Sunday magazine

A Sunday magazine is a publication inserted into a Sunday newspaper. It also has been known as a Sunday supplement, Sunday newspaper magazine or Sunday magazine section. Traditionally, the articles in these magazines cover a wide range of subjects, and the content is not as current and timely as the rest of the newspaper.

United States

19th century

With the rise of rotogravure printing in the 19th century, Sunday magazines offered better reproduction of photographs, and their varied contents could include columns, serialized novels, short fiction, illustrations, cartoons, puzzles and assorted entertainment features.

Janice Hume, instructor in journalism history at Kansas State University, noted, "The early Sunday magazines were latter 19th-century inventions and really linked to the rise of the department store and wanting to get those ads to women readers."

In 1869, the San Francisco Chronicle published San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, regarded as the first Sunday magazine, and the Chicago Inter Ocean added color to its supplement. The New York Times Magazine was published on September 6, 1896, and it contained the first photographs ever printed in that newspaper. During the 1890s, publications were inserted into Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Hearst had the eight-page Women's Home Journal and the 16-page Sunday American Magazine, which later became The American Weekly. In November 1896, Morrill Goddard, editor of the New York Journal from 1896 to 1937, launched Hearst's Sunday magazine, later commenting, "Nothing is so stale as yesterday's newspaper, but The American Weekly may be around the house for days or weeks and lose none of its interest."

20th century

Joseph P. Knapp published the Associated Sunday Magazine from 1903 to 1905. His Every Week, published between 1915 and 1918, reached a circulation of more than 550,000.