Wednesday, 30 March 2022

History of Magazines

 History

The first magazine was published in Germany during the 17th century. The success of this publication led to the introduction of magazines across Europe. During the 17th and 18th centuries, publishers founded several different types of periodicals aimed at diverse audiences, including the elite and women.


 

In the 17th century, magazines were a way of finding out news, reading poetry and prose. The idea was for a magazine was to have the best of both words to be entertaining yet serious, rational and unsophisticated, by having both hard and soft news. However, in today’s society, whilst having many similarities to original magazines, they have to provide information on particular niches and focus on trends or issues, giving background information on important news events whilst also being entertaining for audiences to read. All of these magazines were written in the 17th century and as you can see, they both lack colour and illustrations and are in a different format to the modern day examples of the lifestyle magazines below.

 

The collage on the left shows 20th century moving towards a more colourful look to magazines with more coverlids and features splashed on the cover. The picture on the right shows modern 21st century magazines and it shows clear coverlines to represent the topics and stories in the magazine, highlighting a ‘try-before-buy’ technique. Magazines now, especially fashion magazines, feature celebrities on their covers for celebrity endorsement due to the commercial nature of magazines. 


Contemporary context

Who are major players in this industry? Vogue, People Magazine, GQ, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Us weekly, InStyle, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, TIME, Vanity Fair, Men's Health, Women's Health, Allure, Essence.
How do companies finance, make their revenue? Most magazines make most of their profits from advertisement, not from sales. Major magazines like Vogue make a fortune off advertisement. Cost are made up of a space rate as above plus a net production charge from £4,500 per page for a Vogue shoot or £2,000 per page with supplied assets.







 
 
 

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