Wiktionary
n. a magazine dedicated to the dissemination of information related to a particular industry
WordNet
n. a magazine published for and read by members of a particular trade group
Wikipedia
A trade magazine, also called a trade journal or professional magazine (and colloquially or disparagingly a trade rag), is a magazine whose target audience is people who work in a particular trade or industry. Its main goals are to keep members of the industry abreast of new developments (in which role it functions similarly to how academic journals, scientific journals, medical journals, and engineering journals serve their audiences) and to serve targeted advertising to them, which earns a profit for the publication and sales for the advertisers while also providing sales engineering–type advice to the readers, helping them with industrial purchasing and investment decisions. The collective term for this area of publishing is the trade press (although that term sometimes also refers to publishers of trade paperbacks).
Trade magazines typically contain advertising content centered on the industry in question with little if any general-audience advertising. They also generally contain industry-specific job notices, a highly pertinent aspect to many readers.
For the print medium, most trade magazines operate on a type of subscription business model known as controlled circulation, in which the print subscription is free but is restricted only to subscribers who are what salespeople refer to as qualified leads. Because the print medium costs substantial amounts of money (for printing and postage), the publishers cannot afford to hand out free copies to everyone who requests one (unqualified leads); instead, they operate under controlled circulation, deciding who may receive free subscriptions based on each person's qualification as a member of the trade (and likelihood of buying, for example, likelihood of having corporate purchasing authority, as determined from job title). This allows a high level of certainty that advertisements will be received by the advertiser's target audience, and it avoids wasted printing and distribution expenses.
Usage examples of "trade magazine".
Two days ago, I was a junior editor with a trade magazine publisher and dying of boredom.
Thomas reports that most of his time nowadays is taken up with editing an engineering magazine for power plants and utilities, as well as doubling as editor for a trade magazine for machine shops.
I was reading in a trade magazine that a man in Germany has some of good quality.
There's a trade magazine called Publishers Weekly, and they get galley copies of books months before publication.
Neither Harkavay nor Booker had got the whole story - for one thing, Thad was adamant about not giving that smarmy little prick Frederick Clawson so much as a mention - but it was still good enough to rate a wider circulation it than either the AP wire service or the book-publishing industry's trade magazine could give.
He reached for a copy of the trade magazine that was out and open on her desk and started to read the latest section that Patty had highlighted.
Chiclitz remembered vaguely from a trade magazine that the government was always in the market for these.
I had a thirty-five-hundred-dollar-a-year job in Dearborn editing a furniture trade magazine, and I was drafted into the Signal Corps and sent to write training films.