Slam (magazine)
magazine
Slam (stylized in all caps) is an American basketball magazine in circulation since 1994.
History
Founding and early years
Slam was launched in 1994 as a basketball magazine that combined the sport with hip hop culture at a time when the genre was becoming increasingly popular. Launching as a quarterly with an initial circulation of 125,000, it was founded by publisher Dennis Page at Harris Publications, and he hired Cory Johnson to be the first Editor in Chief.
Its first issue had a cover story on Larry Johnson of the Charlotte Hornets (written by future Fortune editor Andrew Serwer) and a feature on then-Cal freshman Jason Kidd. Many of the magazine's lasting features, such as In Your Face, Slam-a-da-month, and Last Shot, all began with that first issue.
From 1996 to 1997, Slam's total annual-unit sales rose 25 percent, with advertising revenue increasing by more than a third; by 1998, the magazine was published eight times per year.
Ownership
Slam's ownership has changed several times. Petersen Publishing bought Slam in 1998. The next year, Petersen was acquired by British publisher EMAP. In 2001, EMAP sold its U.S. division to Primedia (now Rent Group). When Primedia left the magazine business in 2007, Source Interlink acquired a majority of the company, including Slam, in August 2017.
“Slam (magazine)” enters the record as magazine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Slam and magazine can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Slam (magazine)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Slam and magazine provides the most credible route into that argument.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q921844. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1994, 1996, 1997 and 1998.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Slam (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.