magazine

Click to Play

Lorrie Moore Considers Whether Reading Is Vital

Click to Play

Nick Troiano on Maven's Video Publishing Solutions

Click to Play

At Home High Tech Beauty Beauty Products

Click to Play

5 Reasons Why It's Time to Invest In Your Home

View more History, Politics, Society videos

For more information on magazine, visit Britannica.com.

1. Publication issued periodically, containing miscellaneous editorial pieces, such as articles, short stories, interviews, photographic essays, or poems, of either a specifie or general nature. Noted for their superior production quality, magazines are sold by subscription and at newsstands. They usually obtain the bulk of their revenue from the sale of advertising space. Often, newspapers, particularly Sunday editions, will feature a separate magazine section. See also supplement.

2. Supply chamber, as a holder on a gun for cartridges or a lightproof compartment in or on a camera or projeetor for film.

3. see magazine format.

noun

A place where something is deposited for safekeeping: archive, depository, repository, store, storehouse, warehouse. See keep/release.

Magazines (from Fr.: magasins) are stores for equipment, provisions, arms, and ammunition. By extention the word also came to mean the usually detachable containers for cartridges in rapid fire weapons. Although the concentration of provisions for an army in a few places was not new, it came to dominate warfare in Europe following the Thirty Years War, during which one of the more telling innovations introduced by Gustavus Adolphus was an integrated logistics system combining pre-stocked warehouses and compact supply trains with orderly requisitioning.

However, his armies had been relatively small. During the 1640s and 1650s the French administrator Michel Le Tellier established the beginnings of a system on a much larger scale, using civilian contractors both to provide supplies to magasins and to transport them between stores or in the traditional baggage train with the army. His son the Marquis de Louvois established larger magasins généraux to meet the needs of Louis XIV's huge field armies, and also ensured that the network of frontier fortresses had sufficient supplies to resist a siege for at least six months. Within France this was designed to relieve the local population of the impositions of a large army, while outside her borders the theatres of operations might already be picked clean. The ravaging of the Palatinate at the start of the League of Augsburg war was intended to deny the area to enemy armies, limiting the number of fronts Louis's armies had to cover.

The degree to which armies were ever completely weaned from foraging can be overstated, not least because of cash limitations in symbiosis with the near-crippling corruption that came to characterize the state's relationship with civilian contractors. But in the absence of a parallel revolution in transport, what the magazine system certainly did was to impose severe strategic limitations. During the League of Augsburg war and for the following century armies rarely ventured more than a week's march from their nearest magazine, and manoeuvres to get across the lines of supply of armies in the field came to be far more common than battles. Accompanying this was the evolution of siege warfare to capture the impressive fortifications surrounding the larger magasins généraux, the loss of which could deny an army the possibility of operating in a given area.

Although more given than many contemporary commanders to the battlefield decision, Frederick ‘the Great’ would bring this about by getting across his enemies' lines of supply and once remarked that ‘the masterpiece of a successful general is to starve the enemy’. With all their limitations, for as long as fear of desertion and a totally centralized system of rigid command and control dictated that armies march as one huge unit, magazines were indispensable. It was the advent of the highly motivated French Revolutionary armies, which could be trusted to disperse for foraging on the march and concentrate for battle, that exposed the strategic and tactical poverty of the older style armies and restored mobility to European warfare. Magazines remained of great importance, but their absolute centrality to the conduct of wars declined.

— Jon Robb-Webb/Hugh Bicheno

n. 1. a chamber for holding a supply of cartridges to be fed automatically to the breech of a gun.

2. a store for arms, ammunition, explosives, and provisions for use in military operations.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

A storage place for ammunition and explosives; also see powder house.

Magazines were the dominant mass medium in the United States from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. They helped create a national culture of shared references, information, perspectives, and literature, and as the premier venue for advertising nationally available products, created a national material culture as well. In 2000, despite the rise of competing media, more than 17,000 consumer magazines were published in the United States. The 758 of those titles tracked by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, an industry group, reported over 378 million in aggregate circulation that year.

