Timeline: a history of magazines
1586-1949 ; 1950-1969 ; 1970-1989 ; 1990-
Events in the history of magazines. These pages list developments in technology, distribution and corporate strategy as well as the influence of periodicals on culture.
| 1990 | BBC/Redwood launches Good Food, which takes sector by storm. Similar effect with titles such as Gardeners' World and Top Gear. Also some high-profile failures, such as Tomorrow's World. Other publishers, especially IPC, were livid, claiming the magazines had free TV advertising worth millions of pounds | |
| World Wide Web described by Tim Berners-Lee | ||
| Entertainment Weekly launched (US) | ||
| 1991 | February. Deregulation of listings market, destroying duopoly of BBC's Radio Times and IPC's TV Times. IPC slashes latter's cover price to move downmarket; also launches What's on TV. Bauer launches TV Quick. Hamfield launches TV Plus, which soon folds. Papers launch their own weekly guides as do some magazines, such as Time Out | |
| Maxwell floats the Mirror Group, achieving almost £250m for just under half of the company; though investors were seen as unenthusiastic (May). The run-up featured pensioners threatening legal action over a fall in the value of their pensions | ||
| Enquiry into Standards of Cross Media Promotion by John Sadler identifies promotion on BBC TV of BBC magazines as an area for concern | ||
| BBC Gardeners' World uses trug (a basket for plant cuttings, etc) as cover mount – magazine sold inside the cover mount! The height of a marketing battle with Emap and IPC for gardening market – other cover mounts included a metal and wood garden spade | ||
| New Crane Publishing launches Sainsbury's Magazine licensed from the supermarket. A variant of contract publishing | ||
| BBC closes The Listener. The Times takes over on its crossword | ||
| Esquire launches in UK | ||
| For Him changes its name to FHM | ||
| 1992 | Emap buys Car from FF Publishing. Magazine switches from hot metal to DTP production | |
| First SMS text message to a mobile phone | ||
| Newspaper and magazine archives published on CD-Rom | ||
| (20 June) Economist makes reference to the world wide web: 'Researchers at CERN in Geneva are trying to build a similar service, which they call World-Wide Web (or W3), drawing on their experience in helping physicists find their way around the mountains of data produced by CERN's accelerators.' | ||
| Punch closes for first time | ||
| 1993 | Reed Elsevier plc formed by merger of Dutch academic publisher Elsevier and Reed International, owner of UK's largest magazine publisher IPC. World's third-biggest publisher. Starts to sell off consumer products, such as local newspapers, to focus on academic journals and business information | |
| Mosaic – first graphical web browser | ||
| Wired magazine launches in US | ||
| Haymarket's What Car? produces CD-Rom holding review of Saab saloon with XYZ new media magazine | ||
| Emap launches weekly Carweek. Closes next year having cost company £7 million | ||
| The Times cuts price to 30p, heralding a price war | ||
| 30 January issue of New Statesman & Society publishes article about rumours of affair between John Major, the prime minister, and a caterer, Clare Latimer – 'The curious case of John Major's "mistress"'. Major and Latimer both sued the magazine, but settled for £1,001 without the magazine admitting liability. They also sued the impecunious Scallyway, a fringe magazine, which first published the rumours. However, NSS had to pay for settlements made by its printers, distributor and newsagents – which cost more than £200,000. It raised the money in a fund-raising campaign entitled 'Would you sue your paper boy?' In 2002, MP Edwina Curry revealed she had a four-year affair with Major between 1984 and 1988 | ||
| Association of Publishing Agencies founded in UK | ||
| 1994 | IPC launches Loaded with James Brown as editor – start of a boom in 'lads' mags' | |
| Directory of US federal website lists ‘nearly 300 sources' of government information | ||
| Emap buys men's fashion title FHM from small publisher Tayvale. Mike Soutar appointed editor for relaunch with publisher David Hepworth | ||
| Reed-Elsevier buys Lexis-Nexis. Marks starts of corporate strategy to concentrate on online academic markets that is to see it sell off newspapers, printing companies, book publishers – and IPC, the UK's biggest magazine house | ||
| US Wired magazine launches Hot Wired website | ||
| Daily Telegraph claims to be the first national newspaper on the web | ||
| Future Publishing launches .Net magazine and Futurenet website | ||
| First banner advertising on the web, for Wired magazine (US) | ||
| December issue of Vogue carries half-page advertisement for www.condenast.co.uk | ||
