Yankee Magazine Celebrates 80th Anniversary
BOSTON (CBS) - Yankee Magazine turns 80 years old this month. As WBZ business reporter Jeff Brown reports, this magazine came close to never getting off the ground.
The truth is, Yankee was mired in scandal with the very first edition.
"And it started off in 1935 with a circulation of about 600 people most of whom were fraudulent," Publisher Brook Holmberg says.
So how does the company get caught up in fraud before it really begins?
"You know we asked a subscription agency, in quotes, to give us names of potential subscribers and they just gave us names out of the phone book and it turns out that none of those names were actually real people," Holmberg says.
But this is a business that relied on subscriptions and not sales to pay the bills.
"So we applied some business principles in the 50s and 60s and that sort of took it to the next level from a family enterprise and a labor of love to a really sound business model," he says.
Once they got that straightened out, real subscribers starting flocking to the family run publication and they were just getting started.
"Then after a couple of decades and some changes during World War II, when it actually became a newsletter and came back as a magazine, and then for the next several decades it grew and grew until we reached a peak of about a million subscribers in the '80's."
And what a business it's become. Yankee today has levelled off to about 300,000 but, they have about 1.9 million total readers.
"So that means that every copy of Yankee is being read by about five or six individual people," he says.
And their free website gets half a million users each month and more than a million page views.
And a fun fact about the quintessential New England magazine:
"Some of our most passionate readers live outside of the region because we're their connection. Yankee is their monthly or bi monthly post card from their home or the place they love or went to camp or went to school."
Here's to another 80 years. The anniversary edition is on sale now.
WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Jeff Brown reports
