business magazines

Forbes

In 1917, Bertie Charles Forbes started the first business-specific magazine devoted to doers and doings. As a result, Forbes wanted to call the magazine Doers and Doings, but his business partner Walter Drey convinced him to use his last name because it was so well known in the investment community. However, the cover of the first issue of Forbes magazine did include the words devoted to doers and doings. The first issue, which sold for 15 cents, also featured articles on New York banking laws, utilities, big bankers forecasting money rates, as well as a story about women in business written by a woman (which was surprising given there were few women in business and few women writing about anything, especially business), and a tagline on the cover that read “How Forbes gets big men to talk.”

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During the 1920s, Forbes remained the only major business magazine in the United States and became known for profiles like John D. Rockefeller’s, more so than any other business publication. B. C. Forbes was very interested in the personalities within business, and he became most well-known for pioneering personal profiles of business leaders. In 1996, Timothy Forbes, Forbes’ grandson, attributed personality profiles becoming commonplace in business journalism to his grandfather’s efforts, saying he helped the genre move away from simply covering statistics to capturing the stories of the people behind the statistics. More specifically, he described his grandfather as the humanizer of business.

In addition to profiles, Forbes provided investment advice. However, this caused the magazine to lose subscribers after the stock market crash in 1929, when the magazine still ran articles encouraging investment despite the crash. The magazine stayed in business because of income from Forbes’ syndicated column titled “Fact and Comment,” which he started while working at the Journal of Commerce before running it in 100 newspapers and then in Forbes. However, Forbes went from being the only major business magazine to ranking third behind BusinessWeek and Fortune. Forbes’ circulation did rise after the Great Depression in the 1950s and 1960s under the direction of Malcolm Forbes, B. C. Forbes’ son who took over running the magazine after his father’s death in 1954, but it still ranked behind BusinessWeek and Fortune. It was not until Malcolm Forbes and Editor James Michaels led the magazine to become more critical in their coverage that their circulation passed that of Fortune in 1976.

Also, regardless of its downtick in circulation during the Great Depression, Forbes represents an important part of business journalism’s history. Not only was it the one of the first major U.S. business magazines, but B. C. Forbes was also one of the first well-known business journalists to both the business world and to readers, and the magazine’s focus on profiles and investing was a new practice in business journalism. As of 2021, the magazine continues that tradition, focusing on profiles of influential entrepreneurs in the business world, especially through lists such as 30 Under 30 (the top young entrepreneurs), The Forbes 400 (the 400 wealthiest Americans), Self-made Women (the most successful women entrepreneurs), World’s Billionaires, and The Forbes 400 philanthropy score (listing Forbes 400 members by their generosity). Forbes is also well-known for its investment newsletters.

Furthermore, when Steve Forbes, Malcolm Forbes’ son, took over as editor in chief after Malcom’s death in 1990, he launched several spinoff magazines, such as Global Business and Finance (started in 1998), as well as international editions in Asia (started in 1998) and Europe (started in 2005). As of 2026, Forbes magazine had 49 local editions in 81 different countries. Even with the decline of traditional print media (Forbes’ print business lost $100 million in revenue between 2008 and 2018), the U.S. edition has 5.7 million print readers, and the company fully replaced that revenue with its digital platforms. Forbes has tablet and mobile editions, as well as 26 websites around the world with an average of 111 million monthly visitors and 74 million monthly visitors in the United States.

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BusinessWeek

McGraw-Hill Publishing Co. started a new business magazine called The Business Week in September 1929. Unlike Forbes, The Business Week’s focus was the economy, hence why a thermometer ran on the cover of the magazine in the 1930s through 1961, gauging the temperature of the American economy. The thermometer graphic also illustrates another important part of The Business Week’s vision (counter to that of Forbes): interpreting what was going on in the business world, instead of profiling it. As a dig to Forbes, Malcolm Muir, the president of McGraw-Hill, who helped start The Business Week, said the magazine would never solely chronicle events without interpreting their significance. Furthermore, Muir added The Business Week would always have strong opinions and would never hesitate to express those opinions.

Instead, The Business Week drew inspiration from Time magazine’s format by creating distinct departments (e.g., Business Outlook, Washington Outlook, production, marketing, labor, finance, management, transportation, as well as government and business abroad) that published regular features. The magazine’s first Business Outlook section originally described stocks as unsafe earnings. However, its November 2, 1929, issue also said the Wall Street crash did not foreshadow a serious business depression, making it one of many business publications that failed at predicting the Great Depression. Started just 7 weeks prior to the stock market crash, The Business Week lost $1.5 million in revenue from 1929 to 1935.

However, unlike other business magazines struggling during the Great Depression, The Business Week had a few advantages. First of all, The Business Week was able to provide more timely business coverage by publishing a new issue every week, in comparison to Forbes, which came out every 2 weeks and Fortune, which in the beginning was published monthly. Second, its strategy of having a strong opinion as well as providing analysis led the editors to advocate that the U.S. government take aggressive steps to revive the economy. For example, in October 1930, the magazine complained that the Federal Reserve was standing by idly and a House consumption tax bill was fiscal suicide that would cause further deflation in March 1932. The magazine defines this as one its finest hours.

