Jasmine Business Directory

The Magazines and E-Zines category within News and Politics gathers periodicals whose main job is to report and comment on current affairs, government, elections and public life. The titles here are not single-topic hobby publications. They belong closer to journalism than to lifestyle publishing, and they include weekly and monthly news magazines, political reviews, opinion journals, current-affairs digests and their digital equivalents. An e-zine, short for electronic magazine, is the online version of a printed title. The word zine descends from fanzine and magazine, and the term came to mean small-circulation magazines and newsletters distributed by electronic means (Online magazine, 2024). A title in this section might be a long-running print weekly with a paid website, a digital-only outlet founded for the web, or a hybrid that publishes daily online and prints a selected edition each issue.

The listings here cover a range of ownership models and editorial leanings. You will find general news magazines that summarise the week, partisan political reviews that argue a position, non-partisan policy journals, regional current-affairs titles and independent online publications that grew out of blogging. Because the category name appears in more than one place across the directory, the entries collected under this News and Politics branch are kept separate from same-named categories elsewhere. A health title or a travel magazine would be filed under its own subject tree. The publications in this particular news and politics web directory section share an editorial focus on events, governance and the public sphere rather than on a consumer niche.

Editorial control separates a magazine from a raw feed or a social timeline. Magazines and their electronic counterparts usually operate with editors or editorial boards that review submissions and carry out a quality-control function (Online magazine, 2024). Readers and advertisers pay for that gatekeeping, and it is why a news and politics business directory treats these titles as separate commercial operations. Each listing is a publisher, an editorial team, a subscription business and, often, an events or syndication arm.

For someone using this page, the practical value is discovery. A reader looking for serious current-affairs coverage, a media buyer planning a campaign, a press officer compiling outreach lists or a researcher surveying the political magazines in print and online can browse the businesses and resources collected here in one place. The page is a curated index of news and political periodicals, and this corner of the current-affairs web directory works as an everyday category rather than a marketing label. The sections that follow set out the history of the format, how the industry is structured and regulated, how the move from print to digital has reshaped the economics, and where to read further.

The magazine as a form is older than the news weekly that now defines this category. The word magazine derives from the Arabic makhazin, meaning depot or storehouse, and reached English through the French magasin and the Italian magazzino (Magazine, 2024). The earliest publication usually described as a magazine, the literary and philosophical Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen, appeared in Germany in 1663. The label was fixed in London in 1731, when Edward Cave launched The Gentleman's Magazine and borrowed the military metaphor of a storehouse, calling it a monthly collection to treasure up as in a magazine (Magazine, 2024). From that point the periodical settled into a familiar rhythm of regular issues, mixed contents and an editorial voice. The oldest titles in this branch of the news and politics web directory trace their format back to that pattern.

The dedicated news magazine, the type listed throughout this section, is a twentieth-century invention. Henry Luce and his Yale classmate Briton Hadden founded Time in the United States, and the first issue reached newsstands on 3 March 1923 (EBSCO, 2024). Their pitch was a magazine for busy readers that would summarise the week in compact, briskly written departments, a format Hadden built and called Timestyle. Other publishers copied the model, and it produced a worldwide group of weekly news digests, political reviews and opinion journals that combined reporting with a clear editorial identity. Time ran at a loss for its first four years and turned profitable by 1927, and Hadden, its first editor, died in February 1929 at the age of 31 (EBSCO, 2024). Even then the economics were plain: a news magazine needed a few years to build a paying habit among readers before it could sustain itself. Many of the print titles that dominated the twentieth century still appear in this branch of the directory in their modern, multi-platform form.

The electronic magazine arrived with the public internet in the mid-1990s. Datamation is often cited as one of the first magazines to move from a print format to an online-only format, and Salon, founded in July 1995 by David Talbot, was among the early titles conceived for the web (Online magazine, 2024). Alongside web publications ran disk magazines, or diskmags, distributed on physical media. These early online magazines and diskmags were seen as a disruptive technology by established publishing houses, because they lowered the cost of reaching readers and bypassed the printing and distribution chain (Online magazine, 2024). For a few years the e-zine meant informal, small-team publishing, often produced by one or two people with strong personal voices. Within a decade many of these outlets had grown into professional newsrooms that employed reporters and editors and followed published standards.

