Soap Opera Digest

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Soap Opera Digest
February 1977 issue of Soap Opera Digest, featuring Paul Gleason of All My Children
Editor in Chief	Lynn Leahey
Staff writers	Carolyn Hinsey Jennifer Lenhart
Categories	Entertainment
Frequency	Weekly
First issue	November 1975
Company	Source Interlink Media
Country	United States
Language	English
Website	www.SoapOperaDigest.com

Soap Opera Digest is a magazine chronicling the stories airing on American soap operas and the off-screen lives of the actors appearing on them. The magazine first debuted in November 1975, with actors John Aniston, Ron Tomme, Audrey Peters, Birgitta Tolksdorf, Jerry Lacy and Tudi Wiggins of Love of Life gracing the cover. Currently, the magazine boasts a subscription base of 500,000, as well as more than one million more issues purchased at newsstands and supermarkets each week. In the early 1990s, the magazine had up to 1.4 million subscribers.

The magazine, originally published monthly, moved to biweekly issues in 1979, and started publishing weekly in 1997. The current editor-in-chief is Lynn Leahey. Columnist Carolyn Hinsey reviews current series and soap-related events in her regular feature, "It's Only My Opinion."

The magazine holds an awards show annually to promote excellence in the genre, as decided by the fans who read the magazine. The Soap Opera Digest Awards (formerly the Soapies) have been held every year since 1977, and were last televised in 2000. The Soapy Award was originally designed by Janis Rogak, the magazine's then-Art Director.

The magazine coined "soap speak," in which show names are abbreviated to save space. Nowadays, with the advent of chat rooms and message boards, these shortened names for the shows have become very popular, and a use has been made of them outside of the magazine, and shortened acroynms have even spread beyond daytime television unofficially to primetime programs.