The general trend away from mass market publications and toward specialty magazines coincided with radio’s move to specialized formats in the 1950s. With the rise of television, magazines ultimately reacted the same way radio and movies did: They adapted. Radio developed formats for older and younger audiences, for rock fans and classical music fans. At the movies, filmmakers focused on more adult subject matter that was off-limits to television’s image as a family medium. And magazines traded their mass audience for smaller, discrete audiences that could be guaranteed to advertisers. This specialization continues today as the magazine industry adapts to the Internet. At least six of the nation’s top twenty-five magazines in circulation are now linked to membership in a specialized organization: AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin (for members of the AARP), Game Informer (for a Pro membership card at GameStop stores), AAA Living (for members of the automobile organization, AAA), American Rifleman (one of four magazines for members of the National Rifle Association), and the American Legion Magazine (for members of the American Legion veterans organization). Linking the magazine subscription to organizational membership helps ensure audience loyalty to the magazine in the face of the Internet’s many competing media options.

Magazines are now divided by advertiser type: consumer magazines (O: The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan), which carry a host of general consumer product ads; business or trade magazines (Advertising Age, Progressive Grocer), which include ads for products and services for various occupational groups; and farm magazines (Dairy Herd Management, Dakota Farmer), which contain ads for agricultural products and farming lifestyles. Grouping by advertisers further distinguishes commercial magazines from noncommercial magazine-like periodicals. The noncommercial category includes everything from activist newsletters and scholarly journals to business newsletters created by companies for distribution to employees. Magazines such as Ms., Consumer Reports, and Cook’s Illustrated, which rely solely on subscription and newsstand sales, also accept no advertising and fit into the noncommercial periodical category.

In addition to grouping magazines by advertising style, we can categorize popular consumer magazine styles by the demographic characteristics of their target audience—such as gender, age, or ethnic group—or by an audience interest area, such as entertainment, sports, literature, or tabloids.

Men’s and Women’s Magazines

One way the magazine industry competed with television was to reach niche audiences that were not being served by the new medium, creating magazines focused on more adult subject matter. Playboy, started in 1953 by Hugh Hefner, was the first magazine to do this by undermining the conventional values of pre–World War II America and emphasizing previously taboo subject matter. Scraping together $7,000, Hefner published his first issue, which contained a nude calendar reprint of the actress Marilyn Monroe, along with male-focused articles that criticized alimony payments and gold-digging women. With the financial success of that first issue, which sold more than fifty thousand copies, Hefner was in business.

Playboy’s circulation peaked in the 1960s at more than seven million, but it fell gradually throughout the 1970s as the magazine faced competition from imitators and video, as well as criticism for “packaging” and objectifying women for the enjoyment of men. From the 1980s to today, Playboy and similar publications continue to publish, but newer men’s magazines have shifted their focus to include health (Men’s Health) and lifestyle (Details and Maxim).

Women’s magazines had long demonstrated that gender-based publications were highly marketable, but during the era of specialization, the magazine industry sought the enormous market of magazine-reading women even more aggressively. Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s Day focused on cultivating the image of women as homemakers and consumers. In the conservative 1950s and early 1960s, this formula proved to be enormously successful, but as the women’s movement advanced in the late 1960s and into the 1970s, women’s magazines grew more contemporary and sophisticated, incorporating content related to feminism (such as in Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine, which first appeared in 1972), women’s sexuality (such as in Cosmopolitan magazine, which became a young women’s magazine under the editorship of Helen Gurley Brown in the 1960s), and career and politics—topics previously geared primarily toward men. Even so, Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s Day are all still in the Top 20 list of U.S. highest-circulation magazines (see Table 9.1).

Sports, Entertainment, and Leisure Magazines

In the age of specialization, magazine executives have developed multiple magazines for fans of soap operas, running, tennis, golf, hunting, quilting, antiquing, surfing, and video games, to name only a few. Within categories, magazines specialize further, targeting older or younger runners, men or women golfers, duck hunters or bird-watchers, and midwestern or southern antique collectors.

The most popular sports and leisure magazine is Sports Illustrated, which took its name from a failed 1935 publication. Launched in 1954 by Henry Luce’s Time Inc., Sports Illustrated was initially aimed at well-educated, middle-class men. It has become the most successful general sports magazine in history, covering everything from major-league sports and mountain climbing to foxhunting and snorkeling. Although frequently criticized for its immensely profitable but exploitative yearly swimsuit edition, Sports Illustrated has also done major investigative pieces—for example, on racketeering in boxing and on land conservation. Its circulation held steady at three million in 2014. Sports Illustrated competes directly with ESPN The Magazine and indirectly with dozens of leisure and niche sports magazine competitors, like Golf Digest, Outside, and Pro Football Weekly.

