Outlook is now 13 years old. For a Jewish boy, his thirteenth birthday is the time he comes of age; an English-speaking Indian child is likely to be told that she (or he) is now a teenager, an otherwise alien time of life for most Indian children. What 13 means in the life-cycle of a magazine is less obvious because the average life expectancy of an English magazine in India is hard to reckon.
If we were to use the Illustrated Weekly of India as a precedent (which began life in 1880 as the weekly edition of the Times of India and kept going up to 1993 by which time it was a hundred and thirteen years old), Outlook would be a child with a century of vigorous life ahead of it. On the other hand, if we take as our guide one of India's most promising newsmagazines, Sunday, which began publishing in 1973 and died (along with the twentieth century) in 1999, Outlook would be in the middle of its mid-life crisis, with just another 13 years to look forward to.
On the whole, though, there's reason to take the long view. Successful magazines of news and opinion tend to keep going for a while. Time, the prototype for most modern newsmagazines, opened shop in 1923, and while it isn't quite the behemoth it was in its prime, its paid circulation adds up to around 3.5 million copies each week.
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| TIME Jan 6, 1936 cover |
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