The unfolding history of the magazine

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1:26picking up a magazine to read has faded into a distant memory. It's a long, long time since I picked up or bought a magazine. I do sometimes buy a physical copy of a magazine or borrow one from the public library, but digital access is very convenient. I've been hiding money inside a property magazine lying on the coffee table for two years now. No one picks up these things nowadays. I would only read a printed magazine if I'm on an aeroplane. I have not booked a magazine in a shop or at a newsstand in many years. Have you seen the cost of magazines these days? I last read a magazine at the dentist.

2:06I was nervous so I had to find something to calm me down. Thanks to Jonathan, Saif, Carolyn, Stuart, Majuku, Mark, Keith, Eddie, Helena and Angela for sharing their thoughts on the BBC World Service Facebook page, where we asked when you last read a printed magazine. Usha, what was the last magazine you read? Now, that depends whether you mean like holding a magazine in my hand or online. But as it happens, I received my latest issue of The Caravan just yesterday. It's a news magazine produced in New Delhi. Samir, how about you? You collect magazines, so you have a huge number to choose from. Currently, I'm reading the first issue of a new magazine called The Players, which is combining fashion and sports.

2:57It's 360 pages oversized. You need two hands to carry it. And by the way, if it's not income paper, I don't consider it a magazine. OK, well, we'll get on to that in a bit. Tim, how about you? Well, I'm afraid I'm going to lower the tone here because the last magazine I've been reading is Moto Jornal, which is a Portuguese motorcycling magazine. It's partly because of my interest in motorcycles, but also as I live in Portugal now, I'm trying to do everything to increase my facility with the language. So that's quite helpful. Ah, you heard there my three expert guests who'll be joining us for this forum from the BBC World Service to explore the rich history of magazines and discuss how these things that were once such a big part of our lives have adapted in the face of many challenges.

3:53Usha Raman is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad in India who began her career in magazines writing and editing a variety of publications. She is also the owner and editor of a specialist magazine for teachers. Samir Husni has been analysing and advising the magazine industry for decades. He's the founder and director of the Magazine Media Centre, whose aim is to preserve the past, present and future of the format. And he's written many books, including Inside the Great Minds of Magazine Makers. And Tim Holmes is a former magazine editor, writer, and until his retirement, leader for many years of the magazine journalism course at the University of Cardiff in the UK.

4:42Now, the origins of the word magazine give us an interesting hint as to what became their function. Samir, what did the word magazine mean originally? The word magazine started from the Arabic word makhazim, which means storehouses. It's a place where you can find so many things all in one place. Edward Cave in the UK was the first one to use that word to describe his publication, The Gentleman's Magazine, in 1731. As so often with origin stories, there is no consensus about the earliest example of a magazine. Which one, Tim, has the best claim to being the first magazine? Or at least give us a flavour of some of the contenders.

5:29Well, I can give you four possible examples. So in 1586 in Frankfurt, we have what I'm going to call Gainasseum, which was a collection of engravings of, quote, female costumes from around Europe, so perhaps a proto-fashion magazine. And in 1663 in Hamburg, the Erbaulich magazine, which was kind of literary, philosophy, poetry, hymns, had a lot of idiosyncrasies, but it inspired other magazines, including in 1665 in Paris, the Journal de Scavain, which is very often quoted as the first proper, if you like, magazine. But then if you want another date as well, 1693 in London, the Ladies' Mercury, I think, has a good claim to be the first ever women's magazine.

6:24So you've got a bit of a selection there. Well, clearly the emergence of magazines, newspapers, books, anything ink on paper is connected to the invention of the printing press. We're talking 14th century China, Korea, 15th century Europe. How about India, Usha? What do we know about the earliest magazines there? Well, most accounts date the earliest magazines to the 16th century when the first printing press arrived in India. The first English magazine started along with the first English newspaper in the late 1700s. So that would be around 1780 or so. But there are many magazines in other languages that started around the same time.

7:13In Tamil, Bengali are two languages that have been very prolific in terms of magazine culture. And again, you know, it depends on whose history you listen to or read. The earliest magazine that's found in many of the records is the Oriental Magazine or the Calcutta Amusement, which was kind of a gossipy magazine meant for the expats of the time. And Tim, what did these early magazines look like? We're not talking glossy covers, are we? No, they would have looked to our eyes relatively plain and type heavy. But of course, back then people were used to seeing just type. There would also have been woodcuts included.

7:58But although they look plain by the standards of current magazines, I think there was an art in making the type look good, look nice, look readable, look interesting, and then using the woodcuts to add to that and to increase the enjoyment. Tim, I want to take a step back to look at the broader context of the early days of magazine publishing. What kind of need were magazines fulfilling among people and who were the readers? Well, this is the perennial question for any magazine publishers, which is who are your readers and what do they need? And it was true back then in the days of the Gentleman's Magazine and before that.

