Looking more in depth at four issues of each magazine rather than a year of covers, we see other differences among the three magazines. What topics got the most space in the magazines during the weeks studied?
U.S. News, by far, was the most traditional, devoting nearly half of its space, 49 percent, to U.S. government and domestic affairs. These topics took up 26 percent of the space in Newsweek during the weeks studied, and 13 percent in Time.
Newsweek, on the other hand, was the most oriented to entertainment and lifestyle. A full 37 percent of its space was consumed with lifestyle and celebrity stories (versus 31 percent at Time and a mere 6 percent at U.S. News).
What were the lifestyle stories? Newsweek covered the range of lifestyle activities -- health trends, sports, travel, religion, cooking, the arts and popular culture. At Time, the bulk of it was pop-cultural trends and it also had more high-culture arts stories.
Time stood out for the space devoted to science and technology, but that is largely due to a cover issue on DNA.
The three publications were virtually identical in their coverage of military and foreign affairs and the situation in Iraq, averaging 29 percent of the space (and 18 percent of stories).
If one looks at the topics in these four issues by number of stories rather than space, the findings are quite similar. The only significant difference is a lower percentage when it comes to the number of domestic and foreign affairs stories and a higher percentage when it comes to the number of lifestyle stories. In other words, there are fewer domestic and foreign affairs stories, but they are longer. There are more lifestyle stories but they are shorter. All other categories are virtually identical in volume and stories.
Story Length
One area where the differences between the magazines may not be quite so predictable was story length. Here, the in-depth four-week study showed that the three magazines had a similar overall space or news hole (averaging 27,000 to 28,000 words per issue). And at all the magazines short stories dominated, more than half being less than 500 words.
In the examination of the data for length, there were no statistically significant differences in the three magazines.