Post officials also hope that by mixing the magazine's popular art and health features with such content as commentary by former CBS News "Sunday Morning" host Charles Osgood, poetry by Ray Bradbury and fiction by John Hemingway, grandson of Ernest Hemingway, the magazine could boost circulation to 500,000 in the coming years.
Mercho said some people are surprised the Post still exists. She suspects that's because the magazine is primarily available only to subscribers; fewer than 5,000 copies an issue are sold on newsstands. But she believes the relaunch will increase awareness of the magazine.
"The thing the Post has done well over the years is interpret America for America," Mercho said, echoing George Horace Lorimer, who edited the magazine for more than 30 years in the early 1900s.
"America is going through seismic changes, and we want to make sure the Post keeps up with what is going on," she said.
To complement the magazine, the Post has relaunched its Web site, offering new posts each Saturday evening - naturally - with retrospective, art, blogs, health coverage and other content. Amid the Iranian protests over a disputed presidential election, the Web site offered retrospectives on the 1979 Iranian uprisings.
The Post also has begun a yearslong effort to digitize its historical content and offer it online.
"I think the key is keeping your hand on the pulse of what Americans are interested in," SerVaas said. "We're just trying to make sure we stay on that pulse."
America's love affair with the Post and its predecessor date to 1728, when Benjamin Franklin founded the Pennsylvania Gazette in Philadelphia. New owners changed the publication's name to The Saturday Evening Post in 1821, but it remained a newspaper for decades.
"It was a lot like a weblog now," publishing its own articles and reprinting pieces from other papers, said Jeff Nilsson, who oversees the Post archives.
By the 1870s, the content had shifted toward entertainment, with fiction on the front page. The page count began creeping up as the Post became a true magazine with more advertising, human interest features, fiction, poetry and cartoons. Over the decades, the Post has printed work from such authors as C.S. Lewis, Agatha Christie, William Saroyan, Rudyard Kipling, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Lorimer, who became editor in 1899, made the cover into an artists' showcase, featuring J.C. Leyendecker, N.C. Wyeth and others. In 1916, the Post began a nearly 50-year relationship with Norman Rockwell, whose cover work became a hallmark of the magazine.
"It worked well on both ends," said Stephanie Plunkett, chief curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. "I think he understood that the Post provided an outlet that was not really available in other places.
