The Rise of General-Interest Magazines

The heyday of the muckraking era lasted into the mid-1910s, when America was drawn into World War I. After the war and through the 1950s, general-interest magazines were the most prominent publications, offering occasional investigative articles but also covering a wide variety of topics aimed at a broad national audience. A key aspect of these magazines was photojournalism—the use of photos to document the rhythms of daily life (see “Case Study: The Evolution of Photojournalism” on pages 324–325). High-quality photos gave general-interest magazines a visual advantage over radio, which was the most popular medium of the day. In 1920, about fifty-five magazines fit the general-interest category; by 1946, more than one hundred such magazines competed with radio networks for the national audience.

Saturday Evening Post

Although it had been around since 1821, the Saturday Evening Post concluded the nineteenth century as only a modest success, with a circulation of about ten thousand. In 1897, Cyrus Curtis, who had already made Ladies’ Home Journal the nation’s top magazine, bought the Post and remade it into the first widely popular general-interest magazine. Curtis’s strategy for re-invigorating the magazine included printing popular fiction and romanticizing American virtues through words and pictures (a Post tradition best depicted in the three-hundred-plus cover illustrations by Norman Rockwell). Curtis also featured articles that celebrated the business boom of the 1920s. This reversed the journalistic direction of the muckraking era, in which business corruption was often the focus. By the 1920s, the Post had reached two million in circulation, the first magazine to hit that mark.

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SATURDAY EVENING POSTI
artist Albert Staehle’s first cover featuring Butch, a mischievous black-and-white cocker spaniel, was so popular that Staehle was asked to do a series of them. Readers couldn’t wait to see what scrape Butch would get himself into next. Butch’s many adventures included playing baseball, knocking over a lamp, chewing up war rations, and getting a haircut.

Reader’s Digest

The most widely circulated general-interest magazine during this period was Reader’s Digest. Started in a Greenwich Village basement in 1922 by Dewitt Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace, Reader’s Digest championed one of the earliest functions of magazines: printing condensed versions of selected articles from other magazines. In the magazine’s early years, the Wallaces refused to accept ads and sold the Digest only through subscriptions. With its inexpensive production costs, low price, and popular pocket-size format, the magazine’s circulation climbed to over a million during the Great Depression, and by 1946 it was the nation’s most popular magazine. By the mid-1980s, it was the most popular magazine in the world with a circulation of twenty million in America and ten to twelve million abroad. However, by 2012 it was recovering from bankruptcy, and working to cut costs and adjusting its circulation base to about 5.5 million.

Time

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During the general-interest era, national newsmagazines such as Time were also major commercial successes. Begun in 1923 by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, Time developed a magazine brand of interpretive journalism, assigning reporter-researcher teams to cover stories while a rewrite editor would put the article in narrative form with an interpretive point of view. Time had a circulation of 200,000 by 1930, increasing to more than 3 million by the mid-1960s. Time’s success encouraged prominent imitators, including Newsweek (1933– ), U.S. News & World Report (1948– ), and more recently the Week (2001– ). By 2012, economic decline, competition from the Web, and a shrinking number of readers and advertisers took their toll on the three top newsweeklies. Time’s circulation stagnated at 3.3 million while U.S. News became a monthly magazine in 2008 with less than 1.3 million in circulation. After losing $30 million in 2009, Newsweek was sold for $1 and its debts. In an attempt to attract new readers and better compete online, Newsweek merged with the Daily Beast, a Web site run by former magazine editor Tina Brown, but its profitability continued to be an issue.

Life

Despite the commercial success of Reader’s Digest and Time in the twentieth century, the magazines that really symbolized the general-interest genre during this era were the oversized pictorial weeklies Look and Life. More than any other magazine of its day, Life developed an effective strategy for competing with popular radio by advancing photojournalism. Launched as a weekly by Henry Luce in 1936, Life combined the public’s fascination with images (invigorated by the movie industry), radio journalism, and the popularity of advertising and fashion photography. By the end of the 1930s, Life had a pass-along readership—the total number of people who come into contact with a single copy of a magazine—of more than seventeen million, rivaling the ratings of popular national radio programs.

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MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE (1904-1971) was a photojournalist of many “firsts”: first female photographer for Life magazine, first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union, first to shoot the cover photo for Life, and first female war correspondent. Bourke-White (left) was well known for her photos of WWll—including concentration camps—but also for her documentation of the India-Pakistan partition, including a photo of Gandhi at his spinning wheel (far left).

Life’s first editor, Wilson Hicks—formerly a picture editor for the Associated Press—built a staff of renowned photographer-reporters who chronicled the world’s ordinary and extraordinary events from the late 1930s through the 1960s. Among Life’s most famous photojournalists were Margaret Bourke-White, the first woman war correspondent to fly combat missions during World War II, and Gordon Parks, who later became Hollywood’s first African American director of major feature films. Today, Life’s photographic archive is hosted online by Google (images.google.com/hosted/life).