Published by Hearst Magazines , Cosmopolitan has 64 international editions, is printed in 35 languages and is distributed in more than countries. Paul Schlicht told his first-issue readers that his publication was a "first-class family magazine", adding, "There will be a department devoted exclusively to the concerns of women, with articles on fashions, on household decoration, on cooking, and the care and management of children, etc.
There was also a department for the younger members of the family. John Brisben Walker acquired the magazine in That same year, he dispatched Elizabeth Bisland on a race around the world against Nellie Bly to draw attention to his magazine. Under John Brisben Walker's ownership, E. Walker, formerly with Harper's Monthly , took over as the new editor, introducing colour illustrations, serials and book reviews. In , Cosmopolitan announced plans for a free correspondence school: "No charge of any kind will be made to the student.
All expenses for the present will be borne by the Cosmopolitan. No conditions, except a pledge of a given number of hours of study. Also in , H. Olive Schreiner contributed a lengthy article about the Boer War. Other contributors during this period included O. Henry , [7 ] A. Jack London 's novella, " The Red One ", was published in the October issue [8 ] two years after London's death [9 ] , and a constant presence from was Arthur B.
Reeve , with 82 stories featuring Craig Kennedy , the "scientific detective". Hearst formed Cosmopolitan Productions also known as Cosmopolitan Pictures , a film company based in New York City from to , then Hollywood until , for the purpose of making films from stories published in the magazine.
Cosmopolitan magazine was known as Hearst's International Combined with Cosmopolitan from In June it was shortened to Hearst's and was ultimately titled "Hearst's International" in May In order to spare serious cutbacks at San Simeon , Hearst merged the magazine Hearst's International with Cosmopolitan effective March But while the Cosmopolitan title on the cover remained at a typeface of eight-four points , over time span the typeface of the Hearst's International decreased to thirty-six points and then to a barely legible twelve points.
After Hearst died in , the Hearst's International disappeared from the magazine cover altogether in April Emphasizing fiction in the s, it was subtitled The Four-Book Magazine since the first section had one novelette, six or eight short stories, two serials, six to eight articles and eight or nine special features, while the other three sections featured two novels and a digest of current non-fiction books.
During World War II, sales peaked at 2,, The magazine began to run less fiction during the s. Circulation dropped to slightly over a million by , a time when magazines were overshadowed during the rise of paperbacks and television. The Golden Age of magazines came to an end as mass market , general interest publications gave way to special interest magazines targeting specialized audiences.
Cosmopolitan' s circulation continued to decline for another decade until Helen Gurley Brown became chief editor in and remodeled the magazine as New Cosmopolitan and re-invented it as a magazine for modern single career women.
The magazine eventually adopted a cover format consisting of a usually young female model, typically in a low cut dress or bikini. These are the first three articles listed:. They have also been criticized for perpetuating a nearly impossible standard of beauty and for retouching models to make them appear thinner. Today Cosmopolitan retains almost no reminants of its origins. It is fascinating to see how it has shifted with the culture and how our culture has changed because of it.
Sources: here , here , here , here , here , here , and here. Lauren McGuire is a SocImages intern and an assistant to a disability activist. She recently launched her own blog, The Fatal Foxtrot , that is focused on the awkward passage into adulthood. If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers. There's something touchingly quaint about the caption "Audrey Hepburn wears pretty clothes in her new movie.
I am old enough to have read Cosmopolitan before Helen Gurley Brown took over. It was definitely a magazine for readers. Gradually the articles became more aimed at getting and pleasing a man and the fiction became snippets of erotic fantasy. Now when I see an issue of Cosmopolitan I am saddened that it seems to be directed to an audience with the collective attention span of a gnat.
Any portion that pretends to be an article seems limited to bullets and twitter-esque snark. And now it's out of business. Em, absolutely, i used to buy magazines all the time but decided to cut them out completely a few years ago, if i compare how i feel about myself after flicking through a mag like that to how feel when i don't, it makes me wonder why i ever bought them.
I used to read cosmogirl too, I from what I remember it was pretty good, I know I learnt a lot about sexual health and stds from it. I find the 70's issue the most interesting of these examples--it really shows the transition of the magazine from more serious content to "harrowingly explicit sex manual.
And in the recent one it's all sex, all the time, except for one article about not gettin' raped. Sal: All magazines are going in that direction. The last time I bought an issue of "Better Homes and Gardens" a magazine I used to love , I aged through the whole thing looking for an article and never found one. It's all bulleted lists, multi-colored text boxes, and photo captions.
