News magazines have long been an anomaly in the media world. In a changing news environment, their contours have remained largely stable. The content of the major magazines evolved, but the titles remained the same, and so did the basic format. A question kept being asked: Would someone come up with a new idea that would challenge the format and formula of Time and Newsweek, which have long dominated the field? In 2005, there suddenly appeared a possible contender in the form of The Week.
The Week was founded in 2001, but its sudden rise in ad dollars (see Economics [1]) and circulation (see Audience [2]) in 2005 has become news in the past year. Business Week did a piece on the rise of The Week, and media writers have noted how the magazine, once thought of as an experiment, is beginning to be taken seriously.1 [3]
The Week brings a different approach to news magazine content. Rather than having reporters go out to gather news, its editors cull the week’s coverage from foreign and domestic publications and condense it into a summary. The magazine is not trying to set an agenda. It doesn’t make any original decisions about what to cover, and it doesn’t replay anyone else’s coverage at much length. Instead, its attitude may be summed up best in its slogan: “All you need to know about everything that matters.”
In some ways the magazine is loosely following the path laid out by blogs, with less slant in any political direction. In a world inundated with reporting and information, and with a population that has less spare time to keep up with the news, The Week’s approach of providing a kind of weekly briefing paper has obvious appeal.
We noted in past years that the news magazines — at least the mass titles — were on a clear migration away from serious longer reporting about hard-news topics. But now it seems an alternative path may have emerged. The Week does not focus on celebrity gossip or trend news. It is serious in tone and choice of topics, but it does not provide heavy in-depth reportage. It melds significant topics with short space and a fairly balanced presentation that offers a sample of opinions from the left and right. Data indicate that this approach may be catching fire.
Other trends of note in 2005:
The slow drift toward lighter fare at Time and Newsweek showed no signs of abating.
U.S. News and World Report maintained its practice of providing more hard, Washington-based coverage than Time or Newsweek.
Following the presidential election, the New Yorker appeared to lean away from hard-news coverage in 2005 and return to more “culture” reporting.
In the magazine industry over all, entertainment titles grew after having seemed to plateau.
Will the success of The Week and its second-hand summary approach — or the continued success of other nontraditional books like the Economist and the New Yorker — stir the interest of other publishers? Or lead Time and Newsweek, the two dominant weeklies, to reconsider their formats?
The Week’s success also raises a concern. If its content model continues to succeed, and even inspire imitators, the net effect is likely to be fewer reporters gathering information as it peels readers away from those doing the original reporting. Quality outside reportage, then, will grow increasingly important, and the sway over the news that a few publications and companies enjoy could grow.
A Week in the Life of the News Weeklies
Every media outlet has its own way of reporting news and makes its own choices about what to cover. But news magazines have a particularly varied array of options. Because they have a longer time than most other outlets (particularly the other outlets we examine) there are more possibilities for them to consider. Inevitably, a week’s worth of news from the entire world, even news that was covered by other outlets, will not fit between two covers. Traditional magazine editors decide what is and isn’t worth their pages, and because magazines are less time-sensitive the editors are granted a wider latitude in that regard than editors and producers in other media.
In the past, we looked at the topics covered annually to provide a measure of the world the news titles offered. Looking at those topics over 25 years, we found a decline in reporting on national and foreign news and a rise in entertainment and celebrity stories, especially in Time and Newsweek. This year we wanted to look at how that shift away from traditional hard news plays out, by doing a closer examination of one week’s worth of coverage in each magazine. We picked a week that corresponded with the “Day in the life of the media” that we examine in the other chapters of this report.
What do we see? A complicated landscape. If you paused at a newsstand or magazine rack the week of May 16, the first conclusion you would probably have drawn about the week was that nothing epic had happened. The first thing you might notice is that many of the titles are actually dated May 23 – a week after the day they actually appear on the newsstands – in order to appear “fresh” for a longer period of time. The covers of the major news magazines were devoted to a hodgepodge of issues, topics and even products. Time was heralding a look at the new Microsoft Xbox video game console. Newsweek had a president on its cover, but it was one from two centuries ago — George Washington, publicizing an excerpt from the historian David McCullough’s new book on the great man. U.S. News featured a picture of a slot machine and wrote of “Secrets of the Casinos.” The Week, with a sketch of Charles Darwin, turned its attention to the debate on “intelligent design” and evolution. The Economist fronted a discussion about the “axis of evil.” And the New Yorker offered a sketch of Sigmund Freud driving a cab with a fare/patient lying down on the back seat.
Such is the nature of the news magazine world in a week when there is no dominant news event. Magazines have the freedom to promote on their covers a “good read” or an “evergreen” or a piece that for one reason or another was contracted to receive cover play.
Look inside and the differences run deeper still. If you picked up a magazine to get an idea of what happened the week of May 8-14, the reality you found depended greatly on the title you picked.2 [4]