Barely differentiated from newspapers in the eighteenth century, magazines soon functioned as more durable anthology and miscellany, defining national literature and national identity. Initially, ties to England were strong. The term "magazine" itself originates with British monthlies, beginning in 1731 with the Gentleman's Magazine, adopting the word's sense of storehouse. Names of early-nineteenth-century American magazines continued to suggest a collection of miscellaneous but precious contents, with such words as "museum," "repository," "casket," or "cabinet" in their titles. Eighteenth-century American magazines were largely reprints from books, newspapers, and other magazines, often from England, though some editors sought out original contributions. In a country that lacked a class of professional writers, these were often hard to obtain. Nineteenth-century magazines likewise maintained strong ties to England's literary production. As they reprinted British literature—pirated or paid for—they did less than they might have to foster American literature, until changes in copyright law made piracy a less attractive alternative to paying American authors. While periodical circulations remained small, however, reprints and exchanges among newspapers and magazines effectively distributed news, literature, and information nationwide.

Individual eighteenth-century magazines circulated locally to only a few hundred and were short lived; the publishing historian Frank Luther Mott calls it unlikely that the aggregate circulation of all the magazines for any given period in the eighteenth century was ever more than five thousand. Many were church affiliated, and they included a children's magazine, a music magazine, and women's magazines. Like newspaper producers of the time, magazine publishers accepted fuel and produce as payment for subscriptions, and continued to accept such payment for advertising into the late nineteenth century.

Nineteenth Century

Successful women's magazines, such as Godey's Lady's Book (1830–1898), had large readerships, with Godey's circulation reaching 150,000 in the 1860s. Men and children read women's magazines too; despite its name, sailors exchanged bundles of Godey's when their ships met at sea and created scrimshaw based on its fashion illustrations, while wounded soldiers later requested Ladies' Home Journal and other women's magazines. The label "ladies" reassured readers that the work would be concerned with matters of the home, and would not be improper or controversial. Godey's published a combination of fiction (usually with a moral), fashion illustration, sermons, and household advice, all in a friendly tone, and ignored the Civil War. Other nineteenth century women's magazines of this type included, at mid-century, the Home Journal, Arthur's Home Magazine, and, by the end of the century, Ladies' Home Journal, Women's Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, Delineator, and fashion magazines such as Harper's Bazaar.

Although women's magazines such as Frank Leslie's Chimney Corner frequently offered support for elements of women's equality, and other magazines did so more sporadically, suffragist and feminist political magazines were a smaller separate category, lacking the advertising support that came to dominate the women's magazines. But numerous suffrage publications appeared throughout the country: Amelia Bloomer's The Lily and Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Revolution in Seneca Falls, New York; Lucy Stone's Woman's Journal in Boston; and Colorado's Queen Bee. The Lowell Offering, a literary magazine edited and published by the female workers in the Lowell cotton mills, was another type of women's magazine.

Book and magazine publishing were closely entwined. Appleton's, Atlantic Monthly, Scribner's, Harper's Monthly, Harper's Weekly, and others were owned by book publishers, which used them to promote their books and authors and fostered a sense of an American literary center. Book reviews in magazines helped to promote individual books and to shape public conversation about books and reading.

Gift books or annuals, widely popular in the middle of the nineteenth century, served some of the same functions as magazines. The same people, such as Nathaniel P. Willis, could be found wearing both magazine and gift book editorial hats. Often issued specifically as Christmas or New Year gifts, they nurtured the vogue for holiday-related stories. The monthlies branched out to make not only Christmas but also Thanksgiving and Independence Day stories a reliable topic for magazine writers.

Much U.S. literature, especially essays, first appeared in magazines, with book reprints following. Through mid-century, book publishers worried that magazine publication of a work competed with book sales. Low postal rates for periodicals and high ones for books helped the magazine industry, and also attracted publishers who pirated British and European authors to sell their works cheaply. The 1830s and 1840s saw an explosion of fiction made available in the form of extraordinarily cheap weekly newspapers in a gigantic format, such as Brother Jonathan, with fiction-filled pages sometimes over four feet long—a format that mimetically enhanced their claims to hold the "whole unbounded universe," as The New World, another elephantine paper, put it. Blurring boundaries between book, magazine, and newspaper, such weeklies issued "extra" editions containing entire pirated novels by popular authors such as Dickens, sold for eighteen or twenty cents, and directly competed with book publishers. A post office decision labeling them pamphlets rather than newspapers, and therefore requiring higher postage, helped kill them off, but they had reached audiences of up to 60,000. By the late nineteenth century, however, publishers found that magazine serialization had the effect of publicizing a work and building book sales. These papers, and several dollar-a-year magazines, established that a low-priced periodical could be profitable. While eighteenth-century magazines cost the equivalent of two to three days of labor in wages for a year's subscription, by the mid-nineteenth century prices were relatively lower, at between one and five dollars per year.

Although the women's magazines and the largest of the general magazines at midcentury, such as Graham's and Harper's, avoided or ignored the major political controversies of the day, other general magazines did espouse positions, with Atlantic Monthly, for example, known for its abolitionist sympathies. Numerous noncommercial magazines sponsored by organizations and societies took stands. Antislavery magazines blossomed from the 1820s on, while southern magazines such as the Southern Quarterly Review of Charleston championed the proslavery position. Others promoted such causes as women's rights, temperance, and later socialism, anarchism, and birth control. Many late-eighteenth-century magazines were church affiliated, and church-related magazines continued into the nineteenth century, with many children's magazines produced by denominations or connected to the Sunday school movement. Weekly magazines such as Frank Leslie's, The Independent, and Harper's Weekly provided readers with battlefield news and pictures during the Civil War.

Specific racial and ethnic communities produced magazines as well. The Literary Voyager; or Muzzeniegun (1826– 1827), was the first of a small number of Native American magazines that made brief appearances. The category grew enormously with the rise of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s. Spanish-speaking communities of Texas, California, and the Southwest along with immigrant communities produced extensive publications in languages other than English, though most of these were daily or weekly newspapers rather than magazines. An estimated 3,444 publications in languages other than English were launched between 1884 and 1920, with a combined circulation of 6 million in 1910. Hundreds of magazines lived brief lives and folded, succumbing to the problems of finding a readership and an economical means of distribution; those without sufficient capital were particularly vulnerable.

Late Nineteenth Century

The so-called "class monthlies" of the 1880s and 1890s—Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, Century, and Scribner's—were read by the well off and more educated people and helped to create or consolidate the reputations of such writers as Henry James, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, and William Dean Howells (also editor of Atlantic Monthly, 1871–1881). The role these monthlies played in shaping literary opinion and their connection to other publishing enterprises has led literary scholars and historians to consider these four the most prominent and important magazines of the late nineteenth century. They were not, however, the most widely read.

The appearance of cheap, mass circulation magazines in the United States has often been linked to the "magazine revolution" of the early 1890s, when three month-lies—Munsey's, Cosmopolitan, and McClures—dropped their price to ten cents, shifted the basis of their enterprise from the sale of the magazine to the sale of advertising, and began to achieve circulations in the hundreds of thousands. But this development was more gradual than revolutionary. Ten-cent and even five-cent monthlies that depended on advertising for their revenues already existed. Known as mail-order monthlies, they advertised goods available by mail, assuming their readers would be out of reach of stores. These newspaper-sized magazines were far more widely distributed than the class monthlies, with circulations above half a million, though such figures were notoriously based on continuing to send papers to nonpaying subscribers. Many, such as the People's Literary Companion, Ladies' World, and Youth's Companion, were addressed to a largely rural, poorer readership; others, such as Ladies' Home Journal, saw their readers as genteel town people, if not the upper-class elite that Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and Century drew at thirty-five cents a copy (four dollars a year), or Scribner's at twenty-five cents a copy. Although the three big new ten-cent monthlies of the 1890s looked like heavily illustrated versions of the elite magazines, resembling them in size, and in sequestering ads to the front and back of the magazines, their content addressed a new white-collar audience of professionals and managers. Their version of "progressivism" embraced and promoted new developments in technology and consumer goods. In achieving such large circulations, they necessarily reached readers who had not previously subscribed to magazines. The new magazines also followed the elite magazines in their sale and promotion of single issues of the magazine, rather than inviting readers to join a community of readers as the mail-order monthlies did through their emphasis on subscriptions and subscription clubs.

The new readership cultivated by the ten-cent magazines, if only because of its size, was a less homogeneous group than the mainly northeastern elite readers of the quality class publications. These readers sought magazines about their own regions as well, and supported new regional magazines: San Francisco's Overland Monthly beginning in 1868, Honolulu in 1888, Brooklyn Life in 1890, Delestry's Western Magazine of Minnesota in 1897, and Sunset Magazine in 1898. Regional and city-based magazines proliferated in the 1960s and 1970s.

While promising something new every month, each magazine provided a familiar, reliable set of experiences—columns to be followed, stories and poems catering to a particular taste or range of tastes, features and service articles for a defined audience. Editors of the new magazines of the 1890s actively solicited work, rather than waiting in the more genteel and leisured fashion for suitable writing to drop in over the transom. McClures, for example, commissioned muckraking articles. And the magazines both defined and created communities of readers.

The most crucial distinction between the new ten-cent magazine and the older elite magazines was the reliance of the new magazines on advertising rather than sales, and soon the pinning of advertising rates to circulation figures. Publishers had shifted from directly selling magazines to readers to selling their readership to advertisers. Nationally circulated magazines were attractive to the new burgeoning advertising trade as the best way to reach readers, now thought of principally as consumers. The editor's new role was to attract and keep readers interested in the magazine's pages, including its advertising pages. As Edward Bok, editor of Ladies' Home Journal, explained in 1921, "The making of a modern magazine is a business proposition; the editor is there to make it pay."

The magazines themselves advertised in order to draw more readers. Authors became celebrities and their names became promotional tools, advertised and listed on magazine front covers and posters, instead of hidden by the anonymity and pseudonymity common early in the century.

Advertising did not help all magazines thrive, however. Magazines addressed to specific communities such as African Americans were financially precarious, since they competed with the far-better-capitalized mass-circulation magazines for both readers and advertisers, while national advertisers largely refused to see African Americans as consumers. Newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier long served as the national publications for African Americans, while the longest lived African American magazines were those sponsored by organizations: Crisis (1910–1996) issued by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois from 1910 to 1934, and the Urban League's Opportunity, begun in 1923. The first African American commercially based magazine to achieve substantial success was Ebony, founded in 1945, which persuaded advertisers that African Americans could be lucrative targets.

Twentieth Century

From the 1920s through the 1960s, surveys found that about 60 percent of Americans regularly read a magazine—generally more than read books, and fewer than read newspapers. Magazine circulations reached millions. Mass-market magazines of the early to mid-twentieth century were the place for authors to establish themselves and to make money. Mainstream magazines such as SaturdayEvening Post, Life, and Look were for decades the most attractive medium for advertisers wishing to reach Americans all over the country. (An exception to the connection between mass circulation and advertising was the immensely popular conservative Reader's Digest, which began in 1922 by reprinting articles from other publications, and refused advertising, in order to keep its high circulation figures secret from the sources it paid for reprints.) The mass-circulation news magazines, born in the 1920s and 1930s, influenced political policy. Henry Luce's powerful Time, Life, and Fortune empire tested the potential of multimedia with its newsreels. But radio and then television proved far more effective media than magazines for reaching the largest possible audience. Since the 1960s, many mass magazines folded, while others retooled to address more specialized demographic groups than broadcast television could reach. At the same time, magazines arose that catered to the new medium: TV Guide continued to have one of the highest magazine circulation rates in the twenty-first century.

In contrast to the general mass-circulation magazines, eventually known as the "slicks," because of the photograph-enhancing, shiny paper on which they were printed, "little" or literary magazines appeared in the early twentieth century and defined themselves by their difference from the commercial magazines, publishing fiction, poetry, and essays that would not be acceptable in the slicks. Little magazines were often produced as labors of love to house new or experimental writing. Literary monthlies of the 1910s and 1920s, such as Little Review and Poetry, defined themselves as upholding high art against commercial publishing, offering access to a purer art, and maintaining a personal editorial vision against the increasingly bland fare of the commercial magazines.

Such magazines are widely credited with nurturing the principal figures of modernism. Sherwood Anderson, H. D., T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, and others first appeared or had their first significant publication in such magazines as Little Review, Poetry, Lyric, Glebe, and Dial of the 1920s, usually without pay. Some faced censorship. The Little Review's editor Margaret Anderson serialized James Joyce's novel Ulysses for three years, though the post office seized and burned four of the issues, charging obscenity. W. H. Auden celebrated the feeling that the small press was an embattled force, in this case a bulwark against both utilitarianism and politics he saw contaminating intellectual life in the postwar university: "Our intellectual marines, / Landing in little magazines / Capture a trend" ("Under Which Lyre," 1946).

But noncommercial periodicals often did have a political focus. Progressive magazines such as The New Masses (1926) became increasingly prominent in the 1930s, and reappeared in greater numbers in the 1960s. Magazines such as Freedomways emerged from the civil rights era, along with black arts movement periodicals such as Umbra (1962) and Nommo (1969), whose antecedents also included the independent black arts periodical Fire!! (1926). New feminist policy and criticism-oriented periodicals such as Chrysalis, Heresies, and Quest appeared in the 1970s, along with an outpouring of feminist literary magazines such as Aphra, Conditions, Common Lives, Lesbian Lives, and Sinister Wisdom. The commercial magazine Ms. achieved substantial circulation both with and without advertising.

A few small press magazines had sponsors. By the 1940s, many literary magazines were situated in and subsidized by universities. The Sewanee Review, for example, was reinvigorated in the 1940s by the University of the South as a way of raising the school's prestige and attracting prominent writers and scholars. On the other end of the economic spectrum, Beat poets of the 1950s and poets allied with or following them created a rich lode of low-budget publications, in what was known as the Mimeograph Revolution.

Magazines such as The New Yorker (begun 1925), Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness (1900–1930), Vanity Fair in its 1913–1936 version, and the influential American Mercury, begun by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan (1924–1950) defined a niche more sophisticated than the slicks but less esoteric than the small press magazines. Another alternative to the slicks were the pulps, printed on rough wood-pulp paper, which began in the 1890s and flourished most dramatically between the wars, with an estimated two hundred titles in circulation at any point during that period. They picked up characters, writers, and readers from the older dime novels. Librarians refused to order these garishly covered magazines, which primarily appealed to readers who were young, immigrant, poor, uneducated, and working class. Early pulps such as Frank Munsey's Argosy published general fiction, but specialized titles soon concentrated on romance, boxing, war, detective, western, aviation, science fiction, fantasy, and "spicy" stories. The romance titles targeted women readers and the adventure magazines went after men, but readers crossed over, as they had for Godey's Lady's Book. Authors, too, crossed over, with writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler writing for both pulps and slicks. Pulps ultimately lost their reader-ship to television, paperbacks, and comic books, and most were gone by the mid-1950s. With the exception of the small press magazines, fiction in general was a rarity in most magazines by the twenty-first century.

By the early twenty-first century, new magazines were aimed at increasingly specialized markets, nearly always niches organized around specific consumer interests or an audience defined by demographics that magazine founders expected to attract advertisers. For example, magazines for brides, an attractive readership for advertisers selling household goods as well as wedding and honeymoon accoutrements, include not only Bride's magazine (begun 1935), but the more specialized Destination Weddings and Honeymoons, Latina Bride, Christian Bride, Houston Bride, Manhattan Bride, and Mother of the Bride, all begun in 2000. Other advertiser-generated categories included airlines' in-flight magazines or new niche market magazines, such as American Windsurfer, Dub: Automotive Lifestyles Magazine, and Mary Beth's Teddy Bears and More. New forms of periodical publishing created new fusions of advertising and editorial matter, seen in periodicals such as Simple Living, Flair, Unlimited, and CML: Camel Quarterly produced by magazine publishing conglomerates on special order for cigarette companies.

The anticommercial opposition likewise became more specialized, with the proliferation of zines, homemade photocopied magazines often with tiny circulations on topics like working at temporary jobs, 1970s nostalgia, grrrlpower, and neopaganism. Many zines and other magazines, such as Salon, abandoned the printed page to appear solely on the World Wide Web.

The Internet

The Internet promised to change the face of magazines, and briefly seemed likely to eliminate them altogether. As commercial (rather than educational or nonprofit) concerns moved onto the Web, they rapidly discovered the potential to support their publications with advertising, just as magazines do, and to target the reader/consumer more precisely than magazines aimed at even the most specialized of niches. Amazon.com, for example, in this sense functioned as a magazine: offering reading matter by selling services at a loss, and aiming to make up the shortfall by selling advertising.

The very low cost of producing an attractive Web site, in contrast to the costs of paper, printing, and binding incurred even with desktop publishing, drew many independent "content producers" to the Web, disrupting established earmarks of professionalism that told magazine readers whether they were holding a well-financed professional production or an amateur periodical issued from a basement. Such contrasts reemerged as media conglomerates moved onto the Web, but then distinctions between a Web site connected to a television station and one for a magazine blurred, just as their ownerships did, resulting in such combinations as AOL (America Online) Time Warner magazines.

Most commercial print magazines developed Web sites, typically promoting the current issue, offering a sample of its contents, special Web-only content, and sometimes offering options for interacting with the magazine (and its advertisers) such as chat rooms, e-mail discussion lists, and shopping links. Trade magazines for specialized business niches often displayed the table of contents, but offered full access only to subscribers, or sold access to specific articles by the piece. Long-established print magazines capitalized on their past publications through the Web as well, with the New Yorker, for example, republishing old covers and old articles of general interest on its Web site's "From the Archive" section and selling its historic stock of cartoons—on T-shirts, in frames, or for use in presentations.

Other sites, more closely resembling traditional magazines, with departments and columns, appeared entirely on the Web. Some Web publications like Salon, originally offered without a fee, continued offering a selection of free matter while creating a "premium" site for a fee as well, offered with exclusive content, fewer ads, and "galleries of erotic art." Such sites cultivated online discussion groups based on common interests of readers, which, once established, might shift to charging a fee.

The World Wide Web also emerged as an extraordinary resource for research using magazines, as educational groups have scanned lengthy runs of defunct magazines in the public domain (generally into the 1920s) and made searchable archives available for free. Owners of active magazines scanned their archives and, often after an initial period of free access, sold access to them.

Bibliography

Anderson, Elliott, and Mary Kinzie, eds. The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History. Yonkers, N.Y.: Pushcart Press, 1978.

Chielens, Edward E., ed. American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.

———. American Literary Magazines: The Twentieth Century. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992.

Duncombe, Stephen. Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture. London: Verso, 1997.

Friedman, R. Seth. The Factsheet Five Zine Reader: The Best Writing from the Underground World of Zines. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1997.

Garvey, Ellen Gruber. The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hoffman, Fredrick John, Charles A. Allen, and Carolyn Farquhar Ulrich. The Little Magazine. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946.

Kaestle, Carl F., et al. Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading since 1880. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991.

Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1938–1966.

Ohmann, Richard M. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century. New York: Verso, 1996.

Oxbridge Communications. National Directory of Magazines. New York: Oxbridge Communications, 2001.

Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964.

Smith, Erin A. Hard-Boiled: Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000.

Tebbel, John, and Mary Ellen Zuckerman. The Magazine in America, 1741–1990. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985.

• Receptacles and Casks - magazine: room or storage place for supplies, esp. ammunition
• Firearm Parts, Accessories, and Processes - magazine: sometimes removable or reloadable storage receptacle that holds extra cartridges in repeating rifles and shotguns; military storehouse for arms and ammunition
• Publications - magazine: periodic publication, usu. bound in paper, containing articles by various writers, often with photographs and illustrations, frequently focusing on some unifying theme or subject
• Cinematography Tools and Techniques - magazine: lightproof film container
• Television Programming and Institutions - magazine: documentary show covering several topics in single broadcast; newsmagazine
• Tools and Techniques - magazine: unit loaded with film that can be removed from camera and replaced by another unit in order to change film in use in middle of roll

Not to be confused with zine.

This article is about the magazine as a published medium. For other uses, see Magazine (disambiguation).

"Quarterly" redirects here. For quarterly in heraldry, see Quartering (heraldry).

This article may need to be rewritten entirely to comply with Wikipedia's quality standards. You can help. The discussion page may contain suggestions. (December 2011)

Journalism
News · Writing style Ethics · Objectivity Values · Attribution Defamation Editorial independence Journalism school List of journalism articles
Areas
Arts · Business Entertainment Environment Fashion · Medicine Politics · Science Sports · Technology Trade · Traffic Weather · World
Genres
Advocacy · Analytic · Broadcast Citizen · Civic Collaborative Comics journalism Community Database · Gonzo Investigative · Literary Muckraking · Narrative "New Journalism" Non-profit journalism Online · Opinion Peace · Photojournalism Scientific · Visual · Watchdog
Social impact
Fourth Estate Freedom of the press Infotainment · Media bias Public relations Press service Yellow journalism
News media
Newspapers · Magazines TV and radio Internet News agencies Alternative media
Roles
Journalists (reporters) Editor · Columnist Copy editor Meteorologist News presenter Photographer Pundit/Political commentator
Category: Journalism
v t e

Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications that are printed with ink on paper, generally published on a regular schedule and contain a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three.^[1]

Contents 1 Distribution 1.1 Paid circulation 1.2 Non-Paid Circulation 1.3 Controlled circulation 2 Technical definition 3 History 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Distribution

Magazines can be distributed through the mail; through sales by newsstands, bookstores or other vendors; or through free distribution at selected pick-up locations. Sales models for distribution fall into three main categories.

Paid circulation

In this model, the magazine is sold to readers for a price, either on a per-issue basis or by subscription, where an annual fee or monthly price is paid and issues are sent by post to readers. Examples from the UK include Private Eye and PC Pro.

Non-Paid Circulation

This means that there is no cover price and issues are given away, for example in street dispensers, airline in-flight magazines or included with other products or publications. An example from the UK and Australia is TNT Magazine.

Controlled circulation

This is the model used by "insider magazines" or industry-based publications distributed only to qualifying readers, often for free and determined by some form of survey. This latter model was widely used before the rise of the World Wide Web and is still employed by some titles. For example, in the United Kingdom, a number of computer-industry magazines, including Computer Weekly and Computing, and in finance, Waters Magazine.

Technical definition

In the library technical sense a "magazine" paginates with each issue starting at page one.^[2] Academic or professional publications that are not peer-reviewed are generally professional magazines.^[3]

History

Main article: History of newspapers and magazines

The Gentleman's Magazine, first published in 1731, in London, is considered to have been the first general-interest magazine. Edward Cave, who edited The Gentleman's Magazine under the pen name "Sylvanus Urban," was the first to use the term "magazine," on the analogy of a military storehouse of varied materiel, originally derived from the Arabic makhazin "storehouses".^[4] Wordsmith offers this origin: "Plural of Arabic makhzan: storehouse, used figuratively as "storehouse of information" for books, and later to periodicals)."^[5]

The oldest consumer magazine still in print is The Scots Magazine, which was first published in 1739, though multiple changes in ownership and gaps in publication totaling over 90 years weaken that claim. Lloyd's List was founded in Edward Lloyd’s England coffee shop in 1734; it is still published as a daily business newspaper.

