Augusta Magazine
Augusta Magazine is a city magazine serving Augusta, Georgia, and the wider Central Savannah River Area, including Aiken, South Carolina, across the river. Published from offices on Broad Street in downtown Augusta, it offers readers a positive, entertaining and enlightening look at the people, places and events of the metro Augusta area. The magazine is known for its annual franchises — the Best of Augusta awards, voted by readers; a January bridal issue; a Celebrate the Arts issue each August and September; and its Masters Tournament guide, distributed in tens of thousands of copies during Augusta's famous golf week. Media directory listings have described the title as celebrating its fortieth year and setting the standard as the market leader in city magazines locally.
Overview and Market Position
Augusta Magazine presents itself as the city magazine of record for metro Augusta. Its advertising materials describe award-winning design, provocative editorial and high-quality photography giving the magazine an upscale image that engages affluent and educated readers in the area. The magazine's office address is 643 Broad Street in downtown Augusta, the city's historic main street, and its staff has included an art director, a circulation manager, assistant and associate editors and a team of advertising executives — the structure of an established local publishing business. A one-year print subscription, eight issues, has been offered at $24, and current issues are sold through a network of local shops whose locations the magazine lists for readers.
Editorial Departments
The magazine's website organises its content into departments that map the city magazine formula onto Augusta. Features and the Palate food section sit alongside At Home coverage, music writing in the Music Row department, columns and the Southern Sensibility department, photo essays in Snapshots, and recurring departments such as Mezzanine, Parting Shot and the Publisher's Note. Sections devoted to Aiken Homes and Lifestyle and Columbia County Living extend the magazine's reach beyond Richmond County into the South Carolina city of Aiken and the suburban Columbia County communities that form much of the metro area's growth. Guides, archives and special advertising sections round out the mix, together with a podcast, Augusta Magazine's Front Porch, whose episodes feature conversations with local figures from weathercasters to bakers and sports-team owners.
Best of Augusta
The magazine's best-known franchise is Best of Augusta. Each October, the magazine devotes its issue to the annual Best of Augusta Awards, honouring the area's best in dining, entertainment and much more, all voted by readers. Voting opens in the spring — in 2020, publisher Ashlee Duren recorded that voting began in April and ended in late June, with winners named in the October issue — and the magazine traditionally celebrates the winners at an annual event, although the celebration was suspended in 2020 under pandemic restrictions on large gatherings. Readers are invited each year to tell the magazine their favourite things about Augusta: the people, places, foods, hang-outs and secret pleasures that make the city unique. The ballot has run annually for decades' worth of reader surveys, including the Best of Augusta 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions.
The Masters and the Tournament Guide
Augusta is known worldwide for the Masters Tournament, played each spring at Augusta National Golf Club, and the magazine serves the tournament audience directly. Its Masters Tournament Guide is a separate publication designed for the event: roughly 50,000 copies are distributed at private airports, welcome centres throughout Georgia, in Augusta Magazine itself, in all Masters Housing Bureau rental homes, in major hotels and in VIP tents and houses throughout Masters week. The magazine describes the guide as a truly international publication — a fair description of a title handed to visitors who arrive from around the world for one week a year. Tournament coverage gives Augusta Magazine a second, global readership layered over its local base, and anchors its publishing calendar: the year's rhythm builds toward April.
Arts and the Annual Calendar
The magazine's year is structured by special issues. January brings the Bridal Issue, presenting everything needed to plan a wedding Augusta style, with submissions invited from couples married in the preceding year. The August/September issue is dedicated to Celebrate the Arts, the area's vibrant local arts scene, and includes the annual Arts Calendar — a comprehensive listing of visual and performing arts and the biggest fundraising events of the year — together with the annual Arts Council Awards winners. October is Best of Augusta. The magazine also partners with the Augusta Metro Chamber of Commerce on its directory and lifestyle guide, and with the Chamber on the Top 10 in 10 Young Professionals to Watch awards, which the magazine has helped present. This calendar of franchises makes the magazine a fixture in the civic as well as the cultural life of the area.
Food and Local Life
Food coverage runs through the Palate department and features such as the magazine's restaurant reporting, which follows Augusta's dining scene from long-standing institutions to new arrivals — one recent feature told how a military couple stationed at Fort Gordon in 2019, missing the Texas cooking of a previous posting, opened a Tex-Mex restaurant to bring those flavours to Augusta. Features range across the community: a multi-instrumentalist local musician profiled under the headline "Between the Strings"; an artist and designer who carried a sketchpad everywhere from childhood; the restoration of stained-glass windows that had carried the prayers of generations. Publisher's notes keep a conversational thread with readers, reflecting on school reopenings, community resilience and the city's emergence from difficult years.
The City and Region It Serves
Augusta sits on the Savannah River at the Fall Line, a historic city whose identity joins riverfront history, medical and military economies — the magazine's own food features reflect the flow of military families posted to the area's Fort Gordon — and the annual global spotlight of the Masters. The metro area the magazine serves crosses state lines: Aiken, South Carolina, with its own equestrian and winter-colony heritage, and Columbia County's suburbs are part of its coverage map, acknowledged in its department structure. Augusta Magazine's role is to give this two-state river region a single glossy portrait of itself.
Digital Presence and Podcast
The magazine publishes online at augustamagazine.com, where its features, departments, guides and award ballots appear, and where readers vote in the Best of Augusta survey, submit weddings for the bridal issue and find distribution locations. Its Front Porch podcast extends the magazine into audio, with the publisher interviewing local personalities in episodes that have featured a television weathercaster, the owner of the Georgia Soul basketball team and a leading local real estate agent. An e-newsletter and social channels complete the digital operation of a magazine whose print franchises — Best of Augusta, the bridal issue, the arts calendar and the tournament guide — remain its foundation.
Longevity and Standing
Directory descriptions of the Augusta Magazine group describe the title as celebrating its fortieth year as the market leader in local city magazines, with sister publications following the standard it set. Four decades in a mid-sized market is a substantial run for a city magazine, and Augusta Magazine's durability rests on the franchises documented in its own pages: reader-voted awards, a bridal annual, an arts calendar, a chamber partnership and a tournament guide distributed in the tens of thousands. Together they make the magazine one of the institutions through which Augusta presents itself — to its own residents each month, and to the world each April.
