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The History of The Saturday Evening Post, Part 3: How Two Men Saved a Magazine
It took a million dollars from a publisher and the vision of a great editor to turn the Post from a failing publication to a magazine with more than a million subscribers.
Comments
This video really deep dives the drastic and pretty rapid transformation the Post underwent from being at death’s door in 1897 to already being in 20th century space launch mode by 1902. This was a case of where the old version was meant to end so the right man at the right time with the right vision could come along and take it into the stratosphere.
With George Horace Lorimer what they accomplished was astonishing. Subscriptions coming in at 4.000 per day, advertising going up 17,000% by 1910. All of this coming together with all of the new products of the industrial revolution, and the job growth that came along with it.
Cyrus Curtis was a wealthy man or none of this would have been possible. He never lost sight though of the common man and woman the magazine was being edited for, and who were his subscribers. A wealthy man with humanity that cared about the common good, treating everyday Americans with respect by delivering them the best of everything, every week, from cover to cover.
He knew how to appeal to people of various levels of education, and give those with less the chance to learn and be on a more equal footing. That rare quality of ‘the better you do, the better I’ll do’ or ‘win-win’ for short. Unfortunately we’ve been living times where “our government” has gone out of its way to crush the average American, the environment and so much more in every way possible. The dire results scream for themselves.