Scouting Magazine
Scouting Magazine is the official magazine for adult leaders in Scouting in the United States, published by Scouting America — the organisation long known as the Boy Scouts of America — from Irving, Texas. First published on April 15, 1913, it served generations of volunteer leaders of Cub Scouts, Scouts BSA troops, and Venturing crews with news, programme ideas, outdoor skills, training guidance, and stories of Scouting in action. For most of its life it appeared five times a year in print, with a subscription included in the registration fee of volunteer leaders. Its final print edition was the May–June 2020 issue; since then its journalism has continued online at scoutingmagazine.org, where it still supports the adults who make the Scouting programme possible.
Begun in 1913, Three Years After the BSA
Scouting magazine began publication on April 15, 1913, in the first years of organised Scouting in America. The Boy Scouts of America had been incorporated on February 8, 1910, by Chicago publisher William D. Boyce, inspired by an encounter with an unknown Scout in London, and built with the help of figures such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Daniel Carter Beard, and James E. West, its first professional Chief Scout Executive. The new movement grew quickly and needed a channel to its adult volunteers. A leaders' magazine was the answer: where the youth magazine Boys' Life, begun shortly before, spoke to boys themselves, Scouting spoke to the Scoutmasters, Cub Scout leaders, and committee members responsible for delivering the programme week after week.
A Magazine for Adult Leaders
The target audience of Scouting has always been specific and practical: adult leaders of Cub Scouts, Scouts BSA, and Venturing. Its contents combined news of Scouting events with articles on the substance of the programme — service, outdoor skills and activities, advancement, camping, and youth development — and features about Scouting activities around the country. A subscription was included in the registration fee for all volunteer leaders registered with the BSA, a distribution model that put the magazine into the hands of virtually the entire volunteer corps. At its measured height, total circulation stood at 955,637 in June 2012, a figure that reflects the scale of the volunteer organisation it served: close to a million adults receiving the same programme guidance and inspiration five times a year.
Frequency, Identity and the Irving Headquarters
In its print era, Scouting was published five times a year, in combined issues dated January–February, March–April, May–June, September–October, and November–December — a rhythm that followed the Scouting year, pausing in midsummer when leaders were at camp and in December during the holidays. The magazine carried International Standard Serial Number 0036-9500 and was based in Irving, Texas, the national headquarters city of the Boy Scouts of America outside Dallas. Editorial leadership in its later print years included editorial director Michael Goldman and senior editor Aaron Derr, names familiar to leaders from the magazine's pages and its digital extensions. The magazine's identity was unmistakably institutional, in the best sense: it was not a commercial title chasing newsstand sales, but the house journal of a national youth movement.
Recurring Departments and Programme Help
Scouting's value to leaders lay in its recurring departments, a stable architecture of help and ideas that readers could rely on issue after issue. They included feature articles; Trailhead; What I've Learned, in which experienced leaders reflected on lessons from the trail and troop meeting; Advancement FAQs, answering the intricate questions that surround ranks and merit badges; Cub Scout Corner, for leaders of the youngest Scouts; Nature of Boys, on understanding young people; What Would You Do?, presenting ethical and practical dilemmas; Merit Badge Clinic; Ethics; Great Gear, reviewing equipment; Health & Wellness; Survive This!, on outdoor safety and skills; Fuel Up, on food for active programmes; Dutch Treat, celebrating Dutch-oven cooking; a Boys' Life Preview; and Cool Camp, spotlighting notable camps. Together they formed a continuing education course delivered by mail.
The Outdoor Programme at Its Core
Outdoor skills and activities sat at the centre of Scouting's coverage, reflecting the movement's founding belief that character is built outdoors. Articles taught and refreshed the competencies leaders needed to take young people camping, hiking, paddling, and climbing safely: pitching camp, cooking outdoors, first aid, Leave No Trace ethics, cold- and heat-weather preparation, and the management of risk. Gear coverage helped volunteers, who typically buy equipment on family budgets, choose durable tents, packs, and stoves. Camp features celebrated the BSA's network of local council camps and national high-adventure bases. For many leaders, especially new ones recruited when their own children joined, the magazine functioned as a patient mentor, translating the official handbooks into stories and checklists they could use on Friday night.
Service, Ethics and Youth Development
Beyond skills, Scouting addressed the purposes of the programme: service to others, ethical decision-making, and the healthy development of young people. Its ethics columns and dilemma features supported leaders teaching the Scout Oath and Law, and its health and wellness coverage spoke both to youth fitness and to the wellbeing of adult volunteers. Features profiled troops and crews doing notable service, Eagle Scout projects transforming communities, and leaders whose decades of volunteering embodied the movement's ideals. The magazine also carried organisational news — programme updates, changes in advancement requirements, national jamboree coverage, and policy explanations — performing the essential trade-press function of keeping a vast, decentralised volunteer workforce informed and aligned.
Scouting Magazine and Scout Life: Two Titles, Two Audiences
Readers outside the movement sometimes confuse Scouting with its youth counterpart, and the distinction is worth making clearly. Scout Life, known for most of its history as Boys' Life, is written for young people themselves, with fiction, comics, jokes, and youth-oriented features. Scouting was written for the adults behind the programme — the pack and troop leaders, Venturing advisors, commissioners, and committee members. The two magazines, linked by a preview department in Scouting's pages, divided labour sensibly: one inspired the Scouts; the other equipped their leaders. Understanding that division is key to understanding Scouting's practical tone, its assumption of responsibility in its readers, and its focus on how to run a meeting, a campout, or a service project well.
The End of Print in 2020 and Life Online
The last print edition of Scouting was the May–June 2020 issue, closing a 107-year run in print that had begun in 1913. The end of the print edition came amid the wider pressures on magazine publishing and, in that year, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, which suspended much in-person Scouting activity. Crucially, the magazine did not disappear: online content at scoutingmagazine.org continues to be updated, carrying forward its leaders' journalism in digital form, supplemented by the organisation's blogs and leader resources. Long-serving digital voices from the magazine, notably the Ask the Expert and Bryan on Scouting traditions associated with its online era, helped leaders through programme changes in real time. The archive of print issues, meanwhile, remains a rich record of American Scouting, preserved in collections including university and museum holdings and digital archives.
A Record of American Volunteerism
Viewed as a whole, Scouting magazine is also a historical source of unusual depth. Across more than a century it recorded how a national youth movement trained its volunteers, celebrated its camps and jamborees, absorbed social change — including the opening of its programmes to girls and young women in Cub Scouting and Scouts BSA in the late 2010s, and the organisation's later adoption of the name Scouting America — and understood its mission in each era. Historians of youth organisations, outdoor education, and American volunteerism can trace those shifts through its departments and covers. Few membership magazines served so large a volunteer audience for so long, and fewer still combined practical instruction with the ideals of a movement as thoroughly as Scouting did.
Scouting Magazine Today
Today Scouting Magazine lives on as a digital publication for adult leaders, published by Scouting America from Irving, Texas, at scoutingmagazine.org. Its print run, from April 15, 1913, to May–June 2020, belongs to history, written throughout in past expectation that leaders would keep arriving to be helped — and they do, now on screens rather than by mail. The mission is unchanged from the one that created it three years after the BSA's founding: to give the volunteers who lead Cub Scouts, Scouts BSA troops, and Venturing crews the news, skills, ideas, and encouragement they need. In that sense Scouting remains what it was designed to be in 1913 — the leaders' magazine of American Scouting.
