Southern Progress Corporation

Southern Progress Corporation

Type	Subsidiary of Time Inc.
Industry	Periodicals
Founded	1886
Headquarters	Birmingham, Alabama, USA
Key people	Bill McDougald, Vice-President, Southern Progress Homes Group
Products	Magazines, Books, and Websites
Revenue	$1.00 billion USD (2008)
Number of employees	1,100 (2007)
Parent	Time Inc.
Website	http://www.timeinc.com/brands/living.php

Southern Progress Corporation, based in Birmingham, Alabama, is a publisher of lifestyle magazines and books. The company publishes such magazines as Southern Living, Cooking Light, Health, Coastal Living and Sunset. At the end of 2012, its magazines have a combined readership of about 8 million. The company employs more than 700 people at headquarters in Birmingham, Alabama.

The origins of Southern Progress trace to 1886, with the Progressive Farmer, a weekly newsletter, founded by Civil War veteran Leonidas LaFayette Polk in North Carolina in 1886. The newsletter was intended to bring the latest information on crop and livestock production to the newly united nation's agrarian economy in the Southeast. After Polk died suddenly in 1892, Clarence H. Poe from Raleigh, NC took over as editor (in 1899), and in 1903, he and 3 partners purchased the publication, taking it from a newspaper to a magazine with 36,000 subscribers. Together they organized the Agricultural Publishing Company, the name of which was later changed to the Progressive Farmer Company. One of the most notable achievements of the Progressive Farmer magazine was its continual crusade and endorsement during the early twentieth century of the land grant college subsidies provided to Agricultural and Mechanical colleges across the United States.

The magazine broadened its reach beyond the Southeast by merging its Raleigh, North Carolina operation with the Southern Farm Gazette newspaper published in Starkville, Mississippi. This was a major innovation in publishing at the time. Merging these two farm publications established the first publication in history to publish regional editorial specific to its circulation areas. This merger of the Progressive Farmer and the Southern Farm Gazette resulted in the need to have a production and printing facility that would be a one-day train trip to both of the editorial offices in Starkville, Mississippi and Raleigh, North Carolina for receiving the typewritten feature stories for publication. It was decided in 1911 to establish a central office in Birmingham, Alabama, while Clarence Poe and his partners remained in Raleigh, NC and directed company operations from there.

The Progressive Farmer Company continued to publish across the Southeastern and Mid-south regions soon expanding successfully into Texas and the Southwest. Serving farm information needs, publishing through two world wars, crusading for important rural farm issues such as rural electrification, soil conservation, rural education and modern agricultural technology, the magazine soared to a circulation high of 1.3 million by the 1960s.