Development of Magazine Tropes

 

Image from: Canva

    Greetings to everyone and welcome back to my blog where today we are going to be gong over the development of how the magazine was able to categorize into the general interest, special interest, and professional magazine that we generally see today. 

    The market for magazine consumption in North America was growing incredible during the 18th century. During this time period, education and being literate at a younger age was becoming a lot more commonplace among regular civilians. So because of this, the ability to be able to utilize a magazine was much higher. Publishers needed to find a way to create product that was attractive to all these new categories of people. Companies needed to start creating publications specific to certain professions as they began to want to target to different niches. There was also an emergence of wanting to read about your favorite activities. This is where the Sports Illustrated and the Cosmopolitans come into fruition. Magazines that specify over the brand new makeup set or the best players in the basketball league became a brand new form of entertainment. We see great examples of this, for example, with The Bookman being founded in 1895, the Atlantic in 1857, and so on. 

    With the publications of these sorts of magazines, we also saw the emergence of “gender exclusive” publications for one to read. Seventeen magazine is a magazine that while originally focused on all American adolescents, it began to shift its focus to the young female adolescents of the nation. It just goes to show how the shift in culture affected how not only Seventeen, but all these new waves of magazines going into specific niches. But that’s all for todays post folks, stay tuned for the next one!

References

- Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). Magazine. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved December 23, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/magazine-publishing 

- https://www.magazines.com/