That history is why the present category is so mixed. A current-affairs web directory of this kind now lists century-old weeklies beside digital-native outlets that have never printed an issue. Some entries are the online editions of established magazines; others began as independent online journals and acquired the editorial structure of a magazine over time. The line between an online magazine and an online journal is partly one of audience: titles aimed at specialists or learned societies tend to be called journals, while those addressing a general current-affairs readership keep the magazine label (Online magazine, 2024). When you scan the listings, you are looking at a single tradition that has split across paper and screen, and this section indexes both the print and the electronic titles together.

A news magazine is a business as well as a body of journalism, and the industry has long had ways to measure and verify its reach. Circulation auditing exists because advertisers once had no way to trust the sales figures publishers quoted. In the United Kingdom the Audit Bureau of Circulations was set up in 1931 by the Society of British Advertisers, after it was calculated that if every circulation claim of the national press were true, every man, woman and child would have had to buy seven daily papers (Audit Bureau of Circulations (UK), 2024). ABC sets industry-agreed standards for measuring print and digital media and was the first UK joint industry currency for the sector. It began certifying digital replica editions in 2011 and issued its first digital publication certificates in 2012 (Audit Bureau of Circulations (UK), 2024).

North America has a parallel institution. The body now called the Alliance for Audited Media was founded in 1914 by the Association of National Advertisers, originally under the name Audit Bureau of Circulations, and it independently verifies print and digital circulation, website analytics and audience data for newspapers and magazines in the United States and Canada (Alliance for Audited Media, 2024). In early 2023 it merged with BPA Worldwide to form the largest not-for-profit media auditing organisation in the region (Alliance for Audited Media, 2024). For any title listed in a news and current-affairs business directory, an AAM, BPA or ABC figure is the closest thing to an objective measure of audience, and media buyers treat audited numbers differently from publisher claims.

Content standards are governed separately from circulation. In the United Kingdom the Independent Press Standards Organisation regulates most of the magazine and newspaper sector. IPSO was established on 8 September 2014 after the closure of the Press Complaints Commission, and it oversees more than 2,600 print and online titles, including many magazines and their websites (Independent Press Standards Organisation, 2024). Members agree to follow the Editors' Code of Practice, which is written and reviewed by the Editors' Code Committee and covers accuracy, privacy, intrusion into grief and harassment; the latest version took effect on 1 January 2025 (Independent Press Standards Organisation, 2024). IPSO can require prominent corrections and critical adjudications and, in serious and systemic cases, levy fines. Some major outlets, including the Financial Times and The Guardian, have chosen to stay outside IPSO and operate their own arrangements (Independent Press Standards Organisation, 2024).

The split between commercial measurement and editorial regulation affects how the listings should be read. A profile in a political-magazine web directory carries two kinds of credibility signal: audited reach on one side, and a regulatory regime or published standards policy on the other. The publications gathered in this section fall at different points on that map. Some belong to a recognised press regulator, some regulate themselves, and others operate in jurisdictions with their own councils and codes. Because the directory collects current-affairs and political titles rather than a single national press, the entries cover several regulatory traditions, and that variety is part of what a researcher or media planner is looking at when they browse here.

Ownership varies just as widely. The category mixes large publishing groups, independent foundations, member-funded co-operatives and small proprietor-run outlets. This matters for anyone using these business directories to plan outreach or advertising, because the commercial contact, the editorial contact and the rights holder are often different organisations. A curated index of news and political magazines works best when it shows those distinctions, so the listings treat each title as a publishing business with its own structure.

The main change in this category over the past two decades is the move of readers and revenue from paper to screen. The decline in print is steep and well documented. According to the Reuters Institute, the share of people accessing news in print fell to about 10 percent in 2025, down from 50 percent in 2013 (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2025). Print consumption has stabilised at a low level in some markets, but the long trend is clear, and it has cut away much of the newsstand model that once carried weekly news magazines. The format survives, but most of its activity has moved online, and this branch of the news and politics web directory now lists e-zines and electronic editions alongside their print parents.

The revenue picture for periodicals shows the same pressure. The United States Census Bureau's Service Annual Survey found that estimated revenue from periodical publishing, which includes magazines, fell from 40.2 billion dollars in 2002 to 23.9 billion dollars in 2020, a decline of 40.5 percent (United States Census Bureau, 2022). The drop split roughly into a 20.7 percent fall between 2002 and 2010 and a 25.0 percent fall between 2010 and 2020 (United States Census Bureau, 2022). Much of that loss was advertising income migrating to digital platforms, which forced news and political titles to find money from readers instead of from advertisers.