Another popular magazine type that fits loosely into the leisure category includes magazines devoted to music—everything from hip-hop’s the Source to country’s Country Weekly. The all-time circulation champ in this category is Rolling Stone, started in 1967 as an irreverent, left-wing political and cultural magazine by twenty-one-year-old Jann Wenner. Once considered an alternative magazine, Rolling Stone had paddled into the mainstream by 1982 with a circulation approaching 800,000; by 2014, it had a circulation of more than 1.4 million. Many fans of the early Rolling Stone, however, disappointed with its move to increase circulation and reflect mainstream consumer values, turned to less high-gloss alternatives, such as Spin.

Founded in 1888 by Boston lawyer Gardiner Green Hubbard and his famous son-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell, National Geographic promoted “humanized geography” and helped pioneer color photography in 1910. It was also the first publication to publish both undersea and aerial color photographs. In addition, many of National Geographic’s nature and culture specials on television, which began in 1965, rank among the most popular programs in the history of public television. National Geographic’s popularity grew slowly and steadily throughout the twentieth century, reaching 1 million in circulation in 1935 and 10 million in the 1970s. In the late 1990s, its circulation of paid subscriptions slipped to under 9 million. Other media ventures (for example, a cable channel and atlases) provided new revenue as circulation for the magazine continued to slide, falling to 4 million in 2014 (but with 3 million in international distribution). Despite its falling circulation, National Geographic is often recognized as one of the country’s best magazines for its reporting and photojournalism. Today, National Geographic competes with other travel and geography magazines, such as Discover, Smithsonian, Travel & Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, and its own National Geographic Traveler.

Magazines for the Ages

In the age of specialization, magazines have further delineated readers along ever-narrowing age lines, appealing more and more to very young readers and older readers, groups often ignored by mainstream television.

The first children’s magazines appeared in New England in the late eighteenth century. Ever since, magazines such as Youth’s Companion, Boy’s Life (the Boy Scouts’ national publication since 1912), Highlights for Children, and Ranger Rick have successfully targeted preschool and elementary-school children. The ad-free and subscription-only Highlights for Children topped the children’s magazine category in 2014, with a circulation of more than two million.

In the popular arena, the leading female teen magazines have shown substantial growth; the top magazine for thirteen- to nineteen-year-olds is Seventeen, with a circulation of two million in 2014. Several established magazines responded to the growing popularity of the teen market by introducing specialized editions, such as Teen Vogue and Girl’s Life. (For a critical take on women’s fashion magazines, see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Uncovering American Beauty” on page 330.)

Targeting young men in their twenties, Maxim, launched in 1997, was one of the fastest-growing magazines of the late 1990s. Maxim’s covers boast the magazine’s obsession with “sex, sports, beer, gadgets, clothes, fitness,” a content mix that helped it eclipse rivals like GQ and Esquire. Today, Maxim’s circulation has leveled off at about two million.

In targeting audiences by age, the most dramatic success has come from magazines aimed at readers over age fifty, America’s fastest-growing age segment. These publications have tried to meet the cultural interests of older Americans, who historically have not been prominently featured in mainstream consumer culture. The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) and its magazine, AARP The Magazine, were founded in 1958 by retired California teacher Ethel Percy Andrus. Subscriptions to the bimonthly AARP The Magazine and the monthly AARP Bulletin come free when someone joins the AARP and pays the modest membership fee ($16 in 2014). By the early 1980s, AARP The Magazine’s circulation approached seven million. However, with the AARP signing up thirty thousand new members each week by the late 1980s, both AARP The Magazine and the newsletter overtook TV Guide and Reader’s Digest as the top circulated magazines. By 2014, both had circulations of over twenty-two million, far surpassing the circulations of all other magazines (see Table 9.1). Article topics in the magazine cover a range of lifestyle, travel, money, health, and entertainment issues, such as sex at age fifty-plus, secrets for spectacular vacations, and how poker can create a sharper mind.

Elite Magazines

Although long in existence, elite magazines grew in popularity during the age of specialization. Elite magazines are characterized by their combination of literature, criticism, humor, and journalism and by their appeal to highly educated audiences, often living in urban areas. Among the numerous elite publications that grew in stature during the twentieth century were the Atlantic Monthly (now the Atlantic), Vanity Fair, and Harper’s.