| 1995 | Periodical Publishers Association on the web | |
| Guardian newspaper launches UK version of Wired | ||
| IPC launches UnZip, 'the UK's first fully interactive magazine on CD-Rom'. Based on content from New Scientist, NME and Vox. Zone did technical work. 15 age label; £15.99 introductory offer; for Mac and PC | ||
| Editor Gill Hudson puts CD-Rom on cover of August issue of Maxim in UK | ||
| IPC launches Uploaded.com, based on content from Loaded , and nme.com, based on New Musical Express. Start of an ambitious web programme | ||
| Indonesian government revokes licence of weekly news magazine Tempo (founded 1971). Staff splits to launch website, Tempo Interaktif (www.tempo.co.id) and weekly Gatra. Web articles attacking corrupt president Suharto and his son 'Tommy' later collated as book | ||
| 1996 | Punch resurrected by Mohamed el Fayed | |
| Futurenet website claims 200,000 registered users | ||
| Future's .Net produces 32-page supplement 'Doing Business Online' with Financial Times. Distributed 460,000 copies with paper and magazine | ||
| Loaded selling more than 250,000 copies a month | ||
| VNU launches Jobnet recruitment website based on advertising in Computing, PC Week and Network News | ||
| 1997 | TV Guide magazine in US goes online | |
| Web page linking test case between Shetland Times and Shetland News settles out of court | ||
| Zest and Good Housekeeping make masthead TV programmes | ||
| April issue of Emap's Garden Answers has metal and wood garden spade on cover | ||
| Dennis's Maxim beats IPC's Loaded and Emap's FHM in launching new-wave men's magazine in US | ||
| Filipacchi Medias and Hachette Filipacchi Medias merge to form Hachette Filipacchi Medias, the world's largest magazine publisher, with 160 titles in France and internationally | ||
| David Hillman, who redesigned the Guardian, appointed Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA | ||
| Hearst launches Kosmopolitan in Indonesia ('C' pronounced as 'ch') | ||
| 1998 | Cinven, a venture capital firm, funds management buyout of IPC from Reed Elsevier plc for £860 million | |
| Custom Publishing Council established as a committee of the Magazine Publishers of America | ||
| 1999 | Cosmo Hair launches | |
| Wagadon's Deluxe folds. Condé Nast sells Wagadon stake to Emap, and Nick Logan sells his The Face, Arena and Frank to Emap. Frank closed immediately | ||
| Launch of www.natmags.co.uk Over the next 18 months, National Magazines launches 'microsites' for each of its magazines | ||
| 2000 | January issue of Loaded published with 100 different covers | |
| FHM launches in US under editor Ed Needham. Maxim guarantees sales of 950,000 copies a month to advertisers | ||
| Beme, a women's portal, launched by IPC Electric | ||
| National Magazines buys UK arm of Gruner and Jahr | ||
| In advertising in US magazines such as Brill's Content for its e-book reader, Microsoft forecasts: '2005: The sales of e-book titles, e-magazines and e-newspapers top $1 billion'; and '2020 Ninety per cent of all titles are now sold in electronic as well as paper form. Websters [US dictionary] alters its first definition of the word 'book' to refer to e-book titles read on screen.' | ||
| 2001 | US group Time Inc buys IPC from Cinven for £1.15 billion | |
| European Union Directive on Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society | ||
| Spate of activity in women's glossies. Condé Nast launches Glamour
in innovative handbag-sized A5 format at £1.50 with £4m
marketing campaign; first ABC sales figure of 451,486 just
690 behind Cosmopolitan . National Magazines launches In Style and Cosmo Girl!; Cosmo-branded cafes. Launches increase sales in the sector by 17.8 per cent |
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| Emap sells US arm Petersen for £366m to Primedia – having paid £1bn for the company in 1999 | ||
| Dotcom crash. IPC closes high-profile websites such as Beme.com and Uploaded.com. Similar story of contraction at Emap. Technology-dependent Future in crisis: sells Business 2.0 in US and closes UK edition; closes many other titles | ||
| Newspaper and magazine designer Simon Esterson appointed Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA | ||
| 2002 | John Brown Citrus wins contract to publish Sky’s customer magazine from Redwood. The satellite broadcaster's contract title was the UK's highest circulating magazine (5,183,964 copies). John Brown Citrus becomes the biggest customer publishing company | |
| Hachette Filipacchi Medias of France buys Attic Futura (UK arm of Australian publisher PMP) and ends joint deal with Emap over fashion glossy Elle, women's monthly Red, and Elle Decoration and Elle Girl | ||
| Despite series of relaunches, Punch closed by Mohammed al Fayed. Lives on as website selling cartoon catalogue www.punch.co.uk | ||
