PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Mozart began composing when he was 5 years old. Orson Welles had written, staged, and directed his first play by the time he was 5. And though we hesitate to associate ourselves with such daunting precocity, we can't help but feel a bit of the prodigy's pride as we celebrate Entertainment Weekly's five years of publication. After all, since our first issue appeared on newsstands on Feb. 12, 1990 (k.d. lang was our first cover subject), we have created 264 painstakingly produced issues, won countless honors and citations for our innovative design and photography, been named three times as a finalist for the prestigious National Magazine Awards, and seen our circulation figures rise from 256,000 to more than 1,300,000 today. Our Entertainment Weekly family has grown in other ways as well. During the magazine's life span, more than 50 children (and two grandchildren) have been born to our staffers-from my son, Jimmy, who was born two months after our first issue was published, to marketing manager Liz Coleman's daughter, Abigail Lee, who arrived less than two months ago. Another five are on the way. In our early years, we could have been accused (only semijokingly) of simply trying to expand our subscriber base. But today, our burgeoning family is just a metaphor for the promise of things to come, in our quinquennial year and beyond. After all, Picasso's talent for drawing didn't surface until he was 10.