Only one of the top 10 magazine companies, Time Warner, publishes one of the big three news magazines, Time. Newsweek is owned by The Washington Post, a big media company that is only a bit player in the magazine world. And U.S. News is owned by real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, who also owns a hodgepodge of magazines and newspapers. Why are the big news magazines so underrepresented in the big magazine companies? In part it may be that they are not sexy or new. They are among the longest continuously published magazines in the country. They got in, established their names and made competition difficult.

Lack of profit potential should not be overlooked as cause as well.

Even as magazine startups grow, the news magazine category remains largely unchanged, particularly at the mass-marketed, high-circulation end of the spectrum.⁵ [1] Does this mean that three big news magazines is the limit? Possibly. But the fact that there are, and long have been, only three big news magazines despite continuous growth in other segments (such as entertainment) suggests that many publishers simply do not think there is money to be made here. It is true that the magazine companies that have thrived in the past 20 years are more focused on niches other than news and might have a hard time starting a news magazine from scratch. But there is nothing preventing companies with strong editorial backgrounds, such as Hearst or Advance, from launching new news magazines. Even Time Warner might be interested in the idea if it looked profitable. The company did not fear cannibalizing People's readership when it launched Entertainment Weekly or Teen People. It assumed there were niches in which it could move without harming its franchise and it was right.

Why this did not occur in news magazines is a question. Perhaps the field was considered too crowded. Now, absent a remaking of the genre's format, it seems, it certainly is.