However, the most widely circulated elite magazine is the New Yorker. Launched in 1925 by Harold Ross, the New Yorker became the first city magazine aimed at a national upscale audience. Over the years, the New Yorker has featured many of the twentieth century’s most prominent biographers, writers, reporters, and humorists, including A. J. Liebling, Dorothy Parker, Lillian Ross, John Updike, E. B. White, and Garrison Keillor, as well as James Thurber’s cartoons and Ogden Nash’s poetry. It introduced some of the finest literary journalism of the twentieth century, devoting an entire issue to John Hersey’s Hiroshima and serializing Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. By the mid-1960s, the New Yorker’s circulation hovered around 500,000; by 2014, its print circulation stayed steady at over 1 million, and its digital circulation was healthy at more than 86,000 readers.

Minority-Targeted Magazines

Minority-targeted magazines, like newspapers, have existed since before the Civil War, including the African American antislavery magazines Emancipator, Liberator, and Reformer. One of the most influential early African American magazines, the Crisis, was founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910 and is the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In the modern age, the major magazine publisher for African Americans has been John H. Johnson, a former Chicago insurance salesman, who started Negro Digest in 1942 on $500 borrowed against his mother’s furniture. By 1945, the Digest had a circulation of more than 100,000, and its profits enabled Johnson and a small group of editors to start Ebony, a picture-text magazine modeled on Life but serving black readers. The Johnson Publishing Company also successfully introduced Jet, a pocket-size supermarket magazine, in 1951. By 2014, Ebony’s circulation was rising to 1.3 million. Essence, the first major magazine geared toward African American women, debuted in 1969, and by 2014, it had a circulation of over 1 million. Jet, trailing the other two African American market magazines, announced in 2014 that it would begin publishing in a digital-only format.

Other minority groups also have magazines aimed at their own interests. The Advocate, founded in 1967 as a twelve-page newsletter, was the first major magazine to address issues of interest to gay men and lesbians, and it has in ensuing years published some of the best journalism about antigay violence, policy issues affecting the LGBT community, and AIDS—topics often not well covered by the mainstream press. Out is the top gay style magazine. Both are owned by Here Media, which also owns Here TV and several LGBT Web sites.

With increases in the Hispanic population and immigration, magazines appealing to Spanish-speaking readers have developed rapidly since the 1980s. In 1983, the De Armas Spanish Magazine Network began distributing Spanish-language versions of mainstream American magazines, including Cosmopolitan en Español; Harper’s Bazaar en Español; and Ring, the prominent boxing magazine. Latina magazine was started in 1996, and is the most successful English-language publication for Hispanic women. The new magazines target the most upwardly mobile segments of the growing American Hispanic population, which numbered more than fifty-three million—about 17 percent of the U.S. population—by 2014. Today, People en Español, Latina, and Vanidades rank as the top three Hispanic magazines by ad revenue.

Although national magazines aimed at other minority groups were slow to arrive, there are magazines now that target virtually every race, culture, and ethnicity, including Asian Week, Native Peoples, and Tikkun.

Supermarket Tabloids

With headlines like “Sex Secrets of a Russian Spy,” “Extraterrestrials Follow the Teachings of Oprah Winfrey,” and “Al-Qaeda Breeding Killer Mosquitoes,” supermarket tabloids push the limits of both decency and credibility. Although they are published on newsprint, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which checks newspaper and magazine circulation figures to determine advertising rates, counts weekly tabloids as magazines. Tabloid history can be traced to newspapers’ use of graphics and pictorial layouts in the 1860s and 1870s, but the modern U.S. tabloid began with the founding of the National Enquirer by William Randolph Hearst in 1926. The Enquirer struggled until it was purchased in 1952 by Generoso Pope, who originally intended to use it to “fight for the rights of man” and “human decency and dignity.”9 In the interest of profit, though, Pope settled on the “gore formula” to transform the paper’s anemic weekly circulation of seven thousand: “I noticed how auto accidents drew crowds and I decided that if it was blood that interested people, I’d give it to them.”10

By the mid-1960s, the Enquirer’s circulation had jumped to over one million through the publication of bizarre human-interest stories, gruesome murder tales, violent accident accounts, unexplained-phenomena stories, and malicious celebrity gossip. By 1974, the magazine’s weekly circulation had topped four million. Its popularity inspired the creation of other tabloids like Globe (founded in 1954) and Star (founded by News Corp. in 1974) and the adoption of a tabloid style by general-interest magazines such as People and Us Weekly. Today, tabloid magazine sales are down from their peak in the 1980s, but they continue to be popular. American Media in Boca Raton, Florida, owns several magazines, including two key supermarket tabloids: Star and National Enquirer.