Discover (magazine)

Discover

January 2005 issue of Discover
Editor	Corey S. Powell
Categories	Science
Frequency	10 per year
Total circulation (December 2012)	582,276
First issue	1980
Company	Kalmbach Publishing
Country	United States
Based in	Waukesha, Wisconsin
Language	English
Website	discovermagazine.com
ISSN	0274-7529

Discover is an American general audience science magazine launched in October 1980 by Time Inc. It has been owned by Kalmbach Publishing since 2010.

Discover was created primarily through the efforts of Time magazine editor Leon Jaroff. He noticed that magazine sales jumped every time the cover featured a science topic. Jaroff interpreted this as a considerable public interest in science, and in 1971, he began agitating for the creation of a science-oriented magazine. This was difficult, as a former colleague noted, because "Selling science to people who graduated to be managers was very difficult".

Jaroff's persistence finally paid off, and Discover magazine published its first edition in 1980.Discover was originally launched into a burgeoning market for science magazines aimed at educated non-professionals, intended to be easier to read than Scientific American but more detailed and science-oriented than Popular Science. Shortly after its launch, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) launched a similar magazine called Science 80 (not to be confused with its flagship academic journal), and both Science News and Science Digest changed their formats to follow the new trend.

During this period, Discover featured fairly in-depth science reporting on "hard science" and avoided fringe topics like extraterrestrial intelligence. Most issues contained an essay by a well-known scientist—such as Stephen Jay Gould, Jared Diamond, and Stephen Hawking. Another common article was a biography, often linked with mentions of other scientists working in the field. The "Skeptical Eye" column sought to uncover pop-science scams, and was the medium where James Randi released the results of Project Alpha. Jaroff said that it was the most-read section at its launch.