Child (magazine)

Child

Final issue of Child, June/July 2007
Editor-in-Chief	Miriam Arond
Categories	Parenting
Frequency	10X a year
Circulation	740,534[1]
Publisher	Meredith Corporation
First issue	1986
Final issue	June/July 2007
Country	USA
Language	English
Website	www.child.com
ISSN	0894-7988

Child is a discontinued American parenting magazine founded by Jackie Leo and MaryAnn Sommers in 1986 and published through 2007. It was originally backed by Italian publishers, then sold to The New York Times Magazine Group which published it until 1995 along with its other women’s magazines, including Family Circle, before selling the titles to Gruner + Jahr. The Meredith Corporation acquired the Gruner & Jahr group in 2005.

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While Child was originally aimed at sophisticated, dual-career parents, from 1995-2000, when Gruner & Jahr U.S.A. first purchased it, the magazine became a practical mass service magazine. In February 2000, Miriam Arond became Editor in Chief and relaunched Child as a lifestyle magazine for (as the tagline said) "Raising Kids With Smarts & Style." With beautiful, striking visuals, and newsworthy, trendspotting content, Child doubled its advertising pages from under 500 ad pages in 2000 to over 1,000 ad pages in 2005. The magazine won over 35 editorial and design awards.^[2] Its award-winning content included exclusive, data-driven surveys, like "The 10 Best Children's Hospitals,"^[3] topical feature investigations like "Crisis in the ER",^[4] essays by acclaimed writers like Susan Cheever, Anne Rice, Anne Roiphe, Neal Pollack, A.J. Jacobs, and Rosanne Cash, and Child's Best Children's Book Awards.

Signature events for Child magazine included its annual Children's Champion Awards (honorees at the awards events included Dr. Marion Wright Edelman, Judy Blume, Geoffrey Canada, Wendy Kopp),^[5] the first ever Children's Fashion Shows under the tents at Bryant Park in New York City, and the Best Children's Book Awards, which were celebrated at bookstores throughout the country with signings by children's book authors and illustrators, including Lifetime Achievement Award winners Julie Andrews, Maurice Sendak, Hilary Knight, Tomie de Paola, and Eric Carle.

When Meredith, Corporation acquired Child magazine in 2005 it made a deliberate decision to lower its rate base from 1,020,000 to 700,000+. The Des Moines, Iowa publisher, known for its mass service publications like Better Homes & Gardens, found that Child, a lifestyle magazine that needed to be marketed to the more affluent, was not a good fit for its portfolio. In 2007 Meredith decided to fold the print version and include the Web site child.com in its parents.com portal (which includes content from its other mass market parent-related magazines American Baby, Parents, and Family Circle).

References

1. ^ Moses, Lucia; April 2, 2007; "Parenting titles evolve"; MediaWeek; retrieved May 2, 2007.
2. ^ Mission Statement
3. ^ 2007's 10 Best Children's Hospitals
4. ^ Crisis in the ER
5. ^ CHILD Magazine's 2005 Children's Champion Awards: A Salute to Six Heroes