Magazine

• 1. Introduction

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  Magazines carry a word with a secret life. When Edward Cave edited The Gentleman's Magazine in 1731 London, he described his publication as "a monthly collection, to treasure up as in a magazine" - borrowing the image of a military storehouse packed with gunpowder and artillery. That comparison, between a weapon depot and a periodical, turns out to be surprisingly apt. Magazines have stored ideas, shaped political movements, driven journalists to expose the most powerful people in America, and given millions of readers a place on a cover that carried the weight of genuine honor.

  The word itself traveled far before it landed in English. It comes from the Arabic makhāzin, the plural of makhzan, meaning depot or storehouse. It passed through Italian and Middle French before arriving in the language we speak now. And somehow, that origin stuck. A magazine became a place to store things worth keeping.

  What kind of thing gets stored there? That is the question this documentary sets out to answer. From a literary philosophy journal launched in 1663 Germany to satirical weeklies with circulations in the hundreds of thousands, magazines have taken almost every conceivable form. They have been censored by Napoleon, deployed as propaganda during the French Revolution, and used by American muckrakers to go after Standard Oil. They have told women what to wear and told governments what they were doing wrong. Whether any of that still holds power in the present is a question the story of magazines raises without quite settling.

• 2. The First Storehouses

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  Erbauliche Monaths Unterredungen, a literary and philosophy magazine launched in 1663 in Germany, is the earliest example of the form. It predates The Gentleman's Magazine by nearly seven decades, and The Gentleman's Magazine itself, first published in 1731 in London, holds its own landmark status as the first general-interest magazine aimed at a broad public.

  The Scots Magazine, first published in 1739, has a claim to being the oldest consumer magazine still in print, though that claim is complicated by multiple ownership changes and publication gaps totalling over 90 years. Lloyd's List, founded in Edward Lloyd's coffee shop in England in 1734, ran as a printed magazine for 274 years before ending its print edition in 2013. Its online platform is still updated daily.

  The Illustrated London News, founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842, was the first illustrated weekly news magazine. Each of these early titles established something the form would carry forward: the idea that a periodical could have a distinct identity, a specific audience, and a particular purpose beyond simple news delivery. The difference between those purposes would grow sharper over time, and eventually it would separate magazines from journals entirely. Journal articles are written by experts for experts; magazine articles are written for a general public or a defined demographic. Journals publish peer-reviewed research on narrow subjects; magazines aim to entertain, inform, or educate across a much wider range. That distinction, between depth for the few and breadth for the many, shaped every editorial decision that followed.

• 3. France: Press and Power

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  Jean Loret disseminated the weekly news of music, dance, and Parisian society from 1650 until 1665 in verse, in what he called a gazette burlesque. Those three volumes of La Muse historique, published in 1650, 1660, and 1665, make him one of France's first journalists. He was working under the Ancien Regime, a period when the most prominent magazines were Mercure de France, the Journal des sçavans founded in 1665 for scientists, and the Gazette de France founded in 1631.

  Periodicals under that system were censored by the central government in Paris. They could criticize Church abuses and bureaucratic incompetence, but they generally supported the monarchy. Historian M. Patricia Dougherty has noted that they played at most a small role in stimulating the Revolution that eventually came. During the Revolution itself, new periodicals became central propaganda organs for competing factions. Jean-Paul Marat, who lived from 1743 to 1793, was the most prominent editor of that period. His publication L'Ami du peuple argued vigorously for the rights of the lower classes against the enemies Marat despised; it closed when he was assassinated. Napoleon reimposed strict censorship after 1800.

  When Napoleon left in 1815, magazines flourished again. Most were based in Paris and most emphasized literature, poetry, and stories. The Catholic press offers a particularly instructive window into how those magazines navigated political crisis. In 1830, eight Catholic periodicals were publishing in Paris. None were officially owned or sponsored by the Church, and they reflected a range of opinion about the July Revolution that overthrew the Bourbon monarchy. Several had been strong Bourbon supporters, yet all eight ultimately urged support for the new government. Dougherty argued that this process created distance between the Church and the new monarch, and enabled Catholic readers to develop a new understanding of church-state relationships.

• 4. The Ottoman Press

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  The Moniteur Ottoman was a gazette written in French, first published in 1831 on the order of Mahmud II. It was the first official gazette of the Ottoman Empire, edited by Alexandre Blacque at the expense of the Sublime Porte. Its name likely referred to the French newspaper Le Moniteur Universel, and it was issued weekly.

  Takvim-i vekayi was published a few months later, intended as a Turkish-language translation of the Moniteur into Ottoman Turkish. It passed through several editors, including a former Consul for Denmark named M. Franceschi and later Hassuna de Ghiez, before being edited finally by Lucien Rouet. Facing hostility from embassies, it was closed in the 1840s.

