“People” magazine first published

Journalists have a special designation for different types of news. Issues-focused reporting, with facts and statistics and arguments is called “hard news;” that was what TIME magazine represented. Sensational, human-interest stories were called “soft news;” they became the basis of Time, Inc. Corporation’s new magazine called People.

On this day, March 4, 1974, People magazine first went on sale. Volume 1, Issue 1 was dated for the following week: March 11.

Its very first issue, sold on newsstands for 35 cents each, had Mia Farrow, star of the movie The Great Gatsby on the cover, and interviews with Gloria Vanderbilt and author Alexander Solzhenitsin. Smartly, the publishers did not call it soft news, They equated it with a people-driven TIME, no less authoritative in its coverage. “We’re getting back to the people who are causing the news and who are caught up in it, or deserve to be in it,” its executive editor told the sister publication TIME. “Our focus is on people, not issues.”