Introduction to Journalism

School of Communication Arts & Science

Prof. Jaewon Joo

Whatis

Magazine?

• Magazines are publications that appear on a regular schedule and contain a variety of articles.

• The English word “magazine” recalls a military storehouse of war materiel and originally was derived from the Arabic word “makhazin” meaning “storehouses”.

The History of Magazines

• 1663 - The world's first magazine – Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen (translation: Edifying Monthly Discussions) – is published in Germany.

• 1704 - The first English language magazine - Review

• 1731 - The first modern general-interest magazine, The Gentleman's Magazine, is published in England as entertainment with essays, stories, poems and political commentaries.

• 1741 - Benjamin Franklin intends to publish America's first magazine, General Magazine, but is scooped when American Magazine comes out three days earlier.

The History of Magazines

• 1770 The first women's magazine, The Lady's Magazine, starts with literary and fashion content plus embroidery patterns.

• The first really successful magazine in the United States was the Saturday Evening Post, first published in 1821.

• 1843 The Economist begins examining news, politics, business, science and the arts.

• 1899 National Geographic appears.

• 1923 Time, the first U.S. newsmagazine, is started.

• 1933 Newsweek begins publication.

The History of Magazines

• The magazine, Life, is credited with establishing photojournalism (1936). Life maintained a staff of top photographers that often won prizes for their graphic and moving news photos.

• Fort Peck Dam, Montana, 1936, by Margaret Bourke-White

• This photograph became an icon of the machine age

Explosive growth of Magazines

• 1825 : fewer than 100 magazines in the US

• 1850 : over 600 magazines in the US

• 1900 : more than 5,000 magazines in the US

• Uncle Tom's Cabin, which also fueled the Civil War, was first serialized in a magazine.

• Position : expensive and high class media cheap mass media

• Price : 30 cents 15 cents 5 cents

Explosive growth of Magazines

• In 1883, a publisher McClure successfully dropped the price of his general-interest McClure's magazine to only 15 cents.

• Frank Munsey, lowered the price of Munsey's Magazine from 25c to 10c as well. Suddenly every major magazine cut its prices and upped its circulation.

• In 1800s, there were no headlines or continued stories, and pictures were confined to within columns.

The MuckrakingMagazines

• In the early time of magazines, working class were paid extremely low wages, but the owners of the companies lived in luxurious homes and pursued lavish lifestyles.

• Seeing the great injustice, magazine writers began to do exposes on the conditions.

• Magazines did exposes on the tens of thousands of workers that were injured or made ill by the working conditions, and the many woman who had to turn to prostitution just to feed their families.

This not only made their jobs harder (magazines obviously depend on advertising), but it even made their work dangerous.

The NewsMagazines

• With the approach of international conflict in Europe and the beginning of the First World War, magazines started featuring articles on international issues.

• Magazines had the effect of starting to inflame U.S. attitudes against Germany.

• In 1923, Henry Luce, who had just graduated from Yale University, begged and borrowed $86,000 from friends and relatives to start Timemagazine.

• A trend was seen in newsmagazines to move away from hard news and shift their focus toward more feature (soft news) articles.

Photography changes the format

• Early photographs had to be copied by hand.

• Magazines hired photographers to shoot pictures and engravers to etch them.

• A good illustrated magazine like Harper's Monthly or Leslie's carried lots of small type. It took hours to read a magazine.

• The combination of the photos, evolving styles of journalism, and the new technology of offset printing and color process created a new language of the printed page, a language which made high-power advertising layouts possible.

Photography changes the format

Photography changes the format

Photography changes the format

• Photographs immediately dominated the news.

• Most people did not realize until later that the photo and printing processes distorted reality as much as the old sketch artists.

• Suddenly magazines were very attractive to advertisers.

Advertising Explodes

• They no longer sold people information and entertainment; their main purpose was to provide advertisers with a steady, returning audience.

• Advertisement made it possible to sell magazines below production cost, which made it possible to lower their price still more, which increased their audience, which made them even more useful to advertisers.

• They reshaped the formats to bring readers closer to ads.

Advertising paper or Magazine?

High-classMagazines

• The most influential of American magazines was Fortune in the early time of Magazine.

• Fortune in the 1930s was a work of art with content that happened to be the affairs of the business.

• In covering the industrial world, Fortune's photographers and designers created an almost hand-crafted looking magazine. It was one of the first to print high quality color illustrations; and the first to try and sell a story primarily through photographs.

EconomicsOfMagazines • Typical magazines derive at least half of

their income from advertising.

• The magazine publishing business is highly competitive.

• Since ad revenue for most magazines has been dropping they can be influenced by advertising interests.

Magazines tend to shy away from controversial content that can turn off advertisers.

The company wanted to be able to cancel ads in any issue that contained content they didn't like.

• Manufacturing and distribution includes paper and postage, two expense categories that have been rapidly increasing.

• The expenses for generating the magazine's content represent only a small part of total expenses.

EconomicsOfMagazines

New typesOfMagazine

• On-line Magazines

• Fanzines

DiscussionTopic

• AD-free magazine would be possible to publish and to make it popular? Why or why not?

• What type of magazine will be survived in the next decade?