The past few weeks have shocked the world of magazines. Top editors—Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, Cindi Leive at Glamour, Nancy Gibbs at Time, and Robbie Myers at Elle—have announced departures from their high-profile posts. Hugh Hefner now holds court at the Playboy Club in the Sky, a penthouse away from S.I. Newhouse, the just-departed editor-friendly chief of Conde Nast (Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue, and others). Major companies—Time Inc. (People and a roster of hall-of-fame titles) and Rodale (Prevention, Men’s Health) are exploring sales. So is Rolling Stone, itself a magazine wrapped around the persona of its founder and 50-year presence, Jann Wenner.
At a monthly get-together of media pros, the editor of this magazine (Jackson) and a Rolling Stone alumni who’s consulted or written for many titles and teaches about them (Peck) used this confluence of change to muse about which “books” had been significant then and now. Using Rolling Stone‘s 50 years of publishing as an arbitrary separator,* we’ve come up with rationales for two sets of Significant Sixteen magazines that have shaped politics and culture (and have done some of the best work covering—and uncovering—issues of social and environmental justice for readers).
Our half-century intermezzo has witnessed the dominance of television, the Internet, and mobile, as well as changing taste and business models. Consequently, only three titles appear on both lists. If nothing else, the shifts between ’67 and ’17 demonstrate how most magazines follow a life cycle: often-difficult births, brash youthfulness, midlife success, and retirement at the back of the newsstand rack—or solely in the archives.
We realize that “significance” is a squishy qualifier. Let us know whether or not you agree with our choices.
*Editor’s Note: Cosmopolitan, which would capture a sex-positive if non-feminist worldview, started only in 1965; again, Rolling Stone began in 1967. H/T to Wikipedia for supplying start-up dates for most print titles.
