About Fitness Magazine

Fitness Magazine

Fitness was an American women's magazine about health, exercise and nutrition, published in New York City from 1992 until its final print issue in April 2015. Launched in 1992, it spent its first years under Bertelsmann's Gruner + Jahr before the Meredith Corporation acquired it in 2005. Under Meredith it reached a circulation of about 1.5 million, described itself as a guide to a healthy mind, body and spirit, and ended its print life in 2015 when Meredith bought the rival title Shape and merged Fitness into it, keeping the Fitness website alive.

The magazine's formal name was simply Fitness, and it should not be confused with men's or bodybuilding titles of similar name. Its readers were women of different ages and sizes whom it aimed to help reach practical, everyday health goals, and its publisher said it wanted to change the conversation about women's bodies from "skinny" to "healthy" — a positioning that shaped its covers, its service journalism and its final decade.

Launch in 1992

Fitness was launched in 1992, entering a women's health market that was expanding as aerobics, running and gym training became mainstream activities for American women. The magazine's founding publisher was Gruner + Jahr, the magazine arm of the German media group Bertelsmann, which operated a portfolio of American consumer titles from New York. The new title's remit, from the start, was the practical side of women's wellbeing: exercise instruction, nutrition guidance and health reporting presented for general readers rather than athletes.

That remit gave Fitness a clear identity among women's magazines. Where fashion titles treated exercise as an occasional beauty topic, Fitness made training and healthy eating its central subject, and built its issues around instruction readers could act on at home, in a gym or in the kitchen.

Acquisition by Meredith in 2005

In 2005 the Meredith Corporation acquired Fitness from Gruner + Jahr. Meredith, based in Des Moines, Iowa, but with its magazine editorial operations in New York, was the publisher of Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies' Home Journal and Family Circle, and the purchase added a dedicated health title to its women's lifestyle group. The same year, Fitness launched its web presence at fitnessmagazine.com, giving readers online fitness and health resources alongside the monthly editorial content — an early acknowledgement that workout and nutrition advice was migrating to searchable digital formats.

Within Meredith, Fitness sat alongside the company's other service magazines for women, and its editors moved between those titles. Its New York offices were at 375 Lexington Avenue, and it was published, in its later Meredith years, ten or eleven times a year; Meredith's own 2008 description listed eleven issues a year, a circulation of 1.5 million and a total audience of 6.4 million readers.

Editorial Approach

Fitness described its editorial mix as beauty, wellness and active lifestyle coverage in the service of a healthy mind, body and spirit. Issues combined workout programmes and exercise instruction with nutrition features, healthy recipes, health news and beauty coverage connected to an active life. The how-to character of the magazine was its signature: it was recognised in minOnline's Editorial and Design Awards both as "Most Improved Publication" and for the best "How-To/Instructional" feature, awards that reflected the instructional core of its pages.

The "mind, body and spirit" formula also set the tone of its features. Rather than presenting fitness as punishment or as a route to a single ideal body type, the magazine addressed women of every age and size, in its publisher's words, and framed exercise and eating as parts of general wellbeing. Its January 2015 print cover featured the singer and actress Demi Lovato, an example of the celebrity-fronted approach of its final Meredith years.

Betty Wong's Editorship

Betty Wong became editor-in-chief in September 2008, succeeding Denise Brodey. Meredith announced the appointment on September 26, 2008, noting that Wong joined from Family Circle, where she had been executive editor since 2005, and that she had previously been health director at Ladies' Home Journal. Her earlier career included senior roles at Working Mother, Parents, Parents Baby, American Baby, Redbook and McCall's, and she was a graduate of Cornell University. She reported to Sally Lee, Meredith's senior vice president and New York editorial director.

Wong introduced several changes to the magazine, creating new columns and features, and spoke on taking the job of keeping Fitness a leading voice for women seeking real-life health, fitness and wellness solutions. Under her editorship the magazine also developed a larger social media presence and a refreshed look, and it recruited senior staff from rival titles, including beauty director Eleanor Langston from Condé Nast's Self in December 2009.

Performance During the Magazine Downturn

The first years of Wong's tenure coincided with a severe advertising recession for American magazines, which makes the title's recorded performance notable. In 2009, according to Publishers Information Bureau figures, Fitness increased its advertising pages by 18.4 percent at a time when magazine publishers' counts overall were down 27.9 percent across the industry. Meredith as a group performed strongly that year — several of its women's titles were among the few American magazines to gain advertising pages in December 2009 — and Fitness shared in that showing.

Circulation held at a substantial level into the new decade: an audited total of 1,501,244 was recorded for 2011, and Meredith continued to describe the title as reaching an audience of millions of readers across print and digital. On those measures Fitness remained one of the leading American women's health titles through the early 2010s.

The Shape Acquisition and the End of Print

The end came through consolidation rather than collapse. On January 28, 2015, Meredith announced that it would acquire Shape magazine from American Media, Inc., and that Fitness would be merged into Shape beginning with the May 2015 issue. Fitness subscribers would receive Shape instead, and the combined Shape would have a rate base of 2.5 million, an increase of 60 percent over Shape's existing 1.6 million. The final print issue of Fitness was dated April 2015.

Meredith's president of the National Media Group, Tom Harty, presented the deal as establishing Meredith as the leader in the women's active lifestyle category and increasing its reach among millennial women to more than 23 million. The acquisition also brought the Natural Health and Fit Pregnancy brands from American Media. David Zinczenko's Galvanized company, which had overseen Shape's editorial direction at American Media, continued to work on the combined title during the transition.

Digital Afterlife

Print ended, but the brand did not. Meredith kept the Fitness website operating after the merger, and the Fitness and Shape sites continued as separate digital destinations, with a combined reach reported at almost seven million unduplicated monthly visitors at the time of the deal. The arrangement was typical of mid-2010s magazine consolidation: the print subscription list was folded into the stronger surviving title, while the discontinued brand's name, archive and search traffic were retained online.

The corporate owner itself later changed around the brand. Meredith was subsequently combined with Dotdash, and the publisher of record for Fitness became Dotdash Meredith, now People Inc., under which the Fitness name remains part of the company's health portfolio.

Legacy

Fitness magazine's twenty-three years in print traced the mainstreaming of women's exercise in the United States: launched in 1992, when dedicated women's health titles were still a young category, it grew under Gruner + Jahr and then Meredith into a 1.5-million-circulation monthly, weathered the 2009 advertising collapse with gains few titles matched, and was ultimately retired not because its subject had faded but because its publisher chose to concentrate the category in a single larger brand, Shape. Its "mind, body and spirit" framing, its instructional emphasis and its insistence on health over thinness made it a representative title of its era in American women's service publishing.