Founded | 1898 |
---|---|
Founder | Bernarr Macfadden |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | New York City, New York, U.S. |
Publication types | Magazines |
Official website | www |
Macfadden Communications Group is a publisher of business magazines. It has a historical link with a company started in 1898 by Bernarr Macfadden that was one of the largest magazine publishers of the twentieth century.
Physical Culture, Bernarr Macfadden's first magazine though the company Macfadden Publications, was based on Macfadden's interest in bodybuilding. The launch of True Story in 1919 made the company very successful. Other well-known magazines, such as Photoplay and True Detective , soon followed. Macfadden also launched the tabloid New York Evening Graphic . Bernarr Macfadden withdrew from his leadership roles with the company in 1941.
In 1961, the Bartell Broadcasting Corporation bought a controlling share in Macfadden and merged with the company, forming Macfadden-Bartell. [1] Bartell owned WADO New York, WOKY Milwaukee, and KCBQ San Diego. A share in Bartell was acquired by Downe Communications in 1967, with full control in 1969. [2] Between 1969 and 1974 Downe was acquired by Charter Company. Bartell was fully acquired by Downe in 1976, and Downe was fully acquired by Charter in 1978.
Downe purchased the newspaper supplement Family Weekly in 1966, and the Ladies' Home Journal and The American Home from the Curtis Publishing Company in 1968.
Macfadden's women's magazines were spun off in 1975, and sold to the unit president, Peter J. Callahan. These magazines were:
Us was purchased in 1980, and sold in 1986. In the mid-eighties, Macfadden bought the Ideal Publishing Company, which published Teen Beat and other fan magazines, from Filmways. MacFadden acquired a stake in what would become American Media in 1989 when it bought a stake in the National Enquirer .
In 1991, the Macfadden consumer magazines were spun off and merged with Sterling's Magazines. Sterling's published fan magazines such as Tiger Beat , as well as the music magazine Metal Edge . The merger was finalized in October 1992. [3] In 1998, the conglomerate's line of youth music publications was sold off to Primedia; the rest were bought by Dorchester Media in 2004. [4]
The trade magazines Chief Executive and Discount Merchandiser, as well as the company's stake in American Media, remained a separate company. American Media was sold in 1999 to the investment group Evercore Partners. The Macfadden trade titles were sold to VNU the same year.
The executives of Macfadden Business Communications started a new company using the Macfadden name. It is a publisher of business-to-business magazines.
Macfadden also published a few hardcover books through the years, under the imprint Bartholomew House. Initially a way to group together stories from Macfadden's magazines into a book (as in Great Western Heroes, Great Pioneer Heroes), [15] the imprint expanded into first editions of new material after the purchase by the Bartell Group ( Coffee, Tea or Me? , "Say ... Didn’t You Used to Be George Murphy?").
Photoplay was one of the first American film fan magazines. It was founded in Chicago in 1911, the same year that J. Stuart Blackton founded Motion Picture Story, another magazine directed at fans. In 1921, Photoplay established what is considered the first significant annual movie award. For most of its run, it was published by Macfadden Publications. The magazine ceased publication in 1980.
Frederick Orlin Tremaine was an American science fiction magazine editor, most notably of the influential Astounding Stories. He edited a number of other magazines, headed several publishing companies, and sporadically wrote fiction.
Us Weekly is a weekly celebrity and entertainment magazine based in New York City. Us Weekly was founded in 1977 by The New York Times Company, who sold it in 1980. It was acquired by Wenner Media in 1986, and sold to American Media Inc. in 2017. Shortly afterward, former editor James Heidenry stepped down, and was replaced by Jennifer Peros. The chief content officer of American Media, Dylan Howard, oversees the publication.
Composograph refers to a forerunner method of photo manipulation and is a retouched photographic collage popularized by publisher and physical culture advocate Bernarr Macfadden in his New York Evening Graphic in 1924.
Bernarr Macfadden was an American proponent of physical culture, a combination of bodybuilding with nutritional and health theories. He founded the long-running magazine publishing company Macfadden Publications.
