The emergence of news as a commodity in American
magazines during the last dozen years of the nineteenth
century was a direct response to keen competition among
general periodicals. Many editors and publishers of
magazines, most of them from a newspaper background,
believed news articles could serve a significant editorial
purpose and attract a sizable readership. By the early
years of the twentieth century, articles on current events
and issues received as much space, and sometimes more,
as did popular fiction and poetry in numerous monthly
general magazines.
Competition among monthly general magazines, a separate category from women’s magazines and literary magazines, had begun in earnest late in the nineteenth century.
Technology of the era—high-speed printing presses, webfed paper, and half-tone photographs—had combined with
cheap postal rates and a nationwide railroad network to permit inexpensive mass production and distribution.
Also, an abundance of manufacturers and producers
needed to advertise nationally, which caused a tremendous surge in revenue. Consumer products streamed from
manufacturers to distributors and retailers, and national
brands used magazines to advertise apparel, candy, canned
vegetables and meat, cereal, rolled-film cameras, patent
medicines, shoes, soaps, and soups. National advertising
expenditures soared tenfold to a half-billion dollars by during the last third of the nineteenth century.
Demographics and economics created a vast readership
for magazines. The national population almost doubled
between 1880 and 1910. The population clustered more in
cities, which enabled magazines to distribute copies quickly.
At the same time, the national economy transformed from
primarily agricultural to industrial, which resulted in a significant rise in the number of workplace managers, proprietors, administrators, and professional occupations. Men
in these positions earned appreciably more money than
factory workers and laborers, and they could afford to buy
magazines.
Quality general magazines, heretofore written for an elite
readership, seldom had a circulation exceeding fifty thousand copies a month. Suddenly, several became periodicals
for a nascent middle class of Americans whose incomes
and collective curiosity propelled the aggregate circulation
of general magazines into the millions by the early 1900s.
“Editors locked up their ivory towers and came down into
the market place,” wrote Frank Luther Mott, the esteemed
historian in A History of American Magazines, 1885–1905.
New or transformed national magazines emphasized current
events and issues to attract a broader readership, including American, Arena, Century, Collier’s Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Everybody’s, Forum, Literary Digest, McClure’s, Public Opinion, Outlook, and World’s Work. These modern
magazines contained articles and commentary on international items, science, medicine, education, transportation,
municipal governance, and social concerns.
The marketplace rewarded those magazines that emphasized journalism and penalized those that did not sufficiently
do so. Cosmopolitan, a failure as a literary magazine, was
revived in 1889 as a general magazine emphasizing journalism. By the turn of the century, Cosmopolitan circulation
had grown from 20,000 copies monthly in 1889 to 75,000
copies in 1891 and to 350,000 copies by 1900. McClure’s, a
startup in1893, reflected the fascination of editor-publisher
Samuel S. McClure with everything modern and attained
a circulation of 369,000 by 1900. Conversely, Century, a
general magazine that reluctantly, but never fully, embraced
journalism, suffered a decline in circulation from 198,000
copies at the start of the 1890s to 125,000 copies by the
early 1900s.
The late 1880s through the early 1900s have become
a demarcation for magazines in the United States, an era
when a higher proportion of articles about economic, political, and social issues appeared in monthly general periodicals. Editors and publishers realized that many Americans
wished to learn about the factors causing great changes in
society and their lives. Weekly general magazines devoted
to news entered the marketplace in force during this period,
too, their rapid distribution made possible by subscribers
and buyers concentrated in urban areas.
Prior to the 1890s, some general magazines regularly
published a certain number of articles regarding political
and social issues of contemporary relevance among more
prevalent literary fare. Most of these articles on contemporary issues were commentaries or treatises rather than
reports or analyses. Thus, although the articles were about
relatively recent subjects, which usually meant publication
several months afterward, they were not necessarily journalism; adherence to factual information and mention of
specific events were not elements of most.
Magazines and many newspapers appeared in a variety
of page sizes—folio, small folio, quarto, octavo—until well
into the twentieth century, so it was sometimes difficult to
separate magazines from national non-daily newspapers
by specific physical format. Harper’s Weekly, for example,
looked like some newspapers of the era and the editors
described it as a newspaper, but scholars have regarded it
as a magazine because it offered a sizable amount of current events, accompanied by superb illustrations from the
late 1850s into the early 1900s. Its subtitle declared it was
a “Journal of Civilization,” and it recorded momentous
events of the Civil War, helped expose municipal corruption in New York City, and documented social turmoil in
the last years of the nineteenth century.
Magazine journalism, in the sense of timeliness, began
with articles from contributors who were not journalists but
instead were experts or otherwise regarded as knowledgeable on certain subjects. Some of the important monthly
general magazines of the late nineteenth century published
articles by current and former government officials, diplomats, scholars, prominent businessmen, and members of
the American intelligentsia. Sometimes these contributors
submitted unsolicited material and an editor used the article on a space-available basis; later, editors commissioned
articles from contributors.
Gradually, because of meteoric increases in subscriptions and single-copy sales for periodicals that emphasized
journalism, the larger monthly general magazines began to
employ paid correspondents to ensure a reliable supply of
timely articles on contemporary events and issues.
Although the gradual emphasis on news in general magazines occurred from the late 1880s into the early 1900s, a
turning point that demonstrated the commitment to timeliness by major monthly general magazines was the Spanish-American War in 1898. Until the war, an article about a
specific event of major importance usually did not appear in
a general magazine until several months afterward, which
represented the time it took to commission an article, receive
the manuscript, and schedule it for publication. Evidence of
this interval was seen in Cosmopolitan, which addressed
a serious diplomatic crisis between Britain and the United
States from July to November 1895, six months after it had
begun, and Century, which dealt with the same crisis eight
months after its resolution.
However, the outbreak of war between the United States
and Spain coincided with a period of intense competition
among some of the larger monthly general magazines,
which resulted in publication of war-related articles within
a month or two of the official war declaration. The much
shortened interval represented efforts by editors to rush
anything remotely related to the war into print. McClure’s
published “An American in Manila” only one month after
U.S. Navy warships had destroyed a Spanish naval squadron in the bay; the article itself pertained to life in Manila
a few years earlier. Cosmopolitan, a quality general magazine of the era, also managed to print “Havana Just Before
the War” a few weeks prior to the invasion of the island
by U.S. troops in July 1898. During autumn 1898, just two
months after the conclusion of combat in Cuba, McClure’s
presented articles about the capture of Santiago and other
battles.
Collier’s Weekly also demonstrated that news could be
published within a couple weeks of actual events. Its photographs and articles about the war in Cuba established
the magazine’s reputation with the public for coverage of
current events. Later, Collier’s provided articles on the
two-year Filipino insurrection against American occupation, a dramatic series written by Frederick Palmer, a staff
correspondent.
With a sense of immediacy developed during the war
with Spain, magazines engaged in the intense debate
about national policy regarding what to do with the newly
acquired Spanish colonies of the Philippines, Puerto Rico,
and Guam. Articles and commentary in Arena, Atlantic Monthly, Century, Cosmopolitan, Forum, McClure’s,
and Outlook, among others, coincided with the debate in Congress and the attempt by Democrats to make imperialism an issue in the presidential election campaign of 1900.
Magazines also presented serious commentary on news
events and issues. Forum, although never a major magazine since it began monthly publication in 1886, presented
opinion essays on important contemporary subjects, and
published articles on political, economic, and social issues.
Colleges and universities used it in classrooms.
Collier’s and Outlook, with a distribution of 125,000
copies, exemplified the contemporary standard for political
reportage and commentary by weekly general magazines
during the early 1900s. Collier’s and Outlook focused on
presidential candidates, commented on the platforms of the
political parties, and identified various issues as significant
for the nation. Readers across the nation received timely
reports. Women’s magazines, too, reported on events and
issues pertinent to their readership. Governmental reform,
public sanitation, the safety of food and medicine, civic
involvement by women, and access to higher education
were among the subjects.
The concept of the newsmagazine, devoid of literary
work, had evolved by the start of the twentieth century.