8:42And if you put those kind of publications into the context of the time, certainly in Western Europe, you have two really major movements going on. The first is the Age of Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. So there was a huge amount of new information, both physics, maths, philosophy, general learning. that people in particular spheres, to be able to fill their role in society and their niche in society, there's a certain amount and level of information that's needed to be able to do that. And then you can add to that, it's also a period of social change and mobility, the beginnings of mobility.

9:35You've got new categories of citizenship. You've got the beginnings of female emancipation. You've got the whole trade versus gentry kind of thing and new trades and new professions coming on. And all of these categories of people, if you like, all these potential readership groups have information needs. And so you've got them forming what you might call proto-communities. I think there is good evidence that literacy is probably more widespread than is generally recognised. And I think the main limit to being able to participate in the magazine sphere, if you like, would have been the ability to afford it.

10:22I think if you put all of those things together, you've got an idea of who they were and what they needed to know. I mean, would you agree with this, Samir, the sense that, you know, reading a magazine does allow you access to this new community if you were socially mobile? Well, it gives you that sense of membership. Since the beginning of the printing press, we have three ships that cruise through each one of us. Ownership. We want to own something. And when you are holding a magazine in your hands, you are owning it. It's yours. I mean, you paid for it. Nobody can take it away from you. And then the sense of membership, that sense of community that I'm not the only one.

11:04There's like X number of people who are receiving the same exact magazine, regardless where they live. I mean, you have to keep in mind, till television start coming into being, magazines were the only national media, mass media. The idea of having a national newspaper did not really appear in the United States until the mid 80s of the last century. So that sense of membership was so important to the people who are receiving it. And then showmanship. You put it on your coffee table. You are so proud of showing it that, hey, look, I'm not like those common people. And that gives us that inner satisfaction.

11:47Isha, have you got something to say? Well, in India, it's been quite different in terms of ownership. And magazines were characterized by being these things that you could get from a circulating library in the neighborhood. So there used to be these circles of readers who would all, you know, contribute and buy a subscription to a magazine, and then it would circulate among them through this circulating library. So in that sense, they were a local community reading the same magazine serially. So, you know, they would get together at tea shops and coffee houses and discuss that week's or that month's issue of the magazine.

12:28So that's one kind of, I would say, hyper-local community that builds around reading a periodical without necessarily having to afford the entire subscription. So it's a shared subscription. And possibly this exists in other cultures, but it's very, very prevalent across India. Usha, as a magazine editor, how do you go about creating that community of readers? It's one of the things that we've been hearing that distinguishes magazines from other forms of print media. I think more than newspapers, magazines have a much clearer idea of who they're speaking to. And, you know, speaking from my own experience, I run a little magazine for school teachers.

13:14And I think one of the things that sustains the magazine is that community. So how one builds communities, I think for specialist magazines, it's very different from general interest magazines. But I think it's the tone, right? It's much more personal when you're speaking to a reader. It's like you're telling them a story. So the whole mode of journalism is much more speaking directly to a reader rather than broadcasting information to the general public. Vishal, you've previously worked at the magazine India Today, the weekly news magazine. So when you're in news, how do you distinguish yourself from newspapers?

13:58Is it like you say about the content or is it more about the tone of how you address the readers? Well, it's a combination of both. And I think if I could just talk a little bit about India today, it's probably the most successful news magazine in the country. And when they started back in the late 1970s, they very consciously modeled themselves on Time magazine right down to the red border. And so I think they had a sense of how magazine journalism deferred from newspaper journalism in that, of course, it was much more narrative. You had the opportunity and the space to tell stories in much more depth and with greater context.

14:41The other way in which they distinguished themselves, I think, was visually, right? Photographs that, you know, were stories in themselves. And India Today, again, had some excellent photographers who've become legends in the Indian context. Well, let's take a moment to hear what our listeners appreciate about magazines. Magazines allow for perspective. The article doesn't have to be written in the next half hour. Having magazines in your home, to me, has an effect like the Scandinavians call hoog, that comforting feel in your home with the soft blanket and the candles. But I think a beautiful assortment of magazines, it really shows good taste.

15:31It can offer up some new interests and ideas. I've always liked magazines a lot and had lots of subscriptions. If you compare to how we read online, we jump between tabs, notifications, headlines. Magazines offer a far slower, nicer, more intentional way, I think, to take in content. What beats probably the printed magazine against the electronic one is that you are engaging more senses into it. This experience engages more of your person. It is very tactile. You touch, then you smell, then you see the fonts, the paper. You turn the pages. And for me to take some glossy magazine and to find some way with a cup of coffee, it's something unbeatable.

