Soap Opera Digest
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 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 five 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.
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) has been held every year since 1977.
This 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.
[edit] Examples of Soap Speak: Acronyms
- All My Children - AMC
- Another World - AW
- As the World Turns - ATWT
- The Bold and the Beautiful - B&B
- Days of our Lives - DAYS (while DOOL would be the correct acronym, DAYS is used in the magazine)
- The Edge of Night - EON
- General Hospital - GH
- Guiding Light - GL
- Love of Life - LOL
- One Life to Live - OLTL
- Port Charles - PC
- Ryan's Hope - RH
- Santa Barbara - SB
- Search for Tomorrow - SFT
- Sunset Beach - BEACH
- The Young and the Restless - Y&R
Series like Capitol, Loving, The Doctors, Somerset and Passions kept their names as they were shorter.