The transition inside individual titles is visible in the circulation data. Pew Research Center's study of US news magazines found that print single-copy sales fell about 3 percent in 2015 while sales of digital single copies rose by an average of 30 percent to more than 12,000 per title, reaching nearly 30 percent of all single-copy sales (Pew Research Center, 2016). Digital subscriptions grew 6 percent that year but still made up only about 4 percent of overall subscriptions, with titles such as The Atlantic and New York Magazine each posting more than 60 percent digital growth (Pew Research Center, 2016). The aggregate numbers were modest, but the direction was unmistakable: the audience was moving to the web faster than the paid digital business could replace print revenue.

Some titles have turned that shift into a sustainable model, and they show what a healthy entry in a current-affairs directory can look like. The Economist reported paid subscriber numbers of 1.25 million and operating profit of 48.1 million pounds in the year to 31 March 2025, with subscription revenue of 244.7 million pounds making up about two-thirds of total income (Press Gazette, 2025). Its hard paywall, which by 2019 allowed only two free paragraphs before asking readers to register, pushed the business from advertising toward reader payment and a focus on value over volume (Press Gazette, 2025). That approach of registration, a paywall and a focus on the long-term value of each subscriber has since spread across the sector.

Engagement and trust are the harder problem. The Reuters Institute reports that news use is spreading across more platforms, with six networks now reaching at least 10 percent of respondents compared with two a decade earlier, and that selective news avoidance rose to 39 percent, ten points higher than in 2017 (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2024). For news and political magazines this is the main commercial difficulty: readers are reachable on more channels than ever, yet many are tuning current affairs out. The titles indexed in this web directory compete with each other and, just as much, with the wider drift away from the news itself, and the ones that last tend to be those that built direct relationships with paying readers. Anyone browsing the business and web directories that cover current-affairs publishing is looking at the result of that pressure.

This page is built as a working tool. The entries are organised so that a visitor can move from a broad scan of news and political titles to a specific publication quickly, and the curation favours editorially controlled magazines and e-zines over aggregators or social feeds. If you are a reader, the practical use is finding credible current-affairs coverage across the political spectrum and across formats. If you work in communications or advertising, the same news and politics business directory is also an outreach and planning resource, since each profile points to a distinct publishing business with its own audience and contact structure.

Researchers and students studying news magazines in print and online can use this section as an entry point and then verify reach and standing through the bodies described earlier: circulation through ABC in the United Kingdom or the Alliance for Audited Media in North America, and editorial conduct through a recognised regulator such as IPSO where applicable. Because the category name, news and political magazines and e-zines, also appears under other subject trees, confirm that a title genuinely belongs to current affairs rather than to a consumer niche before relying on it. The listings collected in this news and politics web directory are filtered with that distinction in mind, which keeps the page focused on current affairs.

A few habits make these business directories more useful. Check when a title was founded and whether it is print-first, digital-first or hybrid, since that shapes its coverage rhythm and its archive. Look for an audited circulation figure rather than a self-reported one. Note the regulatory regime or published standards policy, which signals how the outlet handles corrections and complaints. Treat the e-zine and the print edition of the same brand as one editorial operation with two distribution channels. Used this way, a current-affairs web directory shows who is publishing, under whose standards and for which readers.

The context set out across these sections covers the history of the magazine, the invention of the news weekly, the arrival of the electronic edition and the economics of the digital shift. It is meant to help you read the listings with a critical eye. The publications indexed here are independent businesses working in a contested and changing market. This page gathers the news and political magazines and e-zines that belong to this branch of the directory and presents them in one place, with the background needed to judge them. The sources below are the basis for the factual claims made above and are good starting points for further study.

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Online magazine. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Magazine. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
3. EBSCO. (2024). Luce Founds Time Magazine. EBSCO Research Starters
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Audit Bureau of Circulations (UK). Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Alliance for Audited Media. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
6. Wikipedia contributors. (2024). Independent Press Standards Organisation. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
7. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2025). Digital News Report 2025. University of Oxford
8. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (2024). Digital News Report 2024: Overview and Key Findings. University of Oxford
9. United States Census Bureau. (2022). Service Annual Survey Shows Continuing Decline in Print Publishing Revenue. United States Census Bureau
10. Pew Research Center. (2016). News Magazines: Fact Sheet. Pew Research Center, State of the News Media
11. Press Gazette. (2025). Subscriptions Growth Fuels Record Revenue Year for The Economist. Press Gazette