Fortune (magazine)

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Fortune
Fortune, December 1941 issue

Fortune, December 1941 issue
Managing Editor Andy Serwer
Categories Business Magazines
Frequency Bi-Weekly
Circulation ~850,000
Publisher Time, Inc., a Time Warner company.
First issue 1930
Country Flag of the United States United States
Language English
Website www fortune.com
ISSN 0015-8259

Fortune magazine is an American business magazine founded by Henry Luce in 1930. His publishing business, consisting of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, grew to become Time Warner, the world's largest media conglomerate, before it was acquired by AOL in 2000.[1] Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Forbes, which is also published bi-weekly, and BusinessWeek. Fortune is currently published by the company's Time Inc. subsidiary. The magazine is especially known for its annual features ranking companies by revenue.

Contents

The July 24, 2006 issue of Fortune, featuring its Fortune 500 list
The July 24, 2006 issue of Fortune, featuring its Fortune 500 list

Fortune was founded by Time co-founder Henry Luce in February 1930, four months after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 that marked the outset of the Great Depression. Briton Hadden, Luce's partner, wasn't enthusiastic about the idea, but Luce went forward with it after Hadden's October 15, 1929 death (of streptococcus).[2]

Luce wrote a memo to the Time, Inc. board in November 1929, "We will not be over-optimistic. We will recognize that this business slump may last as long as an entire year."[3]

Single copies of that first issue cost $1 at a time when the Sunday New York Times was only 5c.[3] At a time when business publications were little more than numbers and statistics printed in black and white, Fortune was an oversized 11"x14", using creamy heavy paper, and great art on a cover printed by a special process.[4] Fortune was also noted for its photography, featuring the work of Margaret Bourke-White and others. Walker Evans served as its photography editor from 1945-1965.

An urban legend says that art director T M Clelland mocked up the cover of the first issue with the $1 price because nobody had yet decided how much to charge; the magazine was printed before anyone realized it, and when people saw it for sale, they thought that the magazine must really have worthwhile content. In fact, there were 30,000 subscribers who'd already signed up to receive that initial 184-page issue.[4]

During the Depression, Fortune developed a reputation for its social conscience, for Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White's color photographs, and for a team of writers including James Agee, Archibald MacLeish, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Alfred Kazin, hired specifically for their writing abilities.

Fortune became an important leg of Luce's Time/Life media empire, which has grown to become Time Warner. For many years Fortune was published as a monthly, but as of September 2005, it is published biweekly. It considers its purview the entire field of business, including the people, trends, companies, and ideas that characterize modern business.

Its primary competitors are Forbes Magazine and Business Week. While circulation of the business magazines sector has apparently slumped since 2000.[5], Fortune claims their circulation has risen from 833,000[6] to 857,000[7] in that period.

A theme of Fortune is its regular publishing of researched and ranked lists. In the human resources field, for example, their Best Companies to Work For list is an industry benchmark. Its most famous lists rank companies by gross revenue and profile their businesses:

In August 2006, CNNmoney.com published a feature from Fortune magazine which recommended books and websites focused on the world's top five companies, as ranked in the "Fortune Global 500". In a novel twist, each company website was featured alongside a website taking a critical view of the company's activities. For example, the recommended websites for Royal Dutch Shell, listed as number 3 in the rankings, was Shell's own portal website along with royaldutchshellplc.com which focuses on alleged negative aspects of the oil giant. The unstated but logical purpose of the recommendations was to allow the public, investors and shareholders to arrive at a balanced view of each company, taking into account the positive and negative information available from the recommended websites.

  1. ^ AOL Eats Time Warner
  2. ^ Henry Luce & His Time by Joseph Epstein, Commentary, Vol. 44, No. 5, November 1967
  3. ^ a b How the world works
  4. ^ a b Background
  5. ^ Magazine audience
  6. ^ Circulation trends
  7. ^ Fortune media kit
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_%28magazine%29"
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