The magazine issue I reviewed was TIME magazine Vol. XI, No. 8, which was published on February 20, 1928. One of the very first things I found interesting was the first page of the issue, which was an advertisement for IPANA Toothpaste. The reason I found it interesting was because at first glance I thought that it was an article before taking a better look. The reason for this confusion came from the fact that this toothpaste ad had more text in it than many magazine articles I see today. As I moved on through the rest of the issue, there were many different advertisements and they all had an incredible amount of text involved. These ads are much different from all of the flashy advertisements we see in magazines today that rely largely on visual appeal. I honestly think that if there were ads like this today people would take one look at all of the text and move on without reading about the product.
Beyond the advertisements, there were several other things I found interesting about the magazine. For instance, as I went through the articles and sections of the magazine, I felt more like I was reading a newspaper than a magazine. It was broken up into sections covering different topics that the authors found newsworthy. There were 7 full pages dedicated to national affairs, several for foreign news, and then smaller sections covering topics such as music and art, medicine, education, people, sport, business, and theatre. Compared to most magazines I see today, the different sections just covered all of the relevant news of the week for that topic. When I read magazines there is typically one or two main articles under a section that are about specific and concise issues, not just anything and everything pertaining to that topic. I also found it interesting that they covered such a wide range of topics. Today it seems that magazines have a more specific focus on certain areas, where some magazines are for entertainment, some for news, some for technology,etc.
Because I don’t read TIME magazine very often, I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t attributing all of these differences to the change in times, in case it was something that was specific to TIME magazine. To see if TIME really was different nowadays I took a look at a more recent TIME magazine issue. I was reassured to see that the ads were much different beyond being in color now. There was very little text and they relied more on pictures to sell the products to readers. I noticed that the magazine was still broken into very similar sections with the same types of headings, but there was a difference. Within each section, there were only a couple of articles that were specific stories related to the broad topic. There wasn’t the same newspaper feel to the magazine where it was just little snippets of everything going on in each area.
It is evident that there has been some change in the way magazines are made over the years, but it hasn’t been too extreme. Most of the change seems to be from the formatting and style of articles within the magazine and how they try to appeal to the audience. This was very noticeable in how the advertisements have changed and even the articles themselves. Now they can appeal to readers more by providing fewer stories that provide more information, which gives readers a better chance to connect to them. Overall, there weren’t very many pictures in the issue compared to the amount in magazines today. Often times today even the news articles in magazines contain at least 4 or 5 pictures. I was almost surprised by the amount of text in the magazine because it is something I attribute more to newspapers than magazines. It made me think that during the time when this issue was published people were more willing to take the time to sit down and read everything. Nowadays I feel as if most people don’t want to take the time to sit down and read that much when they look at a magazine. They usually want to just flip through them, look at the pictures and read the short articles. All of it showed how society has changed and how impatient Americans have become in a way. I had never thought of looking at a magazine before to see how times have changed.
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