2005 Annual Report - Magazine Content Analysis

The story of news magazine content in 2004 is a story of shifting and positioning, and of new players filling what many consider a void left by the big two, Time and Newsweek.
The trend toward a softer, broader content mix at Time and Newsweek (noted in last year's report), continued in 2004, even with a war and a hard-fought presidential election campaign. U.S. News and World Report, meanwhile, continued to position itself as the more conventional "hard-news" alternative inside the traditional news weekly format. As we will see in the section on economics, though, the success of that approach is uncertain.

What stood out in 2004 was that other players in the news magazine sector, not normally viewed as news weeklies, took a more significant role in breaking news, in identifying trends, in doing major investigative work and in fulfilling the role that Time and Newsweek have historically played in American political culture. It is a role that those two may, to a degree, have given up.

Magazines that until recently were not looked to for hard news - the New Yorker, the Atlantic and even GQ - have done two things to alter the news magazine market and readers' expectations. They have suggested that news doesn't belong to the news weeklies alone, and they have shown that news doesn't have to be covered in the way the traditional news weeklies do it.

On its face, the shifts within the news genre can be seen in things like Seymour Hersh's topical investigative pieces on Iraq in the New Yorker, in the rapid growth in the U.S. of The Economist and in the political columns of Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair's editor, Graydon Carter, also personally waded into politics in 2004 with his book "What We've Lost," a sharp critique of the Bush administration.

To get a more complete sense of how the content of some of these magazines has changed, we decided to examine more closely two of the most successful non-traditional magazines, judging from circulation numbers: The New Yorker and The Economist.
There are large differences between the two, of course. The New Yorker, with a literary bent - short stories and poetry appear in its pages - and heavy cultural content, serves as a kind of supplement to traditional news coverage. The Economist, based in London, is closer to a traditional survey of the week's news, though with an emphasis on business and financial news. But over the last 15 years, both have reworked their content in different ways to recast themselves more along the lines of American news magazines. The New Yorker has become more topical. The Economist has become more American in focus.

At the same time, the two magazines share some characteristics. Pictures appear, but are not central to coverage. A premium is placed on writing, though the Economist has a uniform authorial voice and no bylines, while The New Yorker allows each writer his or her own style and has bylines even on its Talk of the Town shorts. And while the main issue or story of the week is discussed in both (for The New Yorker often in the Talk of the Town section) both also reach beyond the hot topic of the day to give a broader look at the news. The Economist does this by running many stories on many different issues around the world. The New Yorker delves deeply into one or two subjects in lengthy stories that are often off the dominant news topic of the week.

The two magazines also fly in the face of the current media trend of coalescing around one or two issues or stories. While both are topical, they do not let others set their news agenda for them. They are more concerned with setting their own priorities for coverage - working off their own ideas of what's important - than they are with joining someone else's conversation. As we will show in the audience section, the combination of new approaches with a traditional feel also seems to be yielding readers, or at least subscriptions.