Editing Magazine (section)

====Progressive era: 1890s–1920s====
[[File:LIFEMagazine10Jul1924.jpg|thumb|The Olympic Number of ''[[Life (magazine)|Life]]'', 10 July 1924. Issues of general interest magazines focused on a specific subject were referred to as "numbers" and featured cover art relevant to the given topic, in this case the [[1924 Summer Olympics]].]]
{{further|Muckrakers|Mass media and American politics}}
Mass-circulation magazines became much more common after 1900, some with circulations in the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Some passed the million-mark in the 1920s. It was an age of [[mass media]]. Because of the rapid expansion of national advertising, the cover price fell sharply to about 10 cents.<ref>{{cite book|first1 =Peter C.|last1= Holloran |first2= Catherine|last2= Cocks|first3= Alan |last3= Lessoff|title=The A to Z of the Progressive Era|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Rt3243E-Wm0C&pg=PA266|year=2009|publisher=Scarecrow Press|isbn=9780810870697|access-date=|url-status=live|archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20191216215435/https://books.google.com/books?id=Rt3243E-Wm0C&pg=PA266|archive-date=16 December 2019 | page = 266}}</ref> One cause was the heavy coverage of corruption in politics, local government and big business, especially by ''Muckrakers.'' They were journalists who wrote for popular magazines to expose social and political sins and shortcomings. They relied on their own [[investigative journalism]] reporting; muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and [[Corruption in the United States|political corruption]]. Muckraking magazines–notably ''[[McClure's]]''–took on corporate monopolies and crooked [[political machine]]s while raising public awareness of chronic urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and [[social issues]] such as [[child labor]].<ref>Herbert Shapiro, ed., ''The muckrakers and American society'' (Heath, 1968), contains representative samples as well as academic commentary.{{full citation needed|date = January 2025}}</ref>{{page needed|date = January 2025}}

The journalists who specialized in exposing waste, corruption, and scandal operated at the state and local level, like [[Ray Stannard Baker]], [[George Creel]], and [[Brand Whitlock]]. Others, including [[Lincoln Steffens]], exposed political corruption in many large cities; [[Ida Tarbell]] went after [[John D. Rockefeller]]'s [[Standard Oil Company]]. [[Samuel Hopkins Adams]] in 1905 showed the fraud involved in many patent medicines, [[Upton Sinclair]]'s 1906 novel ''[[The Jungle]]'' gave a horrid portrayal of how meat was packed, and, also in 1906, [[David Graham Phillips]] unleashed a blistering indictment of the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained that they were not being helpful by raking up all the muck.<ref>Robert Miraldi, ed. ''The Muckrakers: Evangelical Crusaders'' (Praeger, 2000).{{full citation needed|date = January 2025}}</ref>{{page needed|date = January 2025}}<ref>Stein, Harry H. "American Muckrakers and Muckraking: The 50-Year Scholarship", ''Journalism Quarterly'', (1979) 56#1 pp 9–17.</ref>