The Bright, Bleak Future of American Magazines

Peterson, Theodore

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/1568 Copy

Description

Title

The Bright, Bleak Future of American Magazines

Author(s)

Peterson, Theodore

Issue Date

1969

Keyword(s)

Serials control systems

Abstract

On Friday, January 19, 1969, Martin S. Ackerman, who professedly had come to the presidency of the Curtis Publishing Company as savior, announced that the Saturday Evening Post would cease publication with its February 8, 1969, issue. The mourners came solemnly to the funeral, and there were obituaries and euologies galore. Since countless clinicians have already performed autopsies on Benjamin Franklin's illegitimate offspring, this is not the occasion to speculate in detail about why the magazine died. Yet if one is to assess the future of American magazines, it does seem important to put the death of the Saturday Evening Post in perspective, especially since at its death some people heard the ominous tolling of John Donne's churchbell tolling not just for the Post but for all magazines. Certainly the death of the Saturday Evening Post should remind us of the essential mortality of all magazines. Many of the magazines that led in circulation, advertising and prestige preceded the Post in death. And in the same month that the Post died, American Builder slipped quietly into the grave. Eight years earlier, American Builder had been its publisher's number one magazine, and only the previous November it had observed its hundredth anniversary. In April, 1969, Western Farm Life died at age seventy-one. In April, too, the Hearst Corporation gave up its attempts to sustain Eye, a two-year-old monthly for young swingers. Over the years, death has come with democratic impartiality to the young and old, to the poor and to the once wealthy.

Publisher

Graduate School of Library Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Series/Report Name or Number

Allerton Park Institute (16th : 1969)

ISSN

0536-4604

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/1568

Copyright and License Information

Copyright owned by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. 1969.

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