The National Police Gazette was probably the most successful of the men's magazines of the nineteeth century United States. It was founded in 1845 by journalist George Wilkes and lawyer Enoch Camp as a sort of true crime/America's Most Wanted periodical; it told the stories of crime and misbehavior with information about the alleged offenders such as names, aliases, physical descriptions. Series such as "Lives of the Felons" were common, and Wilkes even had an influence on the outcome of a large robbery of gemstones from the U.S. Patent Office in 1848 by printing his suspicions on who had done it and what their plans were. It also spawned one of the earlier anti-abortion campaigns in the U.S, against a former midwife in New York called Madame Restell, leading to a crowd of 700 protesters in front of Restell's house one day in February 1846. The magazine also included stolen property notices and advertisements for such things as patent medicines, insurance, and sporting goods. The owners claimed a circulation of 40,000 by 1850.

Camp retired in the early 1850s, and a few years later in 1856 Wilkes bought a sports magazine, Spirit of the Times, and sold The National Police Gazette to George Washington Matsell, a former New York City police chief. Under Matsell's direction, the magazine expanded -- the stories got racier and illustrations were added, drawings of female crime victims with their clothes disheveled and skirts perhaps revealing legs up to the knee (pretty much softcore pornography at the time). Matsell sold out to his engravers in 1866, and the magazine went into a slump for a decade.

In 1877, Richard Kyle Fox became publisher of the magazine after a few years selling ads and then becoming the business manager. He came up with the idea of selling cheap subscriptions to saloon keepers, barbers, hotel managers, and other places where multiple readers would encounter the magazine. He also made the Gazette stand out from its competing scandal sheets by printing it on pink paper. The illustrations started to include pictures of female burlesque and vaudeville performers in revealing poses, instead of just pictures to accompany stories. In 1879, the magazine had the U.S.'s first full sports journalism department, and started to cover prize fighting/boxing, a sport still illegal in some states, and later other sports. The International Boxing Hall of Fame says Fox did more to popularize boxing than anyone else in the nineteenth century.

The Gazette's success under Fox was huge. By 1885, its advertising rates were the same as such popular magazines as Ladies Home Journal, and Fox claimed each weekly issue was read by a million readers. Subscriptions were about a sixth of that number, but it doesn't seem too unlikely that each issue going to a barbershop or saloon was read by a large number of people. Fox tried to start other magazines, but none came close to matching the Gazette's success. But the Gazette had made Fox a millionaire. Thomas Edison was a regular reader, and later James Joyce made reference to the magazine in Ulysses.

Fox's personality always influenced what was printed. John L. Sullivan, one of the champion boxers of the 1880s, seems to have clashed with Fox, who always supported Sullivan's opponents and even published his own consolation telegram to Paddy Ryan, the heavyweight champion Sullivan defeated in 1881. Perhaps this built up interest in the same way the competition between modern wrestlers interests their fans. Fox also offered his own contests with cash prizes for the winners of bicycling races, wrestling matches, and of course prize fights.

The biggest number of readers seem to have been working-class men -- Howard Chudacoff notes the frequency of articles on middle- or upper-class men harrassing or attacking women, and the women fighting back and beating up the aggressors. Chudacoff says this humiliation of higher-status men particularly appealed to working-class readers. Other articles aimed at specific audiences were columns on well-known barbers and barkeepers (who all happened to be subscribers to the magazine) and by the early 1900s, half-tone photographs that could be framed and hung on the wall of these establishments. The ads were often aimed at bachelors, with "marriage agencies" and risque photographs being sold in the back pages. Chudacoff also points out that the crime stories often had people of other races attacking white victims (particularly women) but the sports coverage was more colorblind and gave equal respect to black and white athletes. Fox's 1902 "physical culture" contest specifically stated "No Color Line in Contest: All Athletes of Whatever Race or Occupation, Free to Enter the Lists for Diamond Medal."

By the 1920s, though, saloons were closed by Prohibition and barbershops were becoming more unisex as flappers came in to get their hair bobbed -- not a place where such a male-oriented magazine was so welcome. Fox died in 1922; his organization kept on for another decade before selling the magazine. Many other girlie mags, sports, and tabloids had sprouted as competition to the Gazette's success. By the 1950s, glossier periodicals such as Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and Playboy had stole even more of its audience. The magazine was still published throughout much of the twentieth century, with headlines such as "Exposed -- The Dope Racket That Killed Marilyn Monroe!" (1962) and "UFOs: A Message from Our Past?" (1975). 1982 is the last year I can find any reference to the magazine, but a run from 1848 to then is still quite impressive, even if the issues of the 1900s never reached the success of the 1880s and 1890s.

Sources:
Chudacoff, Howard P. The Age of the Bachelor: Creating An American Subulture. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999.
http://www.myoutbox.net/popch21.htm
http://www.worldmag.com/world/olasky/Prodigal/c11.html
http://www.ibhof.com/fox.htm
http://members.aol.com/PJaySin/book2.htm
http://www.bobfrost.com/biography/edison.html
http://www.project1947.com/shg/n1.htm
http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae's%20articles/World%20According%20to%20Mae.html