True Detective was an American true crime magazine published from 1924 to 1995. It initiated the true crime magazine genre, and during its peak from the 1940s to the early 1960s it sold millions of copies and spawned numerous imitators. For most of its run, it was published by Macfadden Publications.
True Confessions is a confession magazine targeted at young women readers. It was originally published by Fawcett Publications, beginning in 1922.
Benedict Lust was a German-born American who was one of the founders of naturopathic medicine in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Milo Milton Hastings was an American inventor, author, and nutritionist. He invented the forced-draft chicken incubator and Weeniwinks, a health-food snack. He wrote about chickens, science fiction, and health, among other things. Some of his writing is available in book form and on Project Gutenberg. Hastings was married twice and had three children.
Hillman Periodicals, Inc., was an American magazine and comic book publishing company founded in 1938 by Alex L. Hillman, a former New York City book publisher. It is best known for its true confession and true crime magazines; for the long-running general-interest magazine Pageant; and for comic books including Air Fighters Comics and its successor Airboy Comics, which launched the popular characters Airboy and The Heap.
The New York Evening Graphic was a tabloid newspaper published from 1924 to 1932 by Macfadden Publications. Exploitative and mendacious in its short life, the Graphic exemplified tabloid journalism and launched the careers of Walter Winchell, Louis Sobol, and sportswriter-turned-columnist and television host Ed Sullivan.
Dorothy Phillips was an American stage and film actress. She is known for her emotional performances in melodramas, having played a number of "brow beaten" women on screen, but had a pleasant demeanor off. She garnered little press for anything outside of her work.
Sport was an American sports magazine. Launched in September 1946 by New York–based publisher Macfadden Publications, Sport pioneered the generous use of color photography – it carried eight full-color plates in its first edition.
True Story is an American magazine published by True Renditions, LLC. It launched in 1919 and was the first of the confessions magazines genre. It carried the subtitle Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.
Ghost Stories was an American pulp magazine that published 64 issues between 1926 and 1932. It was one of the earliest competitors to Weird Tales, the first magazine to specialize in the fantasy and occult fiction genre. It was a companion magazine to True Story and True Detective Stories, and focused almost entirely on stories about ghosts, many of which were written by staff writers but presented under pseudonyms as true confessions. These were often accompanied by faked photographs to make the stories appear more believable. Ghost Stories also had original and reprinted contributions, including works by Robert E. Howard, Carl Jacobi, and Frank Belknap Long. Among the reprints were Agatha Christie's "The Last Seance", several stories by H.G. Wells, and Charles Dickens's "The Signal-Man". Initially successful, the magazine began to lose readers and in 1930 was sold to Harold Hersey. Hersey was unable to reverse the magazine's decline, and publication of Ghost Stories ceased in early 1932.
John Russell Coryell was an American dime novel author. He wrote under the Nicholas Carter and Bertha M. Clay house pseudonyms, and, like many of his fellow dime novelists under many other pseudonyms, including Tyman Currio, Lillian R. Drayton, Julia Edwards, Geraldine Fleming, Margaret Grant, Barbara Howard, Harry Dubois Milman, Milton Quarterly, and Lucy May Russell.
The Bartell Group, later known as Bartell Broadcasters, Bartell Family Radio, Macfadden-Bartell, and the Bartell Media Corporation, was a family-owned company that owned a number of radio stations in the United States during the 1940s through the 1960s.
Emile Gauvreau (1891-1956) was an American journalist, newspaper and magazine editor and author of novels and nonfiction books. He is best known as editor of two of New York's entertainment and sensation oriented "jazz age" tabloid newspapers.
Hugh E. Dierker was an American film director and producer.
The Broken Mask is a 1928 American silent drama film directed by James P. Hogan and starring Cullen Landis, Barbara Bedford and Wheeler Oakman. It was made by the independent Morris R. Schlank's production company.
These stories first appeared in men's magazines...