2005 Annual Report - Magazine News Investment

Increasingly, the traditional news weeklies are more synthesizing and disseminating organizations than news gatherers. And these changes can be measured in a variety of ways, from smaller staffs to fewer bureaus.

They have changed their missions from being weekly summaries of news from the world to being frames on the week's events. And increasingly, particularly when it comes to things like national affairs, they focus more on offering "takes" on the week's events rather than news. This approach, their editors argue, was necessitated in part by the rise of 24-hour news and a more competitive news environment. There simply isn't much "new" to tell people at the end of the week.

This wasn't the only road available to the news weeklies. It is not the one news weeklies have taken in other countries.

While it is correct that saturation coverage is a big part of the news environment today, that saturation is generally not very deep or wide. Some events get wall-to-wall repetitive coverage on 24-hour news networks and other stories fall through the cracks. This year's presidential election coverage is a good example. In August, as the swift-boat-veterans story dominated news cycle after news cycle, coverage of the rest of the presidential campaign was relatively light. The policy and issues that reporters claim was lost in a flood of negative campaigning wasn't really lost by the candidates as much as it was pushed out by the media outlets themselves. Every day, as any campaign reporter or campaign aide will tell you, the candidates were on the trail giving the same "what I want to do for this country" speech and finding their words lost in a blitz of topic-of-the-day reportage. In late summer and fall it was stories about the hurricanes hitting Florida. Other times it was the Scott Peterson trial or the death and funeral of former President Ronald Reagan on cable news television. Saturation coverage has given people more news at their disposal, but in some ways the traditional mission of the news weekly - a more comprehensive look at the world at large - is as relevant as ever.

The nontraditional news magazines offer a starkly different approach to the changed news environment. The New Yorker prints in-depth looks at specific issues or ignores the primary news agenda to pursue its own, while The Economist looks at the big issue or two of the week, but also offers a broad survey of the news landscape. Both magazines, it should be noted, rely on very different staff models than the Big Three. The New Yorker grants its writers enormous amounts of autonomy to find, report and write the stories they are assigned - then pays them handsomely. The Economist, with a significant staff in bureaus all around the world, also turns to stringers to fill out its pages with stories that other news organizations ignore.

The Big Three, however, have largely stuck with the reduced version of their staffing approach, even as their mission has changed. Faced with a new news environment, the Big Three have decided largely to chase the same big stories the rest of the news media pursue. The weekly titles add to those stories by layering on top of them a broader vision and tone - "the voice from the mountain" as it is sometimes called. This approach means a few things. It means that covers of the Big Three largely mesh with the national zeitgeist and the mass news media coverage of various "hot topics." News coverage and reportage still matter, of course. But this style of coverage means having a staff made to a large extent up of generalists who can be thrown into, say, a government story one week and a crime story the next. Because everyone is chasing the same few big stories, new big facts and reportage are more difficult to come by and pieces often wind up being a collection of small "exclusive" details folded into a "smart take."