16:26That was Joan, Kurt and Glenn in the United States, Justin in Peru. and Ruta in Lithuania. As we heard there, Glenn mentioned subscribing to various magazines. Tim, talk us through the magazine business model. Why do magazines want to have subscribers? So if you sell your magazine in a shop, there's the cost of getting it to the shop, there's the cost of the shop selling it, so they will want to take perhaps 50 % of the cover price, and then you might have magazines left over that you have to get rid of. If you have a subscription, you get all of the money up front and you can, you know, make use of it.

17:09You've got a bit of regular income. I understand the desire for that. Well, what about advertising? Samir, when and where did that emerge? Was it because the cost of publishing a magazine and keeping the cover price at a certain level got to a point where it just wasn't sustainable? That was the beginning of, I mean, as the turn of the 19th century and we start seeing in the United States the penny press, which is the newspapers that started depending on advertising for their revenue, and they became in the business of counting customers rather than customers who count. and all of a sudden Cyrus Curtis, the owner of Ladies Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, found out that's a great idea.

17:55I mean, if we can sell the magazine cheap, have the subscription cheap and get the money from the advertisers. So they started growing the numbers and magazines like the Saturday Evening Post almost reached a circulation of 7 million copies. In fact, until recently, I would say until maybe the turn of the 21st century, you could get a magazine for the whole year for$20, for example, because of the advertising revenue that's coming in, because they were selling the numbers of their audience to the advertiser. But now we are shifting back to the circulation model because the advertisers have found so many other platforms to advertise on.

18:43And the magazines, instead of costing like$20 for a year, it's$20 for one issue. but the main reason for the advertising being a major aspect of the magazine industry because you have to remember the only place people knew that there is something new in the marketplace was through the advertisement in the magazine and I laugh every time I look at all those ads from the early days, from the 30s and 40s who are like two out of three doctors recommend this brand of cigarettes to smoke. But it's amazing how change has been the only constant in the magazine business. But it is interesting, this relationship between magazines and advertisers.

19:35Usha, looking back over the publications you've worked for, how do you achieve the balance between articles and adverts? I mean, presumably you'd want to fill the magazine with adverts so you make money. Well, I can talk a little bit about, you know, the days when I worked with the India Today group. It was rumoured that the ad on the back page, which was for the longest time from the Bajaj company, and they made this very successful two-wheeler scooter, and that single ad paid the salaries of all the journalists in India Today. Wow. That was the rumor. So were the journalists just not paid any money?

20:17Is that or? Well, no, the advertising space was so expensive. Excellent. Because like Samir said, you know, India today was the only vehicle that would reach people with some disposable income across the country. And it's in English. And already, you know, those who speak English in India tend to be those with some level of disposable income. So they had, you know, the perfect vehicle to reach this particular demographic. So, so obviously, you know, advertising is hugely important just in terms of making a well-designed, well-produced magazine viable. But it's also important because I think actually readers like to look at ads, particularly the glossy magazines.

21:04And if you look at the women's magazines in India, Femina, Now Vogue, of course, a lot of people pick them up and probably spend more time looking at the ads than they do at some of the editorial content. But then to come to the question that you asked in terms of editorial decisions, you do have to take a stand on what kind of advertising you carry, how much advertising you carry. And I think there is some regulation that you can't have more than 45 % or something like that of advertising content in a magazine. 45 % is an awful lot, Samir. I mean, have you? You wanted to come in over that? In the United States, it's 75 % on average.

21:50But that's for the whole year. I mean, to qualify for the postal services as a second class, as the discounted rate of mailing the magazines. Well, some of our listeners find the adverts too much. Jan in South Carolina said, I don't want to pay$15 for a magazine that's mostly ads. Samir, in your work as a consultant to magazine publishers, how do you advise them on the advertising aspect? Do you tell them to go up to 75 %? No. And in fact, I tell them that you have to be in the business of selling content to the readers, to the customers, not to the advertisers. I mean, the day where we are selling our content to the advertisers by selling our audience are gone.

22:39If you are paying$15 for the magazine, you better be getting 80 or 90 percent of editorial content. And that's one reason. I mean, we are seeing with the established magazines and the new magazines, they are cutting down on their frequency because they are increasing the cover price and losing the ad pages. And that's a drastic change from what used to be in the 1920s. I mean, advertisers, they have so many other options now. But it's that, like some other listeners of yours said earlier, it's that lean back experience. I mean, nothing beats holding a magazine in your hand, an ink on paper magazine.

23:19There's no notifications, there's no interruption. And the most important thing to me, it's permanent. Yeah, that's true. There's no delete. There's no backspace. I mean, once you get the magazine, this is it. You're stuck with it, whether it's good or bad. Tim, we've been talking advertising, subscriptions, the various business models that allowed magazines to flourish and gain a foothold in the public consciousness. What were the other things that contributed to this period of expansion in the 19th century? So in terms of technology, there were simply more printers printing more things, and then you get better and faster printing presses so they can print more of the magazines.

