Reader's Digest

It was founded in 1922 by DeWitt and Lila Wallace. They started selling the magazine only by mail for $0.25 an issue, working from their Greenwich Village apartment. Five thousand copies were printed of the first issue and it contained 31 articles including "The Future of Poison Gas," "Wanted: Motives for Motherhood" and "Advice from a President's Physician".

In 1929, Reader's Digest finally hit the newsstands and 62,000 copies were sold. By 1935, circulation passed the one million mark and three years later an international edition was started in the United Kingdom. World War II brought Latin American and Swedish editions of the magazine, and after the war editions were put together for Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, South Africa, and Switzerland. Although paid advertising had always been in the international editions, it didn't appear in American copies until 1955.

Ever since launching Readers' Digest Condensed Books in 1950, the company has been expanding into other mediums. Some of the best known include music (Music of the World's Great Composers - 1959), books (Reader's Digest Great World Atlas - 1963), videos (Why We Fight - 1986), and mail sweepstakes starting in 1962. Their web site, "Reader's Digest World", was launched in 1996 and the magazine published its 10 billionth copy of the U.S. edition in 1994.

"In the inaugural issue of Reader's Digest, the Wallaces offered articles of "enduring value and interest." Today, in a broad range of media formats, the Company continues to be committed to informing, enriching, entertaining and inspiring people of all ages and cultures." - From "Corporate History", Reader's Digest Investor Information

The idea behind the magazine, reflected in the name, is that it would act as a sieve, sifting through the collective national literary output, collecting and presenting in digest form that writing of interest and importance to the worldy, intelligent reader, who could not fairly be expected to pore over so many sources himself to find these gems. Now I don't know if I'm quite willing to call it a success in that regard - as with all commercial publications, there's a lowest common denominator element to it, arguably more here than the average - but it has been a commercial success, consistently maintaining one of the highest circulations in America (currently 12.5 million), producing good sales of spinoff publications and overseas versions, and inspiring other similar-format publications such as the "alternative" Utne Reader.

The format is really the only thing the magazine has in common with Utne, however, as Reader's Digest has since its creation consistently reflected a conservative viewpoint. From Cold War-era anticommunist screeds to modern neocon essays, some of the excerpts have always reflected a rah-rah, military booster, "God, Country, and Family", barbarians-at-the-cultural-gates rightist tilt. These selections, and the editors' letters which inevitably referenced them seemed to offer less a denouncement of leftist excesses than a sense of indignation at the simple existence of any liberals in the first place. I remember from when I regularly read it in junior high (mid-'90s) a regular feature consisting of a collection of "outrageous" actions by judges, which were occasionally matters of obvious incompetence, but more often than not instances of what the editors found to be insufficiently harsh sentencing or excessive concern for due process or the rights of the accused.

Of course, it's possible that all this curmodgeonliness is to some degree a matter of knowing their audience - the average age of a Reader's Digest reader is 49, even before factoring in the magazine's Large Print Edition, marketed towards a more elderly, vision-impaired audience, and per its capita circulation is highest in the (traditionally conservative) American midwest. The 2000 editor-in-chief installation of Eric Schrier, generally considered a moderate, and unarguably the most liberal man to ever hold the position, has changed the atmosphere a bit - reports are that the magazine is tempering its conservative stance and running fewer political articles, but in honesty I haven't read it since 1996 and can't speak from experience on this one. In any case, the Digest was never any National Review, and general interest articles, health news, travel and adventure pieces, and more neutral current-events coverage have always made up the majority of its pages.

Issues of content aside, Reader's Digest is also notable for its size - 5.5" by 7.5" and maybe half an inch thick, just large enough not to fit in a pocket (the Large Print edition is the industry-standard 7" by 10") - and the manner in which it is sold, marketed heavily through the Readers Digest Sweepstakes, a giveaway contest packaged with subscription offers for a wide variety of magazines (the purchasing of which are not, of course, necessary for entry, a fact which is mentioned only as much as is legally required). The magazine and all associated products are published by the Reader's Digest Association, maintained as a family company from founding in 1922 until 1990, when it went public with a NYSE listing ("RDA" for nonvoting stock, "RDB" for voting). For a period of time in 2000, it appeared that German media conglomerate Bertelsmann was going to buy the Association, but the deal never went through and the company remains independent.