Have Any Defunct magazines been Revived (Successfully)?

I am aware of one “Liberty” magazine…it went out of business in 1950-and it was revived in 1971 (lasted for a few years).
Suppose i wanted to reviove an old mag like “Collier’s”-which hasn’t been in business for a long time…given that any people who remembered the old name are probably dead-would the name still have value 9enough that I might have to pay the original owners to use it)?

I believe that Life magazine was revived at least once.

This is the one I came in here to say. A weekly magazine, it went defunct in 1972, and was revived as a monthly in 1978. It went defunct again in 2000, but came back as a Parade-like Sunday newspaper supplement in 2004 (though it ceased publication again three years later).

How about Amateur Telescope Making? I think it died, then made a brief rival, perhaps under the moniker of ATM Journal.

Hows that for obscure? :slight_smile:

Vanity Fair is probably the most famous successful example.

It ran from 1913 to 1935 as one of the most stylish magazines in the business. It failed in the Depression. Then Condé Nast Publications, the original owner, brought in back in 1983. Tina Brown took over as editor in 1984 and made it huge. It helped that she probably paid as much as anybody in the business.

There are many, many attempts at relaunching magazines. Few succeed. Just staying in business more than a year counts. Gaining back its old stature almost never happens. Most people don’t even know that Ms. magazine, whcih died in 1987, was restarted in 2001 and still publishes.

The 1970s’ version of Liberty was a nostalgia piece that reprinted articles from the original, and had no new content. Think of it as a print version of The Lawrence Welk Show.

The Saturday Evening Post was shut down in 1969, and about a year later was reborn as a vastly different product. It’s still published today, although it’s debatable how “successful” it is compared to its predecessor.

Cosmopolitan never quite died, but it was radically transformed when Helen Gurley Brown took over.

Playgirl

Weird Tales is billed as “the magazine that never dies!

Been ressurected , died & brought back again as often as Dracula.

It all depends on who (if anyone) still has ownership of the name / trademark.

Most magazines have been really struggling in the past few years – the combination of the availability of similar content on the Internet, and the recession, has killed or crippled many magazines (though there are some, particularly in niche interests, which seem to be doing all right). So, this might not be the most auspicious time to try to bring back a long-dead magazine.

I wish someone would bring back Byte magazine. It was the best tech source on microprocessors and electronics ever written.

Even the Magazine Death Pool is dead.

(nevermind!)

National Lampoon died in 98 but the name lives on in movies and a website.

Second that. Success was having it’s toll on the quality towards the end, but I never heard a reasonable explanation for its demise. But even 73 went under in the end. It’s surprising any magazine can still keep publishing in the digitial age.

Last I heard, Dr. Dobbs was still available, but it was a shadow of what it formerly was. There’s probably no way around that, ground-breaking work in software isn’t being conducted in the open any more.

It is probably against the spirit of this thread but Cracked.com appears to be a pretty healthy relaunch of the brand.

American Heritage has gone through several changes of ownership and relaunches.

It was originally published by the American Association for State and Local History starting in 1947. The organization was predominantly a historical group and they originally intended the magazine as an in-house publication.

The magazine became somewhat known outside of its original organization but they were not prepared to do a full-scale publication. So the American Heritage Publishing Company was formed in 1954 and they bought the magazine and relaunched it as a public magazine.

Forbes bought the magazine in 1986 and published it through 2007. Forbes ceased publication in that year but six months later, Edwin Grosvenor bought the title and relaunched it. It’s still in print as a quarterly.

I think Games magazine went silent for awhile and then came back.

ETA: Games World of Puzzles - Wikipedia Yup. between 1990 and 1991 was out of business.

Mentioning American Heritage is like hitting a bruise. It once was one of the great American magazines. After Forbes bought it, they slowly turned it into another shrine to the worship of capitalism and business. They still published good articles but too many had this incomprehensible slant until you remembered who owned it. (Forbes is the company run by Steve Forbes, the libertarian/nutcase/flat taxer billionaire.)

The new magazine is hardly successful. It’s hardly a magazine. The majority of pieces are just excerpts from books. It doesn’t even seem to keep to a quarterly schedule.

American Heritage Invention & Technology is still a fine magazine. And its archives are searchable online, making them a great resource.

Well, they did have new content, but that didn’t start till about 2 years into their second run. They called it something like Liberty; Something New and Something Old, mixing new articles with old. Pretty crappy. I think they even went quarterly before dying.

Best wishes.
hh