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Babytalk (magazine)

1935 magazine

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 3, 2024
Entity authorityQ4838547 ↗
Source-derived summary

Babytalk, America's oldest baby magazine, was launched in 1935 as a supplement to customers of a national cloth diaper delivery service based in New Jersey. The free monthly publication aimed to help new mothers trust their maternal instincts with "straight talk" from experts and real moms. Babytalk was part of The Parenting Group, which includes Parenting magazine; the Parenting.com website; Working Mother magazine; Conceive; MomConnection, an online research tool; and a custom content unit. Meredith Corporation, which owns American Baby, Babytalk's biggest competitor, bought Babytalk in May 2013 and shuttered the title.

With a controlled circulation of 2,000,000, Babytalk reached more than 5.5 million readers a month through a combination of in-home subscriptions and distribution at baby retailers, maternity boutiques and OB/GYN offices across the country. Babytalk was distributed at Babies "R" Us, BuyBuyBaby, and Baby Depot, among others.

Many of the features in the magazine were reproduced on sister publication Parenting's website, Parenting.com. The site also features a Pregnancy Planner, with fetal development photos, a customized newsletter and pregnancy info synchronized to a mother's due date; a baby namer tool, with thousands of name descriptions; a fertility calculator, buying guides, blogs, along with resources for health and safety, and child development.

In 2001, Babytalk became the first parenting magazine to feature a child with Down syndrome on the cover.

History

Editor-in-chief Susan Kane led the successful repositioning of all three publications in the Babytalk franchise in 2005 – Babytalk, Babytalk Mom-to-Be, and Babytalk First Months.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Babytalk (magazine)” is 1935 magazine. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Babytalk and magazine, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1935, 2013, 2001, 2005—that can be checked directly. The authority record carries competing date values—1935-01-01, 1935—which should remain separate until their references and qualifiers are resolved. For this dossier, Babytalk and magazine is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “1935 magazine” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 3, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q4838547. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935, 2013, 2001 and 2005.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Babytalk (magazine)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Babytalk (magazine) primary sources, Babytalk (magazine) archive and Babytalk research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Babytalk (magazine)”?
  2. Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Babytalk (magazine)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.