Having begun as "a literary magazine of interest to Newfoundlanders at home and abroad," Newfoundland Quarterly today calls itself "a cultural journal of Newfoundland and Labrador", and publishes articles on the province's culture and history, including biography, local history, book reviews, visual art and poetry.
Patrick O'Flaherty, writing about the early years of the Quarterly in The Rock Observed: Studies in the Literature of Newfoundland, noted that "The dominant theme in the Quarterly was local history, but there were also excursions into biography, humour, poetry, and story-telling.
"[3] In 1940 editorship was passed on to John Evans, Junior, who ran the magazine until it was briefly discontinued in December 1951.
In 1953 Newfoundland Quarterly was purchased and resurrected by Lemuel Janes, also a printer by trade.
In 1981, the magazine was sold to Memorial University of Newfoundland, its current publisher, for the sum of $1.