Magazine is a collection of articles, features, columns, and short items, sometimes known as fillers, targeted at specific audiences and published at regular intervals. Most magazines also include graphics (pictures, charts, and other illustrative material). Magazines provide a wide variety of information, opinion, and entertainment.
A magazine article looks in depth at a topic and generally exceeds 2,000 words in length. A feature story is usually a human-interest piece between 1,000 and 2,000 words long. A column expresses opinion or personal experience and generally runs from 250 to 1,000 words in length. A short item, or filler, is generally less than 250 words long and usually is devoted to news or topics of interest.
Each magazine has a concept, an idea that attracts readers and advertisers. The concept defines the audience. Many magazines cover current events and fashions, discuss foreign affairs, or describe how to repair appliances or prepare food. But each does so according to a concept that targets a specific segment of the audience. This segment is defined by demographics, such as age, income level, and gender, and psychographics, which include such audience interests as hobbies, beliefs, and values. For example, O, The Oprah Magazine targets women who are interested in beauty and fashion, health, and relationship advice. Magazines highlight topics and themes in keeping with their concepts.
A magazine seeks advertisements consistent with its concept. Art directors work closely with editors to bring the concept to life visually, especially on the magazine’s cover. Every aspect of the cover—from the illustration to the headlines—should convey the concept.
Most magazines are published monthly. For this reason, content in magazines is less topical and timely than that in newspapers, most of which are published daily. In addition, magazines have different target audiences than newspapers, which seek to appeal to readers from a specific geographic region rather than those with a common need or interest.
Tens of thousands of magazines are published worldwide. Many of these operate Internet websites in addition to producing a print magazine. Other publications appear only on the Internet as e-zines, also called webzines.
Kinds of magazines
Consumer magazines
appeal to the broad interests of the general public and are the ones usually seen on newsstands and in stores. Consumer magazines include children’s magazines, hobby magazines, intellectual magazines, men’s magazines, women’s magazines, and news magazines. Service magazines include advice, how-to, medical, self-help, and religious publications. Digests reprint material, in a shorter form, that has appeared in other magazines or in books.
Specialized business magazines,
also called trade magazines, appeal to the special interests of business, industrial, and professional groups. For example, Aviation Week & Space Technology focuses on the informational and product needs of people in the aerospace industry. Publishers of specialized trade magazines may seek to gain subscribers by mailing free sample copies only to people whose jobs make them potential readers. By using this and other strategies, a specialized magazine can reduce costs and attract particular advertisers. They can thus succeed with a much smaller circulation than a consumer magazine.
Other magazines.
Association magazines are published for the membership of organizations. They are often distributed free to dues-paying members. AARP The Magazine, published by AARP, a membership organization of people 50 years of age and older, has a circulation higher than any magazine available on newsstands in the United States. A sponsored magazine, or custom publication, promotes a particular brand of products. A corporate sponsor may seek to generate loyalty to a brand by mailing copies of such magazines to people who have registered the purchase of one of the sponsor’s products. Advertising in a sponsored magazine is restricted primarily, or even entirely, to the products or services of the corporate sponsor.
Many magazines have Internet websites featuring content that supplements a magazine’s print version. The print version may refer readers to this additional content. Such a website can help an editor shape the content of the print magazine by using polls to gather information on the opinions, insights, and tastes of readers. It can also attract potential subscribers for the print magazine. An e-zine, also called a webzine or an online magazine, is published exclusively in electronic form and distributed via the Internet. Many e-zine publishers produce no printed magazines.
How print magazines are produced
Print magazines must meet regular publishing deadlines. A magazine’s deadlines can be days or weeks apart.
Planning a magazine.
Editors plan issues of most monthly magazines several months in advance. They and other members of the magazine’s staff first decide what major articles, stories, and other items will appear in each issue, and what types of graphics will be required. Several issues of the magazine are in various stages of production at any one time.
Making assignments.
The editors assign articles to staff or free-lance writers. Each article has a deadline and a specified length. The editors also make photography assignments, called shoots, to staff or free-lance photographers. Or they may purchase photographs from picture agencies. Editors may also assign artists to create drawings or other artwork. Magazines sometimes publish unassigned articles and photographs by free-lance journalists who offer material for sale.
Scheduling the advertising.
Ads are planned for an issue of a magazine while the writers work on their assignments. The editors and staff artists create a layout, which shows how the advertising and editorial material will be arranged on each page.
Editing and assembling an issue.
After the articles have been written, one or more editors go over them to check their accuracy and readability. Some magazines have special researchers called fact checkers who ensure that each fact in an article is accurate. The written material, called copy, is generally stored as digital (numeric) files in a computer. Magazines use special computer programs called page-layout programs to arrange the electronic copy in columns and to create a final page design. Most use photographs and other graphics in digital form so that designers may easily insert the graphics into the layouts. Designers can quickly produce several layout designs for the same article—each made to produce a different emotional response. The editors can then select the layout they feel best conveys the response they seek to evoke. Computerized publishing systems and digital photography have made magazine publishing more efficient and less expensive than it is when traditional methods and equipment are used. 
Many magazines use devices called laser printers to print copies of the pages created by the page layout program. Editors review these copies, called proofs, and check for errors. After the editors have made all necessary revisions, they send digital files of the final version of the pages to the printer. A device called a laser platesetter enables the printer to create printing plates directly from the digital files. This process is known as computer-to-plate or direct-to-plate. The most common method of magazine printing is offset lithography. Some magazines with circulations over 300,000 are still printed using the gravure process. See Printing . 
Online versions.
