2004 Annual Report - Magazine Content Analysis

What are Americans getting from news magazines going into 2004?

The short answer:

• News magazines have bucked the trend toward specialization by becoming softer in content and specializing in little, not even hard news.

• The big three magazines have split into more distinct personalities.

• Newsweek has become the least traditional or serious while U.S. News sits at the other end of the spectrum and Time lies in between.

To get a sense of how magazine journalism has changed, we looked at the content of the three longstanding weekly news magazines. First, we examined 20-year data from Hall's Reports, a Stamford, Conn.-based research firm which measures the number of editorial pages in the magazines by category - national affairs, culture and business. The data indicate that these magazines are very different publications from each other and very different than they used to be. At a time when the industry trend overall has been toward niche publications, news magazines have actually become more general. No longer summaries of the week's hard news - a chronicling of the significant events in the nation and world, they now do a bit of everything, and do very little as in depth as they once did. The expansion of coverage has come in particular at the expense of what is considered more traditional news of government, public policy and the economy. In some ways, the news magazines might be analogous to the morning news shows on television, a hybrid assimilating a little of all styles in one place.

First, there are more pages of editorial content. Editorial pages have increased 9 percent since 1980, even as ad pages have declined, according to data from Hall's Reports.¹

Number of Pages in News Magazines

Advertising and editorial in Time, Newsweek and U.S. News

Design Your Own Chart

Hall’s Media Research unpublished data

* 2003 data is January to July

What is in those pages has also changed. Pages devoted to national affairs, for instance, dropped by 25 percent from 1980 to the first half of 2003, according to Hall's. There is less news on high culture such as museum reviews (13 percent in 1980 versus 10 percent in 2003), and, perhaps surprisingly, a smaller percent of pages devoted to business (11 percent versus 9 percent).²

The number of pages devoted to international news dropped off significantly after the collapse of communism but in 2003 has risen back up, due in large part to September 11th and the war in Iraq, to roughly the same level as in 1980.³

What subjects now take up the pages? The space devoted to entertainment and celebrity stories have roughly doubled since 1980 (and now account for 7 percent of the pages).⁴ Lifestyle coverage has grown from a scant 1 percent in 1980 to 4 percent in 2003 . Health news, which often translates to news you can use rather than medical science, has more than quadrupled (from 2 percent in 1980 to 9 percent in 2003).⁵ The three news magazines, particularly Time and Newsweek, have added pages directly from the genres that have seen the largest rise in circulation.⁶ (See Magazine Audience)

News Magazine Pages by Topic, 1980

Time, Newsweek and U.S. News, total pages

Design Your Own Chart

Hall’s Media Research unpublished data

News Magazine Pages by Topic, 2003

Time, Newsweek and U.S. News, total pages

Design Your Own Chart

Hall’s Media Research unpublished data

* 2003 data is January - July

News Magazine Pages by Topic

Select years 1980 - 2003, Time, Newsweek and U.S. News

Design Your Own Chart

Hall’s Media Research unpublished data

* 2003 figures January - July