See also

• Art magazines
• Automobile magazines
• Boating magazines
• British boys' magazines
• Business magazines
• College magazines
• Computer magazines
• Customer magazines
• Fantasy fiction magazines
• Fashion magazines
• Health and fitness magazines
• Horror fiction magazines
• Humor magazines
• Literary magazines
• Luxury magazines
• Music magazines
• News magazines
• Online magazines
• Pornographic magazines
• Pulp magazines
• Science fiction magazines
• Science magazines and scientific journals
• Shelter magazines (home design and decorating)
• Sports magazines
• Sunday magazines
• Teen magazines
• Trade journals
• Trade magazines
• Zine

Lists

• List of 18th-century British periodicals
• List of fashion magazines
• List of men's magazines
• List of 19th-century British periodicals
• List of online magazine archives
• List of political magazines
• List of railroad-related periodicals
• List of women's magazines
• List of travel magazines
• List of architecture magazines
• List of teen magazines

Categories

• Periodicals
• Religious magazines
• Satirical magazines
• Wildlife magazines

References

1. ^ http://www.magazinepublisher.com/startup.html
2. ^ Likewise, in the technical sense a "journal" has continuous pagination throughout a volume. Thus Business Week, which starts each issue anew with page one, is a magazine, but the Journal of Business Communication, which starts each volume with the winter issue and continues the same sequence of pagination throughout the coterminous year, is a journal. Some professional or trade publications are also peer reviewed, an example being the Journal of Accountancy. See Magazine (firearms) for another sense in which the word "magazine" refers to serialized unitary behavior. Cf. the French Wikipedia's disambiguation of various meanings of the cognate magasin.
3. ^ The fact that a publication calls itself a "journal" does not make it a journal in the technical sense. The Journal of Accountancy, for example, is in fact a magazine (each issue starts with page one). The Wall Street Journal is actually a newspaper.
4. ^ OED, s.v. "Magazine".
5. ^ Wordsmith: Magazine.

External links

• All Magazines

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Magazines

Look up magazine, periodical, or journal in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Magazine at the Open Directory Project

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - tidsskrift, publikation, magasin, depot, magasinbygning
adj. - magasin-

idioms:

• magazine programme    magasinprogram, program med oplysende stof i tv eller radio

Nederlands (Dutch)
tijdschrift, magazine, magazijn (van geweer), munitiekamer, ammunitie/ voorraad

Français (French)
n. - (Journ) revue, magazine, arsenal d'artillerie, magasin
adj. - de magazine

idioms:

• magazine programme    (Radio, TV) magazine

Deutsch (German)
n. - Magazin, Vorratsspeicher, Munitionsdepot, Zeitschrift
adj. - eine Zeitschrift betreffend

idioms:

• magazine programme    Fernseh- od. Radiomagazin

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - περιοδικό, πυριτιδαποθήκη, αποθήκη πυρομαχικών, γεμιστήρας όπλου

idioms:

• magazine programme    (τηλεοπτικό ή ραδιοφωνικό) μαγκαζίνο, ποικίλο πρόγραμμα

Italiano (Italian)
rivista

idioms:

• magazine programme    programma di attualità

Português (Portuguese)
n. - revista (f), armazém (m), gabinete (m) (Fot.)

idioms:

• magazine programme    programa (m) (de teatro, de música etc.)

Русский (Russian)
журнал, склад боеприпасов, фотокассета, бобина

idioms:

• magazine programme    телевизионная программа новостей

Español (Spanish)
n. - revista, publicación, almacén, polvorín, recámara, cargador, bandeja, carrusel, chasis
adj. - relacionado o perteneciente a una publicación

idioms:

• magazine programme    programa de entrevistas y variedades

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - tidskrift, (ammunitions)förråd, magasin, kassett

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
杂志, 弹盒, 仓库, 杂志的

idioms:

• magazine programme    杂志里写的程序

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 雜誌, 彈盒, 倉庫
adj. - 雜誌的

idioms:

• magazine programme    雜誌裡寫的程式

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 잡지, 일요판, 탄약고, 군수품
adj. - 잡지의, 일요판의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 雑誌, 特集欄, 倉庫, 弾薬庫, 弾倉, 燃料室, 資源地, 宝庫

idioms:

• magazine programme    マガジンプログラム

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) مجله‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮כתב-עת, מגזין, מחסנית, מחסן-תחמושת, קובץ, פרסום‬
adj. - ‮של חלק המאמרים בעיתוני סוף השבוע‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.