial (Public Broadcasting System, 1981), a monthly television magazine and program guide, and The Record (1981), a rock-music tabloid launched by the publishers of Rolling Stone, were unsuccessful. Video Digest (AFI Communications Group), which became Entertainment Retailing Industry in 1993, is still in existence.

Big-Budget Promotions

Several publishers risked millions on new magazines in the 1980s. First for Women, launched in 1989 with a $1 million television advertising campaign by the Bauer Group of West Germany, continued to appear on newsstands in the mid 1990s. The most spectacular flop of the 1980s was TV-Cable Week, a cable-television program guide launched with high expectations by Time, Inc., in April 1983. By the time the company abandoned the project the following September, the magazine had lost $47 million, nearly half of the $100 million Time, Inc., had planned to spend on the magazine over the first four to five years. S. I. Newhouse came close to a similar disaster with Vanity Fair (Condé Nast, 1983), developed at the cost of nearly $15 million. During its first eleven months of existence the magazine went through two editors and was widely considered an expensive joke. Then Newhouse hired a third editor, Tina Brown, who turned the magazine around, stirring up controversy by blending gossipy and sometimes outrageous celebrity coverage with articles on serious topics.

NEW MAGAZINES

Boom Times

While the 1930s were a difficult decade for many businesses, magazine publishing flourished during the period. From the pulp magazines to the more respectable "slicks," magazines of widely varying content found a ready market among Americans who wanted either to read about, or, more usually, to distract themselves from, the troubles of the times. General magazines founded before the 1930s, such as the Saturday Evening Post and Reader's Digest, did well, as did Henry Luce's newsweekly Time. Several narrow-interest magazines also succeeded. Though the Depression would hardly seem an ideal time to launch a new business venture, many magazines that have lasted until the end of the twentieth century got their starts in the 1930s,

Success Stories

Luce's business magazine Fortune, for instance, made its debut in 1930 and quickly offered some of the best contemporary treatments of the Depression. Its generous use of photographs and stylish design influenced Luce's later creation, Life, and many other magazines as well. Family Circle, introduced in 1932, was one of the first women's magazines to be distributed exclusively through grocery stores. The marketing strategy worked. Like its similarly distributed competitor Woman's Day, introduced in 1937, it offered a combination of food and entertainment ideas, housekeeping and fashion tips, fiction, and other features.

Magazine Fiction

One of the most noteworthy new magazines of the 1930s was Story, introduced in 1931 by Whit Burnett and Martha Foley. During the 1930s it was commonly regarded as the best place to find good contemporary short fiction. Other significant literary periodicals introduced during the decade include the American Spectator (1932)—with a founding editorial board of Ernest Boyd, James Branch Cab ell, Theodore Dreiser, George Jean Nathan, and Eugene O'Neill—and the Kenyon Review (1939), initially edited by John Crowe Ransom, who made the magazine a vehicle for advocating the New Criticism.

Newsmagazines

At the beginning of the 1930s Time reigned as the only noteworthy weekly newsmagazine. It remained in this position throughout the decade, but its isolation ended with the introduction of two more new Tsweeklies in 1933, US. News & World Report and News-Week. News-Week became Newsweek in 1937, and—thanks to the financial and marketing expertise brought to the magazine by real estate titan Vincent Astor, rail-road heir W. Averell Harriman, McGraw-Hill president Malcolm Muir, and new editor Raymond Moley, a member of Roosevelt's original "brain trust"—it would mount a serious challenge to the dominance of Time in the 1940s.

Picture Magazines

In 1936 Luce, always an innovator, introduced Life, a general-interest magazine with extensive photographs. The following year Gardner Cowles created a similar magazine, Look, as competition. Like Fortune, Luce's new magazine featured the work of talented photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White. Both magazines influenced others in ushering in a new era of photojournalism, a term coined in 1938 to describe the telling of a story primarily through photographs. Life in particular excelled at this, offering readers stark images of the Depression as well as colorful common-interest stories. Both Life and Look prospered for decades and were imitated until the market for general-interest magazines began to shrink. Look folded in 1971, with Life following the next year. Life resumed publication in 1978.

Sources:

Amy Janello and Brennon Jones, The American Magazine (New York: Abrams, 1991);

Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 volumes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938-1968).