I just love the "get a healthy, sexy vagina" headline. Like what, the primary sex organ of a woman is not inherently "sexy"? If a vagina isn't sexy, I don't know what is. Perhaps the article discusses waxing, or kegels, or labiaplasty, or some other way to sex up your sex. I'm ashamed to say that I read Cosmo as a teenager, shortly after I stopped reading Seventeen, and absolutely attribute a lifelong struggle with eating disorders in large part to these rags.
Thankfully, I can now find a perineum on my own and no longer need Cosmo's recycled sex tips. Really interesting how a change that reflected women's liberation and the sexual revolution in the 70s is now serving basically the opposite purpose. The sex articles are no longer there to empower women, but to remind us how woefully inadequate we would be as lovers without Cosmo's sage advice.
I remember in high school, when my friends and I thought it was hilarious to pick a Cosmo article at random and read it out loud to each other in a crowded bookstore. I think the worst was one going into great detail about how, exactly to move your hand around your guy's penis during a hand job.
Faux liberation strikes again. I bought an old copy of Cosmopolitan from for five bucks at a used bookstore. It features two short stories one a man vs. I assumed that it was a different magazine, even though it shared the name, until I looked up the Wikipedia article later. It might be "harrowingly explicit" but it's also completely useless as a sex manual. The advice it gives is all horrible, and the way they present it by suggesting 'hot surprises' instead of encouraging you to talk to your partner and actually find out what you'd both like is even worse.
It's a gender role indoctrination manual that encourages insecurity and discourages communication across gender lines. My wife used to get Cosmo for light reading. I leafed through it from time to time laughing at some of the absolutely ridiculous statements in the articles like "men don't like to cuddle.
Recently, supermarkets in my area have started obscuring the cover of Cosmo on the racks. I mean, it's not like Cosmo used to be less sexist. Maybe it was more intellectually stimulating, but weren't most of the stories written by men anyway?
No guarantees of female empowerment there. I think it's really fascinating how it's changed over the years, along with other non-lady-centric publications, but the "eugh, all it has these days is SEX MANUALS" commentary strikes me as not terribly progressive. To reinforce the point, the headline-grabbing Cosmopolitan annual luncheon of power women in New York was renamed the Hearst But, like so much of the try-hard euphoria in disrupted media, it was not even half the story.
But it has, perhaps, also ensured its own unending losses. A bitter pill after 45 years of publishing in the UK. Australia: The Sydney-based edition is an interesting history. It was launched in , a few months after media titan Kerry Packer pre-empted it with a new competitor, Cleo, after Hearst had snubbed him and granted the Cosmo licence to a rival.
Ultimately, Hearst was forced to accept Packer after he bought Cosmo Australia, which he continued to publish alongside Cleo. The Aussie relationship was eased, though, by Cosmo copy sales that reached an amazing k — greater market penetration and also better profit margins than in either the US or UK. Hearst was forced expensively to compensate the German publisher so it could switch the Aussie edition of Cosmo from a JV into a no-risk licence. In a world where there is more media than consumers have time to consume and more places to put advertising than there is advertising, the Cosmo disruption is far from self-inflicted.
But print media everywhere is certainly paying the price for over-estimating its value to readers and simply not understanding the extent to which many have become mere aggregators of content that is either more freely available or not highly-valued anyway. Digital services, starting from iTunes, have conditioned media consumers to pay only for what they actually want, rather than mixed-up bundles of content that most suit the provider.
As with newspapers, magazine readers increasingly value only distinctive and exclusive content. This will drive advertiser polarisation towards the extremes of either mass market or specialist, targeted media. Many mid-size media brands will be squeezed.
That — rather than technology — is why so much online content will never be profitable. Traditional media must face up to the reality that their heritage may give them few in-built advantages in the digital era. The sheer level of digital competition will inevitably shrink the profits even of relatively durable magazine businesses. Three years ago, Hearst Magazines re-located its digital developments to a separate New York building under its own disruptor Troy Young, who had become global president of Hearst Digital Media in Young, who was previously president of tech and advertising firm Say Media, created a new digital team for each magazine, with the site editors reporting to him, not to the magazine editors-in-chief.
You can imagine the gnashing of teeth. This facilitates content sharing and also the creation of new multi-source products and services. Recently, Hearst opened a 26, sq ft video and multimedia studio. The fact that Hearst Digital Media has reportedly been profitable for three years serves only to underline the systemic problems of the print-based Cosmopolitan magazine:.
But Cosmopolitan can be fixed.
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