Graham intended his new magazine to be popular amongst both men and women, containing fashion, photographs, music, short stories and critical reviews. He also hoped to reach out to both mainstream audiences and those with more refined tastes. Graham was not a writer himself, other than a section at the back of each issue called "Graham's Small Talk", and so relied heavily on contributors. To that end, Graham made sure it was popular amongst writers as a well-paying journal; the $5 standard become known as a "Graham page". Other journals at the time were paying the standard rate of $1 per page. His attempt at attracting the best contributors worked: Contributors to the magazine included William Cullen Bryant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Fitz-Greene Halleck, George D. Prentice, Alice, Horace Binney Wallace, and Phoebe Cary. Not all writers, however, were paid. A notice in the May 1841 issue read: