Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 2, June 1993 | Page 8

J^O£uIar^Culture

7. No propaganda.
8. No ghost-written banalities by Big Names.
9. It will have literary standards of the highest—and if Babbitt
doesn't like literature he doesn't have to read it.
10. It will be beautiful.^
Better than most such enterprises. Fortune largely lived up to
these promises during its first decade. Moreover, the following record
of increased circulation and advertising over most of the depression
era was remarkable: in the 1930s, the average circulation was 34,000
with ad revenue of $354,230; in 1937 average circulation was 143,000
with $1,726,222 of ad revenue.
A 1934 brochure extolled the qualifications of Fortune's 90,000
subscribers, which compared to about 50,000 for The Vlall Street
Journal in the same period. It assumed 1,000,000 actual readers who
were described as follows:
1. Ninety-six percent of Fortune’s readers were executives or
professionals.
2. Fortune reached more than half of those American families
with incomes of more than $25,000.
3. Fortune was read by more than half of ѡ