| 2003 | Dennis uses picture messaging on Maxim website | |
| Emap sets up an actual FHM Pub, manned by models behind the bar and professional darts players, as part of a mobile phone marketing event programme | ||
| Saturday's Daily Mirror scraps female-oriented M and The Look magazine supplements in favour of We Love Telly and Football Confidential. M once marketed itself as the biggest weekly women's magazine | ||
| Glamour confirms position as best-selling women's monthly, more than 100,000 copies ahead of Cosmo, at 576,832 copies | ||
| Best-selling UK titles are What's on TV at 1.7m (IPC); Take a Break 1.2m (H Bauer); and Radio Times 1.2m (BBC Worldwide). Contract titles claim largest circulations: Sky Customer Magazine (6.1m); AA Magazine; O Magazine (2.5m) – all published by John Brown Citrus | ||
| Sunday Times newspaper launches The Month, a CD-Rom previewing arts and entertainment events in the weeks ahead. To be published on the last Sunday of each month. Sponsored by Renault cars. Cost estimated at £10 million. The Independent launches 'compact' version | ||
| PPA announces marketing programme to promote magazines for advertising www.ppa.co.uk | ||
| The Illustrated London News relaunched as a monthly by ILN Group | ||
| 2004 | January: IPC launches 'world's first men's weekly', Nuts. Emap follows a week later with Zoo. Launch budget for each about £8m | |
| BBC Magazines announces ownership deal with publisher of The Times of India, following relaxing of country's rules on foreign investment | ||
| Hearst launches 50th international edition of Cosmopolitan – in Bulgaria | ||
| Acorn User computer magazine closes after 22 years | ||
| Emap announces the closure of The Face, once the embodiment of cutting-edge youth culture, after 24 years | ||
| Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and Elle all follow Glamour's lead in launching 'travel' or 'handbag' formats. The Times follows the Independent's lead and launches 'compact' version; Guardian announces plans to switch to Le Monde-sized Berliner format | ||
| H Bauer, the German publisher, launches – and later closes – Cut men's weekly in UK | ||
| Sales of Emap France's Tele Poche and Pleine Vie fell by 15-20% after Bertelsmann subsidiary Prisma Presse launches Tele 2 Semaines | ||
| Hearst-controlled National Magazine Company forms partnership in the UK to produce weeklies with Australian Consolidated Press | ||
| Pearce Marchbank, who established the graphic style for Time Outand did Oz covers, appointed Royal Designer for Industry by the RSA | ||
| Nat Mags launches Reveal, 'the ultimate glossy women's weekly' | ||
| 2005 | IPC launches real-life weekly Pick Me Up | |
| Emap launches Italian fashion weekly Grazia in UK | ||
| Condé Nast launches monthly Easy Living in UK | ||
| Time Out Chicago launch | ||
| Burda launches Full House women's weekly | ||
| Wallpaper* launches in Moscow | ||
| IPC's Woman & Home launched in South Africa by Caxton | ||
| Future pulls out of buying Highbury after Office of Fair Trading refers deal to the Competition Commission; later buys 37 of its titles | ||
| IPC relaunches fading Loaded | ||
| IPC launches compact-sized TV Easy | ||
| Gruner & Jahr (75% owned by the German group Bertelsmann) pulls out of US after 30 years by selling Family Circle, Parents, Child and Fitness to Meredith for $350m | ||
| Facsimiles of FHM pages available for reading on the website | ||
| Emap France launches Closer | ||
| FHM produces August issue in 3 sizes | ||
| Condé Nast launches trial issue of Men's Vogue in US | ||
| HFUK's Psychologies looks for 'third wave' women in Britain (Oct) | ||
| Guardian newspaper switches to Berliner format at £80m cost (Sept) | ||
| 2006 | Real People launch from ACP-NatMag (Jan) | |
| Highbury sells all its divisions | ||
| Emap closes Smash Hits | ||
| Love It! and Inside Out from News Magazines | ||
| BBC sells Origin division | ||
| Emap launches weekly First | ||
| Emap sells French arm to Mondadori | ||
| Teen sector in distress in UKand US | ||
| Sneak, Family Circle and Test Drive close; You withdrawn | ||
| H. Bauer launches In the Know | ||
| London freesheet war | ||
| 3 publications nominated as icons of England: The Eagle comic; Punch and The Spectator | ||
| 2007 | IPC launches weekly Look | |
| Tyler Brûlé launches Monocle | ||
| Vanity Fair launches as a weekly in Germany | ||
| Condé Nast (US) launches Portfolio | ||
| Free men's weekly Shortlist launched | ||
| 2008 | Emap dismembers itself into consumer and trade divisions, which are then sold | |
| In its first act after buying Emap's consumer titles, Bauer closes weekly First and monthly New Woman | ||
| News of the World relaunches its supplement as Fabulous, ‘Britain’s biggest weekly glossy’ | ||
| US supermarket chain Wal-Mart cuts 1,000 titles from its magazine stocks – including the Economist, Business Week, Forbes and Fortune | ||
| 2005 Dalek cover for Radio Times wins best cover battle in PPA’s magazine promotion week | ||
| Haymarket closes women’s monthly Eve, but maintains website spin-off evecars.com | ||
| Conde Nast cuts Men’s Vogue frequency to just 2 issues a year from 10 | ||
| BBC to review commercial activities after accusation of being an ‘out of control juggernaut’. BBC Magazines launches Lonely Planet amid controversy and complaints from Wonderlust | ||
| Ben Goldacre attacks Woman's Own over its medical reporting in his Bad Science column in the Guardian ('Bad Science: Jackie's tale sets alarm bells ringing', 8 November 2008, p12). A complaint by the interviewee to the Press Complaints Commission about the article, 'A Phone Call Could Kill Me', was not upheld. | ||
| TV chef Jamie Oliver launches Jamie magazine at WHSmith | ||
| 2009 | Arena, the Wagadon monthly that revitalised the men’s lifestyle sector, closed by Bauer; Dennis closes Maxim in UK | |
| The Press Complaints Commission upholds complaint against Closer for a 'serious' breach of the Code of Practice, after it published 'distortions and fabricated quotes' about a woman who had not known she was pregnant before giving birth | ||
| Bauer launches Eat In | ||
| Press Complaints Commission says 5% of the complaints it sees are about magazines, with the 'greater proportion' from people featured in ‘real-life' stories. These included Closer 'distort[ing] a story in breach of the Editors' Code of Practice; Chat's 'cavalier approach' to intrusion into grief or shock; Take a Break paying the daughter of a convicted arsonist for a story about her mother's crime | ||
| Recession bites: Conde Nast closes business-glitzty Portfolio in US and mega weekly Vanity Fair in Germany; Wired loses almost 60% of its US advertising pages in a year. However, in UK, publisher goes ahead with launch of Wired and fashion twice-yearly Love | ||
| 2011 | July 8. Rupert Murdoch announces the closure of the 200-year-old Sunday newspaper the News of the World after widespread phone-hacking exposed | |
| November. Dazed & Confused exhibition at Somerset House and book celebrating 20 years of the magazine | ||
| BBC Worldwide agrees to sell or license its magazines to Exponent, a private equity firm that owns Magicalia, for £121m and offload India joint venture |
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| Discovery of widespread “phone-hacking” by journalists at the News of the World and other newspapers results in the Leveson inquiry into press standards | ||
| 2012 | November. Supermarket freebie Tesco Magazine is assessed as having the highest readership in Britain, overtaking The Sun newspaper. The NRS said readership had risen 8% in a year, to 7.2m, while the paper's had dropped to 7.1m. The twice-monthly magazine was given way at the doors of Tesco's 800 UK outlets. It was published by Cedar under editor Helen Johnston for the UK's biggest supermarket chain by market share. A weakness of customer magazines was demonstrated in that people spent 29 minutes reading The Sun but just 16 minutes with Tesco Magazine. Asda Magazine had 6m readers, Sainbury's Magazine 3.4m and Your M&S 3.7m. Such supermarket magazine have a history of very high circulations, with Family Circle, which was sold at the checkouts of supmarkets, being the top seller among women's monthlies in the 1960s and right up to 1986 | |
| December. Several newspapers and magazines reject any statutory scheme to control the press apart from self-regulation | ||
| 2014 | 8 September. Press Complaints Commission, the newspaper and magazines watchdog, replaced by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) | |
| September. Weekly music magazine NME becomes a freesheet | ||
| 2016 | May. V&A Museum in London launches A History of British Magazine Design by Magforum founder Anthony Quinn at the Magculture Shop in Islington June. V&A publishes A History of British Magazine Design in the US through Abrams Books |
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| 2017 | January. Germany's Hubert Burda Media buys Immediate Media – and the licences to the BBC's titles such as Radio Times – from private equity group Exponent in a £260m deal | |
| November. US media group Meredith buys Time Inc, parent company of Time Inc UK | ||
| 2018 | February. Time Inc UK sold to private equity company Epiris in a deal estimated at £130m | |
| March. Time Inc UK closes weekly music magazine NME | ||
| 2021 | January. Matthew Carter appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to typography and design |
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