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- Despite the commercial success of Reader's Digest and Time in the 20th Century, the magazine that really symbolized the general-interest genre during this era were the oversized pictorial weeklies Look and Life. More than any other magazine of its day, Life developed an effective strategy for competing with popular radio by advancing photojournalism. Launched as a weekly by Henry Luce in 1936, Life was able to combine the public's fascination with images (incorporated by the movie industry), radio journalism, and the popularity of advertising and fashion photography.
- By the end of the 1930s, Life had a pass-along readership- (the total number of people who come in to contact with a single copy of a magazine - of more than seventeen million, rivaling the ratings of popular radio programs.