Magazines didn't look like that until after World War II. The first magazines, in the 1700s, looked like....books.
Magazines began as genteel soapboxes from which literate men expounded their points of view, in essay or satire. Daniel Defoe started the first English magazine, The Review, during or just after his imprisonment for criticizing the Church of England. His purpose: a statesman or man of letters offers his comment, criticism and satire to influence public taste. The audience is composed of members of the same social scene that is the subject of most of the magazine's writing. Over the course of time, readers come to depend on the regularity of its point of view. The form of the Review set the form for British journals: four small pages, dense print, few illustrations (except some engraved borders and lettering) and most of the compelling force contained in the acerbic, airborne sarcasm of the text.
Joseph Addison, a high bred moralist and social critic, followed the form in his essays for his friend Richard Steele's Tatler. When the Tatler folded Addison created The Spectator, the most famous of the early British journals. It looked just like newspapers of the time: a daily 8 x 12-1/2" one-page paper, printed on both sides. Again tiny print, again no illustrations, and maybe half a column of classified ads. Historians consider it a magazine because instead of news, it printed comment. Each issue was written by entirely by Addison or Steele; occasionally by a friend.
Addison introduced the short informal essay and the short fiction story to English literature in his magazine. The Spectator lasted three years, but hundreds of others appeared to replace it. Colonial Americans established their magazines in the same style. Since Addison, prominent literary/art personalities use magazines as one of the most accessible vehicles of their point of view. They magazines they create are usually not popular, but can be influential.
In many ways, the magazines of comment of our time e simply continuing this tradition. There have also been soapbox-magazines for typographic and design theory -- Typographica,  Push Pin Graphic -- which in their own way were as influential. The Dadaist magazines of the 1920s and 1930s combined the two forms, and ushered in machine-age modernism. It may be that the soapboxes of the Web could have an equally strong cultural influence, but it will take ten years or more to see.

1883: The birth of mass media

Until the 1880s, only the upper classes read magazines. They were small soft cover books, carrying stories that appealed to a classically-educated, elite readership that identified with Europe. The poorfolk read newspapers and weekly tabloids. Magazines were expensive, partly because printing technology limited even the most popular to a run of 100,000 copies; it simply took too long to push any more paper through a press.
Plus, until congress created second-class mail in 1879, the American Post Office only carried magazines for short distances, at high cost.
The R. Hoe and Co. rotary printing press fed three rolls of paper through the press at once, and made possible printing runs of as many copies as publishers wanted. At the same time, some publishers were trying to appeal to the new publicly-educated, industrial-urban lower-middle-class by decreasing their prices.
In 1883, the Scotland-born publisher S.S. McClure dropped the price of his general-interest McClure's magazine to only 15 cents. It was phenomenally successful. His rival publisher, Frank Munsey, lowered the price of Munsey's Magazine from 25c to 10c. Suddenly every major magazine cut its prices and upped its circulation. (With paper publications, the more copies printed, the cheaper each one cost to produce.) The average citizen had always been interested in literature and comment, but it had been too expensive before. The powerful and fashionable lost their control of the arts to public taste. Magazines ceased to be soapboxes, and became mass media instead.
S.S. McClure and Frank Munsey were the Rupert Murdoch (and, I suppose, Mort Zuckerman) of their day, but in a more primal, less sophisticated, fashion. Both were U.S.-based entrepreneurs who had grown up poor but McClure was an idealist with a seemingly heartfelt desire to reach many people. Munsey never espoused any goal except to make big money in the magazine trade (he succeeded). McClure's provided the earliest muckraking stories (Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil, for instance) and help develop documentary photography as an editorial device. Munsey's specialized in sentiment and western fiction, and was the first magazine to print female nudes (captioned as 'art') in America. Horatio Alger published his "rags-to-riches" stories in Munsey's.
Within five years after its birth, Munsey's lowest-common-denominator approach had brought it the largest circulation of any magazine in the world. Most of it still looked like a book. There were no headlines or continued stories, and pictures were confined to within columns. In the 1800s reading habits were different. You started at the very first page and read straight through, column by column, until the end. People didn't flick through or skim, and magazine layouts didn't encourage them to.
But ever increasing use of illustration and photography began to change these habits.

1890-1910 Photography changes the format

Early photographs had to be copied by hand, like this flood scene. Magazines hired photographers to shoot pictures and engravers to etch them. Every photo-technologist sought a method of printing pages directly from photographs. Some succeeded, but their methods couldn't combine photos easily with type. These methods included variations of lithography; they produced high quality reproduction plates which were pasted into books and fine art magazines.

Pictures were attractive. Even the earliest printers put individually painted illustrations into their books, like the hand-lettered medieval manuscripts. Then printers used wood blocks, etched out by artists and fit into type racks. A printer would keep a set of blocks, and might use the same 'walled city' image to represent many different towns.
In the 1800s, illustrations were engraved on copper and wood, using a number of sophisticated new techniques (or so they seemed at the time) for simulating grey tones with only black ink. Most illustrations were etched with acid or by hand from pictures drawn onto metal or wood. The process was tedious but produced elaborately textured images, more beautiful than you'd expect from the few that are reproduced today.
Sketch artists were sent to cover events like news photographers are now. They sent back romanticized drawings; this dramatic and noble Civil War battle was probably gruesome and unpicturesque in reality. A good illustrated magazine like Harper's Monthly or Leslie's carried lots of small type. It took hours to read a magazine.
Photographers and editors had to devise precedents for using photography and words together in print. The first photo-interview, between French photographer Paul Nadar and 100 year old physicist M. E. Chevreul (see right), set a precedent for photo-captions later. The muckraking photographs of Jacob Riis is Mc Clure's influenced later social realism documents of the thirties. The combination of the photos, evolving styles of journalism, and the new technology of offset printing and color process created a new language of the printed page, a language which made high-power advertising layouts possible.

The first halftones: "A Scene in Shanty-Town." The tones of photo (above) were filtered through a screen of black and white lines or dots, which gave the illusion of shades of grey. Photographs, more 'realistic' than drawings, could now be reproduced on a page with type with far greater speed and choice. Editors could select one from a number of photographs; they didn't have to trust the sketch artist's rendition. Photographs immediately dominated the news. But the halftone process itself altered the feeling of the original photographs; most people did not realize until later that the photo and printing processes distorted reality as much as the old sketch artists.