Frontline was meant to be a newspaper. Its founders launched it in December 1984, then fell out over what the publication should be, and sold it to PL Investments Ltd, which passed it to The Hindu Group. It became the group's fortnightly magazine, published from Chennai by a company whose flagship daily began as a weekly in September 1878 and whose ownership has rested with the descendants of Kasturi Ranga Iyengar since he acquired it in 1905. N. Ram edited Frontline and Sportstar from 1991 to 2003 before becoming editor-in-chief of The Hindu. R. Vijaya Sankar served as the magazine's long-standing editor until retiring in May 2022, and Vaishna Roy now edits it. The website was redesigned and relaunched on 24 March 2023 by an outside design consultancy. ISSN 0970-1710. Today, Frontline is mainly focused on long-form Indian politics and economy, world affairs, social issues and caste, environment, science and health, arts, literature and cinema, with cover stories and columns from named contributors, from their base in Chennai, India. One interesting fact: Its editorial positions cost it money. A founding editor's public opposition to disinvestment and foreign investment, described as sovereignty-eroding, is cited as having limited the magazine's access to government and corporate advertising as rivals aligned with liberalisation attracted the spending instead.