Fortune is a
global----International mostly means something that involves more than one country. The term international as a word means involvement of, interaction between or encompassing more than one nation, or generally beyond national boundaries...
business magazine published by
Time Inc.Time Inc. is a subsidiary of the media conglomerate Time Warner, the company formed by the 1990 merger of the original Time Inc. and Warner Communications. It publishes 130 magazines, most notably its namesake, Time...
Founded by
Henry LuceHenry Robinson Luce was an influential American publisher. He launched and closely supervised a stable of magazines that transformed journalism and the reading habits of upscale Americans...
in 1930, the publishing business, consisting of
Time,
LifeLife generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....
,
Fortune, and
Sports IllustratedSports Illustrated is an American sports media company owned by media conglomerate Time Warner. Its self titled magazine has over 3.5 million subscribers and is read by 23 million adults each week, including over 18 million men. It was the first magazine with circulation over one million to win the...
, grew to become
Time WarnerTime Warner is one of the world's largest media companies, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc...
. In turn,
AOLAOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
grew as it acquired Time Warner in 2000 when Time Warner was the world's largest
media conglomerateA media conglomerate, media group or media institution is a company that owns large numbers of companies in various mass media such as television, radio, publishing, movies, and the Internet...
.
Fortune's primary competitors in the national business magazine category are
ForbesForbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...
, which is also published bi-weekly, and
BusinessWeekBloomberg Businessweek, commonly and formerly known as BusinessWeek, is a weekly business magazine published by Bloomberg L.P. It is currently headquartered in New York City.- History :...
. The magazine is especially known for its annual features ranking companies by revenue.
CNNMoney.comCNNMoney.com is the world's largest business website. The site is the online home of Fortune and Money, and serves as CNN.com's exclusive business site. The site, edited by Chris Peacock, together with the three titles, is part of the Fortune|Money Group, and attracts more than 10.8 million unique...
is the online home of
Fortune, in addition to
MoneyMoney is published by Time Inc. Its first issue was published in October 1972. Its articles cover the gamut of personal finance topics ranging from investing, saving, retirement and taxes to family finance issues like paying for college, credit, career and home improvement...
.
History and organization
Fortune was founded by
TimeTime is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
co-founder Henry Luce in February 1930, four months after the
Wall Street Crash of 1929The Wall Street Crash of 1929 , also known as the Great Crash, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout...
that marked the onset of the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
.
Briton HaddenBriton Hadden was the co-founder of Time magazine with his Yale classmate Henry Luce. He was Time's first editor and the inventor of its revolutionary writing style, known as Timestyle...
, Luce's partner, wasn't enthusiastic about the idea—which Luce originally thought to title
Power—but Luce went forward with it after Hadden's February 27, 1929 death (probably of septicemia).
Luce wrote a memo to the Time, Inc. board in November 1929, "We will not be over-optimistic. We will recognize that this business slump may last as long as an entire year."
Single copies of that first issue cost $1 at a time when the Sunday
New York TimesThe New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
was only 5¢. At a time when business publications were little more than numbers and statistics printed in black and white,
Fortune was an oversized 11"×14", using creamy heavy paper, and art on a cover printed by a special process.
Fortune was also noted for its photography, featuring the work of
Margaret Bourke-WhiteMargaret Bourke-White was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her...
and others.
Walker EvansWalker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...
served as its photography editor from 1945–1965.
An urban legend says that art director T. M. Clelland mocked up the cover of the first issue with the $1 price because nobody had yet decided how much to charge; the magazine was printed before anyone realized it, and when people saw it for sale, they thought that the magazine must really have worthwhile content. In fact, there were 30,000 subscribers who had already signed up to receive that initial 184-page issue.
During the
Great DepressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
,
Fortune developed a reputation for its social conscience, for
Walker EvansWalker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...
and
Margaret Bourke-WhiteMargaret Bourke-White was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her...
's color photographs, and for a team of writers including
James AgeeJames Rufus Agee was an American author, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, he was one of the most influential film critics in the U.S...
,
Archibald MacLeishArchibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...
,
John Kenneth GalbraithJohn Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith , OC was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism...
, and
Alfred KazinAlfred Kazin was an American writer and literary critic, many of whose writings depicted the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America....
, hired specifically for their writing abilities.
Fortune became an important leg of Luce's Time/Life media empire, which has grown to become
Time WarnerTime Warner is one of the world's largest media companies, headquartered in the Time Warner Center in New York City. Formerly two separate companies, Warner Communications, Inc...
. For many years
Fortune was published as a monthly, but as of January, 1978, it is published twice a month. It considers its purview the entire field of business, including the people, trends, companies, and ideas that characterize modern business.
Marshall LoebMarshall Loeb is an American author, editor, commentator and columnist specializing in business matters, who spent 38 years in the Time Inc. publication network which included service as managing editor of both Fortune and Money magazines...
was named managing editor in 1986 and stepped down in May 1994 upon hitting
Time Inc.Time Inc. is a subsidiary of the media conglomerate Time Warner, the company formed by the 1990 merger of the original Time Inc. and Warner Communications. It publishes 130 magazines, most notably its namesake, Time...
's mandatory retirement age of 65, to be replaced by Walter Kiechel III, an executive editor at the publication. During his tenure at
Fortune, Loeb was credited with expanding the traditional focus on business and the economy with added graphs, charts and tables, as well as the addition of articles on topics such as executive life, and social issues connected to the world of business, such as the effectiveness of public schools and on homelessness.
While circulation of the business magazines sector has apparently slumped since 2000,
Fortune claims their circulation has risen from 833,000 to 857,000 in that period.
In October of 2009, as a result of declining ad revenue and circulation, Fortune began publishing tri-weekly rather than bi-weekly.
Fortune lists
A theme of
Fortune is its regular publishing of researched and ranked lists. In the
human resourcesHuman resources is a term used to describe the individuals who make up the workforce of an organization, although it is also applied in labor economics to, for example, business sectors or even whole nations...
field, for example, their
Best Companies to Work For list is an industry benchmark. Its most famous lists rank companies by gross revenue and profile their businesses:
- Fortune 500
The Fortune 500 is an annual list compiled and published by Fortune magazine that ranks the top 500 U.S. closely held and public corporations as ranked by their gross revenue after adjustments made by Fortune to exclude the impact of excise taxes companies collect. The list includes publicly and...
- Fortune 1000
Fortune 1000 is a reference to a list maintained by the American business magazine Fortune. The list is of the 1000 largest American companies, ranked on revenues alone...
- Fortune Global 500
The Fortune Global 500 is a ranking of the top 500 corporations worldwide as measured by revenue. The list is compiled and published annually by Fortune magazine....
- 40 under 40 (Fortune Magazine)
Fortune Magazine's 40 under 40 List details the young stars in business across the globe.Mark Zuckerberg topped the 2011 list. Facebook now has over 800 million users.-External links:***...
External links