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Follow The Worker, Not The Work: Hard Lessons From Failed London Music Hall Magazines, Scott B. Fosdick

Scott B. Fosdick

London’s music hall stages and the variety entertainment that flourished there at the turn of the 20th century gave rise to a raft of magazines hopeful of gaining an audience from fans and/or performers and theater managers. Some flourished for a time, but all died with the artform, unlike their American cousin, Variety, which still thrives nearly a century after its first issue. This article compares the founding missions of these magazines to that of Variety in search of guiding principles for magazine management, particularly of business publications, in industries undergoing rapid change. The conflict between two long-standing principles of …