Overview

This reference book profiles corporate magazines, those sponsored by and produced for a single business firm. Some of these periodicals are internal, aimed at the company's own employees and retirees. Others are mainly external and are directed at a broader audience of stockholders, customers, and readers outside the corporation's immediate family. Still others have a dual role, and target both internal and external audiences. Some of these magazines are quite old--the oldest profiled here dates from 1865. Some have enormous circulations, the largest having reached nearly 12 million bimonthly, though they rarely produce circulation revenue. This is the first book to fully consider this genre of magazine publishing. Journalism and communication scholars examine a representative sample of 52 of these magazines in individual descriptive essays, each with appended publishing history and information sources. Bibliographic information is necessarily limited. Entries are arranged alphabetically and each entry appears in additional appendixes which classify the profiled magazine by founding date and geographic location. An end-of-volume appendix provides brief data on 232 additional magazines.

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9780313275692

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?Riley is professor of communications at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and also a prolific compiler of reference books on print media. Corporate Magazines of the United States is part of the Greenwood series Historical Guides to the World's Periodicals and Newspapers. In this particular title, Riley and 26 other media professors provide a history of 324 corporate magazines. Unfortunately, only 51 titles receive a detailed analysis; the others are relegated to listings in several appendixes. The justifications for this book are that corporate publications tend to receive limited attention in the standard periodical directories and that many of them deserve better because they have substantial readerships and have been around for several decades. A random sampling of 25 titles substantiates this claim. Only two were mentioned in Writers Market, and six were covered in Magazines for Libraries. An introduction provides information on the purposes of corporate magazines and helps define the scope of this book. The 51 signed articles that make up the bulk of the text are arranged alphabetically by title from American Heritage of Invention & Technology to The World Booker. They are two or more pages in length. A typical entry gives a detailed history, notes changes in format and editors, mentions significant writers, and cites specific articles as examples of interests. Citations for sources of this information are given. Also at the end of the article are locations where magazines can be found, e.g., Library of Congress, corporate office. Title changes, volume numbering, publishers and place of publication, editors, and circulation figures are also listed. Rounding out this book are threeappendixes. The first is a chronology of corporate magazines profiled by year founded; the second shows the state locations of magazines profiled. The third appendix lists titles with frequency, founding date, and location of the sponsoring corporation for corporate magazines not profiled. Concluding the book is a list of contributors with their affiliations. There also is an index similar to others in the series. Information on corporate magazines is frequently difficult to locate. Free Magazines for Libraries (3d ed., McFarland, 1989) describes hundreds of periodicals, many of them corporate magazines, but it doesn't provide historical information on them. Recommended for comprehensive business or journalism collections.?-Wilson Library Bulletin

Author Information

SAM G. RILEY is Professor of Communications Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. He has edited or co-edited several major reference books on journalists and magazines, including American Magazine Journalists (1741-1850, 1850-1900, and 1900-1960, first series) for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and, for Greenwood Press's Historical Guides to the World's Periodicals and Newspapers, Magazines of the American South (1986), Regional Interest Magazines of the United States (1990), Index to Southern Periodicals (1986), and Index to City and Regional Magazines (1989).

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