In addition to the longitudinal data from Hall's about what topics got the most space, we wanted to take a closer look at the news magazine genre in 2003.
To do so, the Project did two analyses. First, it analyzed the cover stories of all three magazines for the year - January through the first of December. Next, it analyzed in greater detail every story in each of the magazines for four weeks of the year, corresponding to the weeks studied for other media in this report.
What we found on one level reaffirmed Hall's research: today news magazines offer a little of everything and none of the magazines anymore can be described as a summary of the week's news.7 [1]
But there are three distinct personalities now between the three magazines, perhaps more than there once was.
U.S. News & World Report, the smallest of the three in circulation and in ad revenue (see Magazine Audience [2] and Magazine Economics [3]), is the most information-laden, the most likely to highlight traditional hard news topics and the most likely to report in a neutral manner - a more straightforward accounting of the facts of events with less of a writer's "take" or opinion on what those events mean.
Newsweek is lighter, more oriented toward lifestyle and celebrity coverage, and more likely to publish stories that contain an emotional component.
Time magazine is something of a hybrid between the two. Its content is more like U.S. News' - neutral and information driven. Its covers, on the other hand, look a good deal more like Newsweek's - highlighting lifestyle and entertainment.