The magazine was originally named Lloyd Thaxton’s Tiger Beat. Thaxton, one of the magazine’s co-founders, was the host of a popular and idiosyncratic music/comedy/variety television show that featured teens dancing to pop music, and performances by teen-idolized bands.
The “Beat” moniker also appeared in Teen Beat, which went into publication in 1967. So I think “beat” was mean to connote “hip” and “groovy” music trends, and AFAICT the significance of “tiger”, as other posters have noted, was just its sixties slang sense of an attractive boy.
That The Beatles used beat as part of their name had to have some significance. Beat = Beatles = music with a beat = the popular boys who made music with this new beat.
The British made “beat” a standard word to describe the new music before the Americans did, I think. “Big Beat” music was music to dance to as early as the late 1950s, and quickly shortened to “beat.” Merseybeat and British Beat had an equivalence for all the pop groups around Liverpool. Mersey Beat was a magazine that started in 1961 and a band took the name before Lennon and McCartney absconded with term. The Beatles probably heard “beat” as the street name for the music they loved and wanted to make every day from the Quarrymen onward.
Anything with “Beat” in the title referenced the British Invasion and their music. Tiger Beat started in 1965, when the U.S. was swimming in it. I’d guess that the target audience of 13-year-old girls would not have seen a journalistic meaning to beat, even if their older siblings might have realized the double meaning of the title.
On another note, I still have a box of my Tiger Beat and 16 magazines. Mine are the 70s issues. I papered my room with the posters from those magazines. They were a big part of my tween life!
Beat reporting is a specialized form of journalism where a reporter covers a particular subject or “beat” on a consistent and ongoing basis. A beat can encompass a wide range of topics, such as politics, education, healthcare, technology, entertainment, sports, or any other area of interest"
Such as “tigers”, for instance.
I think the link to a musical beat is coincidental.
I can’t agree. I was a teenage consumer of the new Beatles-like music. “Beat” was everywhere in the U.S. by that point. American Bandstand* had already made “It has a good beat and it’s easy to dance to” a universal cliche. I might have been interested to learn that beat also had this second meaning in journalism, but I’d never come to that conclusion on my own.
* That name is another example of how fast the new music changed the language. American Bandstand started in 1952, when popular music had evolved only slightly since before the war. Bandstand itself is a term borrowed from the British, for gazebo-like circular stages in parks. Nobody would give a show that name in 1965. They used Hullaballoo and Shindig instead. Bandstand was such an obsolete term that not only did I not ever hear it outside that one context, but I had less a than fuzzy image of what the word meant. A music connection was obvious and that was all. American Beat I would have understood to my bones without ever giving a thought to journalism. I wound up going to Communications grad school and have spent thousands of hours perusing old newspapers and collecting books on the history of journalism, so the laugh’s on me.