24:04Yes. Faster composition, i.e. typesetting. So in the 19th century, it began to be done mechanically and that speeded things up a lot. Paper itself became cheaper and more readily available. So traditionally, paper was made from rags and it was quite a premium product. and then the system of making it out of wood pulp was developed and suddenly paper could be had in large quantities for much cheaper prices. So that made it cheaper to actually start your magazines and keep them going. And I think better image reproduction as well. So again, we talked earlier about woodcuts. By the end of the 19th century, magazines were able to reproduce photographs in halftone illustrations, and that made a huge difference.

25:00And then the political economy itself, i.e. manufacturing. So I can give you a really nice example of this, I think. Bicycles. Okay. The bicycle went through quite a long period of development before settling on John Kemp Starley's safety bicycle, which is basically the bicycle we have now. And once that happened, then you got a massive manufacturing boom in bicycles. So you had lots on the market. So you needed to sell them to people. So there was advertising. But where would you advertise your bicycles? If there were a bicycling magazine, for example, that would be very convenient. So at the end of the 19th century, there was a boom just in bicycling magazines.

25:48So I think it went from, you know, one or two to 20 or 30. So I think if you want an example of how political economy changes that, that's, I think, a very good example of how it influences our cultural production, if you like, the production of magazines in this instance. So Samir, what about TV and radio? When radio and then television emerged and became the main means of mass communication in the 20th century, what was the impact on the magazine industry? Were they in competition or did they actually feed off one another? Well, the more radios we had at the households and the more television started penetrating the American households, the more topics and subject matters were available for the audience.

26:37For example, soap operas on the radio. People were like sitting by the radio listening to a soap opera on every single day. And all of a sudden, we have 10, 15 magazines devoted to soap operas. Same thing happened with cable television. When television started being specialized, when MTV, for example, came on the scene, we used to have one music magazine like Rolling Stone. And all of a sudden, we have a magazine for rap music, a magazine for hip hop, for Metallica. So the mass reach of television and radio helped create subject and topics that the audience was not aware of. So smart publishers are learning how to complete and compete without really any major competition on their behalf.

27:29I mean, they are providing the audience with something that they loved on TV. I mean, I loved watching like wrestling, for example. And all of a sudden there's five magazines to fulfill that. I don't want to say lust for wrestling. but to fulfil that interest of wrestling. Okay, I'd like to turn now to explore what the place of magazines in society is. In India, Usha, how much were magazines responsible for shaping, say, the independence struggle in the early 20th century? Well, many of the politicians of the time or nationalist leaders of the time were also writers. And Gandhi himself, for instance, published several periodicals, something that he called a newspaper rather than a newspaper, which was a weekly.

28:25And I think the idea was to build a critical mass of readers who would then join the freedom struggle. So I I think during the early part of the 20th century, definitely magazines played a huge role in building that consciousness, nurturing that consciousness towards independence. And I think this continued over the years. So from being very nationalist in the pre-independence years to being sort of development oriented in immediate post-independence years to more reactionary and, you know, watchdog in the 70s, 80s, to what we have now, which is much more consumerist, working along with the entertainment industry and so on.

29:13So that would be, I think, the trajectory. But certainly both politically and culturally, I think magazines have both pushed the spirit of the times as well as reflected the spirit of the times. That was a very diplomatic answer, but I want to hear from everyone. Do magazines follow trends and movements or do they create them? What do you think, Tim? I don't think that a magazine or any medium can actually create something out of nothing. But I do think that a good editor can spot a trend or even the hint of the beginnings of a trend very early and can then influence the way that the people involved in that trend or in that situation or that community, whatever it may be, perceive themselves and what they're doing and help to form that identity and community.

30:12And I was thinking of some examples of what this might be. And there's one that's kind of very widely quoted, which is the Face magazine, which was, you know, clubbing and fashion in the 1980s. It was much more influential than lastingly successful. It was successful, but not lastingly successful. But it helped to create a real subcultural scene. I think you've got the magazine Car when it was edited by Mel Nichols and Mel took what was quite a sort of dull, nuts and bolts, dry, dusty sort of publication and turned it into something extremely glamorous. It looked fantastic, had fantastic photography.

30:58The artwork was fantastic. And it was something that if you had even a vague interest in cars, you would be interested in. And for better or worse, I think it led directly into what you might call the top gear era on television and elsewhere. Samir, what do you think about this? Yeah, but also, I mean, if you go back a little bit historically, like 20s, 1920s of the last century, magazines like Ladies Home Journal introduced women smoking in the magazine, which has made it OK for women to smoke in public. And then later they introduced women drinking in public, which is making OK for women to drink in public.