“Should he be smiling?” 

“Anti Rao: Muslims want a new leader to head Congress”

“Did he take the money? Yes, says a majority in an opinion poll”

These are headlines from Outlook magazine’s cover page, addressing former Prime Minister PV Narsimha Rao. By February 1996, less than six months after its launch, the weekly current affairs and news magazine Outlook had published at least three cover stories critical of the most powerful man in the country. 

In contrast, the last time PM Narendra Modi made it to the cover of Outlook was in February 2024. The cover was a montage of five cutouts of Modi in different avatars with the headline "Omnipresent, Omniscient”. To be fair, it isn’t just the PM who didn’t get the spotlight of an Outlook cover. No other India political leader has been the singular focus of the Outlook cover in over a year, barring Jawaharlal Nehru and Dr. BR Ambedkar. 

This year, Outlook will complete three decades in the industry. When it launched, the magazine’s arrival was a storm. For 18 years, the descriptor above the magazine’s masthead read “The Weekly News magazine” and largely lived up to this simple but demanding description. (Since February 10, 2014, Outlook has had a tagline instead: “Read. Think. Understand.”) Thirty years since its launch, the magazine doesn’t make any noise anymore, judging from testimonies of former as well as current reporters and editors. 

The first issue of Outlook hit the newsstands in October 1995 with the cover story “First ever opinion poll in Kashmir”. It explored what the people of the Valley wanted. Copies of the launch issue were burnt, and officials from the Prime Minister’s office called up the founding editor-in-chief, Vinod Mehta, rebuking him for publishing the cover story, which proclaimed “77 percent say no solution within Indian Constitution”.

The magazine’s last three issues included a special edition for Women’s Day – with a cover story profiling women in male-dominated fields, a cover story on “religious tourism” in the country, and another on the new world order. 

Before these, the issue titled ‘The Grid’ explored the “concept of binaries” and was “a resistance to the binaries that make us less human and more programmed creatures who must function as told in order to belong”. Before that, Outlook did a Valentine’s special on “love and loneliness” and the first issue for 2025 was an “ode to Hallyu, the Korean wave, sweeping far and deep in India”.

Newslaundry spoke to over 30 journalists associated with Outlook – including some who were part of its founding team and others who worked with the magazine until recently – to piece together the story of the magazine’s “transformation”.