Ziff Davis
Ziff Davis Inc. (ZD) is an American magazine publisher, and was founded in
1927 in
Chicago by
William B. Ziff, Sr. and
Bernard G. Davis. Throughout most of its history, it was notable as the publisher of hobbyist magazines, often ones devoted to expensive, advertiser-rich hobbies such as cars, photography, and electronics. Its publication of
Popular Electronics and, more briefly,
Electronics World led more or less directly to its interest in home-computer magazines.
In
1938, Ziff Davis acquired the
science fiction magazine,
Amazing Stories, and soon added a new companion,
Fantastic Adventures;
FA was folded by merger with the newer
Fantastic, founded in 1952 initially to great success, in 1954. ZD published a number of other
pulp magazines and, later, digest-sized fiction magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, and continued to publish
Amazing and
Fantastic till
1965.
In
1958, B.G. Davis left the company to found
Davis Publications, which eventually offered a similar mix of magazines, anchored by the purchase of
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine from Mercury Press- This title remained a Davis publication until the demise of that company and the sale, or closure, of their remaining properties in the 1990s.
In 1976, Ziff Davis expanded into broadcasting, following an acquisition of television stations originally owned by greeting card company
Rust Craft. Ziff Davis's stations included
WROC-TV in
Rochester, New York,
WEYI-TV in
Saginaw, Michigan,
WSTV-TV in
Steubenville, Ohio,
WRCB-TV in
Chattanooga, Tennessee and
WJKS-TV in
Jacksonville, Florida. These stations would be sold off to other owners (mainly "Television Station Partners") by the mid-1980s.
Ziff Davis is a major player in the field of computer and internet related publishing. In
1982 it acquired
PC Magazine. In
1989 the company launched the
ZDNet site. In
1995 it launched the magazine
Yahoo! Internet Life, initially as ZD Internet Life. The magazine was meant to accompany and complement the site
Yahoo!.
In
2001 Ziff Davis Media Inc. reached an agreement with
CNET Networks Inc. and ZDNet to regain the URLs lost in the
2000 sale of Ziff Davis Inc, to
SoftBank. The
Ziff Davis Media Inc. partnership of
Willis Stein & Partners and
James Dunning (former Ziff Davis CEO, chairman, and president) gained the online content licensing rights to 11 publications, including PC Magazine,
CIO Insight and
eWEEK.
From this point on the paths Ziff Davis Inc. and the new publishing company
Ziff Davis Media Inc. parted. Ziff Davis Inc. now exists under the name
ZDNet.
Ziff Davis publishes many of North America's most popular videogaming magazines and websites, grouping them as the
1UP Network, including:
*
Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM)
*
Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine (OPM)
*
Computer Gaming World (CGW)
*
1UP.com*
FileFront*
GameVideos.com*
GameTab.com*
GameNOW (also known as EGM2 and Expert Gamer)
*
GMR*
Xbox Nation