Much of the work that goes into creating a magazine for print publication can be reused for a magazine’s online version. The articles and images used for a print edition will often be created in a digital (numerically encoded) format that allows a publisher to easily upload the content onto its online site. This online site may have more content than the magazine’s print version. An online magazine may include such features as blogs written by authors or editors, podcasts, videos of events or interviews, reader surveys, and articles grouped by popularity.
How magazines earn income
Most consumer magazines receive income from two sources: (1) advertising and (2) sales of the publication by subscriptions or by newsstand purchases.
Advertising
ranks as the most important source of income for many magazines. Advertisers generally put their messages in magazines that successfully target the segment of the population the advertisers themselves seek to reach. For example, a photography magazine attracts camera fans who may find its ads helpful in choosing certain photographic equipment. Advertisers of such equipment can reach many potential customers by putting ads in such a magazine. Advertisers spend thousands of dollars for one page of advertising space in some large-circulation magazines. Some advertisers may seek to influence the content of certain magazines. But magazines generally place the needs of their subscribers over the desired influence of advertisers.
Many publishers conduct surveys to find out what groups of people read their magazines. These surveys can identify reader groups by age, income, occupation, race, gender, and other characteristics. Advertisers study such surveys to decide which magazines are read by the people most likely to buy their products.
Sales.
Readers get many consumer magazines by subscription through the mail or over the Internet. They also buy many magazines at newsstands. Subscription and newsstand sales cannot cover the production costs of most magazines. The actual selling of a magazine is also expensive. Promotional campaigns to attract new subscribers can be costly. In newsstand sales, the publisher gets paid only for the magazines actually sold.
History
Early magazines.
The earliest magazines probably developed from newspapers or from bookseller catalogs. Such catalogs, which reviewed books on sale, first appeared during the 1600’s in France. Pamphlets published at regular intervals appeared in England and America in the 1700’s, primarily as literary publications. They included The Tatler and The Spectator, both published in England.
One of the first English magazines, The Gentleman’s Magazine, was published from 1731 to 1914. Edward Cave, an English printer, started it as a collection of articles from various books and pamphlets. Later, the magazine published original material.
The magazine industry developed throughout the world. The first magazine published in America, the American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies, was published in 1741 in Philadelphia. In 1755, Russia’s Academy of Sciences published that country’s first magazine, Monthly Essays. A British publisher launched India’s first magazine, Oriental Magazine: or, Calcutta Amusement, in 1785. The Nova Scotia Magazine, regarded by many historians as Canada’s first magazine, was started in 1789. One of the earliest magazines for women was The Lady’s Magazine, a British monthly founded in 1770.
Magazines in the 1800’s.
In 1830, Louis A. Godey founded Godey’s Lady’s Book, the first American magazine for women. Sarah Josepha Hale edited the magazine, which helped shape the tastes of thousands of women. Among the first influential intellectual magazines was The Dial, published in the early 1840’s by New England transcendentalists and edited by the reformer Margaret Fuller (see Transcendentalism ). The Atlantic Monthly—a journal of literature, politics, science, and the arts—was launched in the United States in 1857. Its first editor was the poet James Russell Lowell.
Early magazines were produced primarily for the wealthy. In the mid-1800’s, publishers in Europe began to produce less expensive magazines aimed at a wider public. The Illustrated London News, a British weekly first published in 1842, helped make magazines visually appealing. The first issue featured 32 woodcut illustrations. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), many people read Harper’s Weekly for its drawings of the battlefront.
In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, American reformers who exposed conditions in business, industry, and politics wrote for Everybody’s Magazine and McClure’s Magazine. These writers, called muckrakers, included Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida M. Tarbell. Ladies’ Home Journal was founded in 1883 as a women’s supplement to Philadelphia’s Tribune and Farmer, a newspaper owned by Cyrus H. K. Curtis. The Journal, edited by Curtis’s wife, Louisa Knapp Curtis, became so successful that it was spun off in 1884 as a magazine. In 1889, Edward Bok became editor of the Journal. Under Bok, the magazine emphasized social reform.
Magazines in the 1900’s.
In 1912, Harriet Monroe, former art critic for the Chicago Tribune, founded Poetry magazine. Other important literary publications begun in the early 1900’s include Vanity Fair, first published in 1914 in the United States; the London Mercury, first published in 1919; and The New Yorker, which appeared in 1925.
Henry R. Luce, who founded Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, and other magazines, was a leading magazine publisher of the 1900’s. Another leading U.S. publisher, John H. Johnson, began publishing Negro Digest in 1942. Johnson later founded Ebony and other magazines written chiefly for African American readers.
During the 1920’s and 1930’s, general magazines were the major means of communication across a nation. These publications featured text and photographs on a wide range of subjects. But the widespread growth of television, beginning in the 1950’s, resulted in many advertisers favoring this new medium to promote their products. A lack of advertising and an increase in overall costs have caused many general magazines to stop publishing or to publish less frequently. As general magazines dwindled, specialized magazines, also known as niche publications, flourished. Specialized magazines frequently cover specific hobbies or activities, such as jewelry making or running. They use sophisticated market and circulation research to target particular audiences and the advertisers who want to reach them. Specialized magazines reduce postage and production costs by accurately projecting sales.
Magazines today.
A magazine publisher once could launch a publication relatively cheaply. But today, high costs—particularly those involving production and mailing—can require a great deal of money to start and maintain a magazine. The amount of content available to readers on the Internet also means that readers have far more choice than they did in the past. Each year, large numbers of new and long-running magazines cease publication, and far fewer new titles are introduced.