  Satirical magazines in Turkey developed their own distinct tradition. Diyojen, one of the earliest, was launched in 1870. By the time the tradition had matured, roughly 20 satirical magazines were in circulation. Oğuz Aral's magazine Gırgır reached a circulation of 750,000 in the 1970s. Marko Paşa launched in 1946. Leading titles in the more recent period include Penguen, with a weekly circulation of 70,000, and LeMan at 50,000.

• 5. The American Muckrakers

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  Benjamin Franklin is said to have envisioned one of the first magazines of the American colonies in 1741, the General Magazine and Historical Chronicle. Publishing at that time was an expensive enterprise: paper and printer's ink were taxed imported goods, interstate tariffs were steep, and a poor road system made even regional distribution difficult. Many magazines launched and failed within a few editions.

  The Pennsylvania Magazine, edited by Thomas Paine, ran for only a short time but became an influential publication during the Revolutionary War. Its final issue, carrying the text of the Declaration of Independence, was published in 1776.

  A century and a half later, mass-circulation magazines had become something altogether different. After 1900, some titles reached circulations in the hundreds of thousands. Some passed the million-mark in the 1920s. The cover price fell sharply, to around 10 cents, partly because national advertising had expanded so rapidly that publishers could subsidize readers rather than rely on them.

  That advertising revenue funded a new kind of journalism. Muckrakers were journalists who wrote for popular magazines to expose social and political corruption. McClure's went after corporate monopolies and political machines while raising public awareness of urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and child labor. Lincoln Steffens exposed political corruption in large cities. Ida Tarbell went after John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Samuel Hopkins Adams, in 1905, documented fraud in patent medicines. David Graham Phillips, in 1906, produced a blistering indictment of the U.S. Senate. Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, which portrayed the meatpacking industry in harrowing detail, was also part of this broader moment. President Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained that they were not being helpful by raking up all the muck. The name stuck, and so did the work.

• 6. Women and the Page

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  The first women's magazine targeted toward wives and mothers was published in 1852. Some publications before it, including Godey's Lady's Book and Harper's Bazaar, had already been intended exclusively for a female audience. Harper's Bazaar distinguished itself as the first magazine to focus exclusively on couture fashion, fashion accessories, and textiles.

  In the 1920s, German magazines aimed at young women offered a particular vision of modern femininity. The glossy pages of Die Dame and Das Blatt der Hausfrau displayed the Neue Frauen, the New Girl, the figure Americans called the flapper. She was chic, financially independent, and presented as an eager participant in consumer culture, kept current on fashion, arts, sports, and modern technology including automobiles and telephones.

  The group of publications that came to be known as the "seven sisters" of American women's magazines includes Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Woman's Day, Redbook, Family Circle, and Better Homes and Gardens. Researchers have argued that mass-marketed women's magazines shaped and transformed cultural values related to parenting practices, with advice columns, advertisements, and articles exerting influence over ideas about motherhood and child-rearing.

  By 2019, People Magazine ranked second behind ESPN Magazine in total reach among American publications, with a reported reach of 98.51 million. The interior design press has its own early landmarks: Innen-Dekoration, founded in 1890, was a monthly journal covering German and Austrian interiors and decorative art; Home Beautiful, founded in 1896, is the oldest continually-published shelter magazine in the United States.

• 7. Print in the Digital Age

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  According to Statista's Research Department, magazine closures outnumbered launches in North America during 2009. The following years reversed that trend: between 2010 and 2015, launches outnumbered closures each year, sometimes by a ratio of 3 to 1.

  In the first six months of 2014 alone, MediaFinder.com tracked 93 new magazine launches against only 30 closures. The category that produced the most new publications was Regional interest, with six new titles, including 12th & Broad and Craft Beer & Brewing. Even as those launches happened, some long-established titles shifted their models. Johnson Publishing's Jet stopped printing regular issues and moved to digital format, retaining only an annual print edition. Ladies' Home Journal ended its monthly schedule and home delivery to become a quarterly newsstand-only special interest publication.

  Subscription figures from the end of 2013 showed that 22 of the top 25 magazines had declined in subscriber numbers compared to the previous year. The three exceptions were Time, Glamour, and ESPN The Magazine. By 2024, some titles, particularly outdoors magazines, appeared to be growing in popularity. Research published in 2025 found that print magazines are perceived as more trustworthy, with better quality journalism than their digital counterparts. That finding, if it holds, points to a distinction that was already latent in Edward Cave's metaphor from 1731: a storehouse is defined not just by what it holds, but by how reliably it keeps things safe.