News sustained Literary Digest, a weekly first produced
in 1890. The magazine provided a roundup of newspaper
articles on specific subjects, summaries of select articles
of a timely nature, and a section of articles that blended
original reporting with edited material from other publications, including magazines. Public Opinion, a weekly that
first appeared in 1886, reprinted dozens of news items from
around the nation arranged by subject, although each item
usually consisted of a brief paragraph, not a full story.
World’s Work, a monthly that began in 1900, opened
each edition with a news summary now familiar to readers
of weekly journals of opinion. Original articles commissioned by editor Walter Hines Page presented information
on topics he believed of importance, interest, and relevance.
World’s Work was a prototype of the newsmagazine with its
arrangement of articles by specific departments.
Several magazines became crusaders for economic and
social justice early in the twentieth century. Exposés in
these magazines served the agenda of reformers. McClure’s
started the investigative journalism trend in January 1903.
Soon, a slew of magazines competed for readers by presenting exposés on life insurance companies, investment scams,
church ownership of tenements, patent medicine ingredients, contaminated food products, political corruption,
price-fixing in certain industries, and predatory practices
by financiers and industrialists. American, Arena, Collier’s,
Cosmopolitan, Everybody’s, Forum, Public Opinion, and
World’s Work were among the notable periodicals engaged
in muckraking.
Circulation soared for some of these magazines from
1903 to 1907: American reached 300,000 copies; Collier’s
attained 568,000; Everybody’s leveled off at 750,000
copies.
The muckraking era ended abruptly. Interest among
Americans waned. Several popular magazines lessened
their news content in response. By the start of World War
I and into the 1920s, fiction made a comeback in general
magazines. Collier’s had resorted to boosting its fiction
component to rebuild circulation.
By the 1920s, Literary Digest dominated the weekly
magazines devoted to current events and commentary.
Other magazines attracted readers with lively commentary
on events and issues. Common Sense, Dial, Nation, New
Republic, and Survey were quality journals of opinion. The
appearance of Time, a weekly newsmagazine, in 1923 and
its phenomenal success signified the viability of news as a
sole editorial component unaccompanied by commentary.
Business Week applied a similar formula upon its debut
in 1929. Although Time’s two longstanding competitors,
Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report, added commentary columns to the news, the weekly newsmagazines
concentrated their efforts toward immediacy of coverage
about events and developments in economic, political, and
social issues. All three attracted an impressive number of
readers.
The Depression era and World War II resulted in an
expansion of news coverage in all major magazines directed
toward specific readership categories, such as women’s,
rural, and general. Items of importance and interest to each
readership category were the focus of articles that accompanied the usual fare of features and miscellany. Life and
Look published news photographs, some of which were
stand-alone and others to accompany articles.
The 1950s and 1960s were a continuation of news coverage by all major categories of magazines. Articles dealt with
dramatic cultural and social changes, civil rights activism,
Vietnam War, space exploration, Cold War tension, and a
variety of other topics. Esquire, New Yorker, Rolling Stone
and others created new narrative styles to attract readers in
their twenties and thirties who appreciated livelier, descriptive writing. This same period saw the demise of many
general magazines, however. Television diverted public
attention and advertising dollars from these periodicals.
Specialized periodicals, those that catered to a niche
readership, became a growth industry in magazines from the
1970s onward. Articles and commentary about events and
issues pertinent to readers with specific interests broadened
the definition of news by providing information on items
within very narrow parameters. Niche magazines produced
a higher number of magazines available to Americans during the early years of the twenty-first century than ever
before. News, in its broadest sense, remained a key element
for most of the magazines that served niche readerships.
Further Reading
Cooper, John Milton, Jr. Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as
American, 1855–1918. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1977.
John, Arthur. The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson
Gilder, Scribner’s Monthly and the Century Magazine,
1870–1909. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.
Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines, Volumes
2, 4, and 5: Sketches of Magazines. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957 and 1968.
Nourie, Alan, and Barbara Nourie. American Mass-Market Magazines. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990.
Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in
America, 1741–1990. New York: Oxford University Press,
1991.
Wilson, Harold S. McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970.
James Landers