There were already plenty of news publications on the market when Thomas J.C. Martyn, a former foreign editor at TIME magazine, came up with the idea of a weekly news format. But who better than a news magazine worker to see the problem with that: there were in fact too many. What was needed was a publication that would take the news of the week, digest and analyze them. That was the concept behind the hyphenated early version of News-Week.

On this day, February 17, 1933, the first News-Week issue came out on the newsstands. Far from the colorful artwork present on the covers today, it featured only seven black-and-white photographs from the week’s news on the cover. It cost 10 cents a copy, $4 for a year, and had a circulation of 50,000.

At its height, the later slightly-renamed Newsweek went out every week to hundreds of thousands of homes nationwide, plus international editions, with interviews and columns about art and entertainment luminaries. In 1980 alone, the magazine scored an interview with John Lennon, and a guest column by sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov. The fortunes of Newsweek turned, as it did for many publications, with the mass adoption of the Internet, and its owners at the Washington Post Co. sold it to the website Daily Beast in 2010. The price was $1.