Besides analyzing the crumbling economy in the 1930s, the magazine reinvented its brand by dropping the “the,” becoming just Business Week in 1934 and then later BusinessWeek (all one word). Also, it continued its coverage of various industries but with a special emphasis on management. There was a postwar explosion of new businesses and technologies, and in order to thrive during a difficult economy, many managers had to develop skills quickly for unfamiliar enterprises. BusinessWeek wanted company managers to learn business strategies and management tips, even if the articles were not about their industries. Furthermore, other types of coverage distinguished BusinessWeek from its competitors, including analyzing societal shifts that impacted business (e.g., women moving up the corporate ladder in the 1970s) as well as how business influenced society, such as urban issues and the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.

Starting in 1984 through the 1990s, BusinessWeek became more aggressive under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Steven Shepard, who believed the magazine needed editorial change, despite its deep reporting and profitability. One of his first acts was giving bylines to writers. Furthermore, under his two decades of leadership, the magazine added an international edition, won multiple National Magazine Awards, launched businessweek.com, and by 1999 reached a circulation of 1.2 million, making it the world’s most widely read business magazine. Ten years later, it had 4.8 million readers in 140 countries.

However, during the dot-com boom’s profit surge, more and more people were turning to the Internet for free news and information, causing a decline in subscriptions and advertising revenue. As a result, in 2009, McGraw-Hill put the magazine up for sale, and it was bought by Bloomberg LP and then redesigned and rebranded with a new name: Bloomberg Businessweek (with a lowercase “w”). Following the magazine’s tradition, it still has a staff divided into various departments that match the print magazine’s sections and is devoted to the same types of coverage but now has a multiplatform presence online, through a mobile and tablet app, as well as a TV show, radio show, and podcast.

Fortune

Henry Luce, the cofounder of Time magazine, started Fortune in 1930 after noticing Time refused to run of a lot of business stories, citing space constraints during the 1920s. He wanted to create what he called a tycoon’s magazine, dedicated specifically to a small yet exclusive circulation of upper executives because he thought the current magazines, Forbes and BusinessWeek, did not pay enough attention to this group. Luce also wanted to produce a beautiful magazine using heavy paper with a vivid design, photos, graphics, and charts. Each issue weighed more than two pounds and cost $1, which was both expensive for readers in a shrinking economy and more than three times the amount of other business magazines usually selling for less than a quarter. In line with his vision, Luce originally wanted to call the magazine Power, but his first wife convinced him to name it Fortune because she thought the name would be subtler for readers.

In light of the October 1929 stock market crash, the board of Time tried to convince Luce not to start a new magazine, but he knew advertisers would pay good money to reach this audience because they had sufficient income to buy luxury products, and they controlled their companies’ finances, making them perfect for corporate advertising. More than half of the 184-page first issue was devoted to advertising, another difference from other magazines at the time. In terms of writing, Luce did not want Fortune to offer advice on how to invest or run a business, nor did he want the magazine to take stances on business and economic issues. Instead, he wanted Fortune to contain articles that were more descriptive and entertaining as well as informative, so he recruited journalists who did not always know a lot about business to allow for a more literary style.

However, the Great Depression forced Luce to do the exact opposite of his vision in order to reflect the problems of the economy. In the 1930s, Fortune changed from being pro-business to more critical, challenging businesses that did not want to be covered and showing how issues such as starvation and homelessness were a direct result of business failures. Also, Luce changed the tone of the magazine and started inserting content in line with his political opinions starting in 1932, with a feature citing Hoover’s failure to acknowledge the severity of the Great Depression alongside a favorable review of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. As a result of the editorial content changes, Fortune’s circulation, advertising revenues, and profits started to rise. By 1935, the magazine had more than 100,000 subscribers. In 1937, despite recording close to $500,000 in profits that year, Fortune did become critical of Roosevelt’s plan to rebuild the economy when business conditions worsened.

Fortune magazine was one of the first publications to recognize the relationship between government and business. Fortune is also recognized for evolving business journalism to include political and societal issues, unique businesses not usually covered by business news, as well as inventing the corporate profile. These articles, which take an in-depth look at a single corporation, taught journalists how to write about companies and are used by every media outlet that covers businesses and their strategies.

Starting in 1955, Fortune became known for its list of the 500 largest companies ranked by revenue, called the Fortune 500. The magazine has other famed lists such as the Fortune 1,000, the Global 500, 100 Fastest Growing Companies, 100 Best Companies to Work For, World’s Most Admired Companies, and The Unicorn List of billion-dollar tech companies, to name a few.

To keep up with its growing popularity, Fortune, which was a monthly magazine from 1930 to 1978, began publishing biweekly. The print magazine was the foundation of Fortune for its first 70 years, but in 2009, the number of issues per year was cut to 18 instead of 25 because of a 34.9% drop in ad page sale. Fortune’s ad sales continued to drop another 25% in 2018. This drop led Meredith Corp., the owner of Fortune, to sell the magazine to Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon for $150 million after acquiring Time Inc. earlier that year. Jiaravanon said he would increase investment in Fortune’s geographic expansion, editorial talent, and of course, digital presence.

Fortune’s online presence hosted by CNN.com started in 2004. Then in 2014, after Time Inc. became a company apart from Time Warner, Fortune launched its own website. As of 2019, Fortune’s online audience is wide, totaling 8.9 million, and its total print circulation of 14 issues a year is around 850,000.