Yankee Magazine Backgrounder

Backgrounder and Quick Facts

2015 marks Yankee’s 80th year as New England’s magazine, fulfilling founder Robb Sagendorph’s gut feeling that the six-state region should have a magazine of its own, “for Yankee readers, by Yankee writers, and about Yankeedom.” During this long history, Yankee has remained true to Robb’s mission: “Yankee’s destiny is the expression and perhaps indirectly the preservation of that great culture in which every Yank was born and by which every Yank must live.”

Yankee Magazine was founded in 1935 and is based in Dublin, New Hampshire. It is the only magazine devoted to New England through its coverage of travel, home, food, and features. With a paid circulation of approximately 300,000 and a total audience of nearly 2 million, it is published by Yankee Publishing Incorporated (YPI), a family-owned and independent magazine publisher. YPI also publishes the nation’s oldest continuously produced periodical, The Old Farmer’s Almanac. More information about Yankee: New England’s Magazine is available at: NewEngland.com/Yankee-Magazine

Editorial Coverage

Features: Yankee features the work of inspired writers and photographers with many different stories to tell. One overarching theme remains constant: New England is a singular place, unlike anywhere on earth. Journalistic essays tie together past, present, and future New England while celebrating its culture, artistry, landscape, people, and style. Yankee also provides entertaining and useful service content that’s easy to read, visual, and full of tips and advice on ways to enjoy New England.

Travel: Travel coverage has been a cornerstone of Yankee Magazine’s content since its inception, mostly due to New England’s geographical, seasonal, and cultural appeal. As a region, New England is a compact yet diverse travel destination. Within one day and a short drive, visitors can experience rugged, mountainous terrain, ocean views, vibrant cultural urban areas, and small-town living. New England offers more variety in a concentrated area than anywhere else in the United States.

With New England’s four distinct seasons, visitors schedule their travel to coincide with their favorite time of year, and locals maintain a rotating assortment of outdoor gear to embrace the changing climate. New England is world-renowned for its spectacular fall foliage display. In late September through October, visitors chase color in the attempt to view peak foliage. They travel back roads by car or bike, or hike under the canopy of blazing red foliage mingling with green, yellow, and orange. Equally enticing are winter’s snow-capped mountains for skiers and riders, the rebirth of lush greenery each spring, and the region’s lakes and ocean beaches during the summer months. New Englanders celebrate each season with time-honored rituals, including picking apples on a crisp fall day, going for a horse-drawn sleigh ride across freshly fallen snow, collecting sap from maple trees in the spring to make pure maple syrup, whitewater rafting Maine’s raging rivers, and building sand castles before the tide comes in on a summer’s afternoon.

Food: Every issue of Yankee celebrates New England cooking and the myriad ingredients, traditions, and talent the area offers. The range of recipes is eclectic, from iconic regional foods — including clam chowder, oyster stew, clam cakes, Parker House rolls, Boston baked beans, johnnycakes, Grape-Nut pudding, apple pies, and whoopee pies — to contemporary and original twists  on classics. Every recipe and every food story takes into consideration our unique seasons, relying on locally grown, seasonal produce, meats, and seafood; the people who grow it, raise it, or catch it; and a talented roster of chefs who cook with these ingredients.

Home & Garden: Yankee showcases interesting New England homes — from a converted barn in Vermont to a restored brownstone in Boston — and the homeowners who live there. Articles offer ideas that are both aspirational and inspirational. Yankee Magazine also features specialty gardeners whose passions range from roses to peonies.

Noteworthy Writers: Writers as diverse as Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Ernest Hebert, John Updike, Pearl Buck, and Stephen King have contributed poems, stories, and nonfiction to the pages of Yankee. Perhaps more important, over the years Yankee has launched the careers of many talented but previously unknown writers and photographers. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Robert Tristram Coffin, Gladys Hasty Carroll, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy have all written for Yankee Magazine. To read some of Yankee’s most popular classic stories, visit the Yankee Magazine Archive.

Noteworthy Painters and Photographers: Until recently, most of Yankee’s covers featured a work of fine art. New Hampshire’s Maxfield Parrish supplied the cover art for the fourth issue of the magazine. Over the years the magazine has featured the paintings of Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Eric Sloane, and many other well-known painters. Beatrix Sagendorph, an accomplished artist and Robb’s wife, provided illustrations for hundreds of Yankee covers from the 1930s through the 1960s. During the late 1990s through 2001, most cover images still were paintings, while our designers were beginning to use photography more often.

Foliage:Yankee’s foliage page attracts autumn enthusiasts with an updatable color map and offers foliage status reports, a blog, a forum, podcasts, photo contests, and recommended drives. This season-specific site provides travel tools and expert advice to help readers and Web visitors plan their fall foliage vacations. Information is extensive and also includes the dos and don’ts of fall travel, plus photo tips, facts, coloring pages, hotline numbers, and more. YankeeFoliage.com is the source for comprehensive fall travel planning, powered by 80 years of expert knowledge about New England from the editors of Yankee Magazine.