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) and circulation (see Audience) 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

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

Time: The world presented in Time’s May 23 issue includes news from the week past, but it isn’t what many might think of as the news of the week. The 82-page magazine functions more as a supplement to a broader news diet, with a mix of topics and a mix of seriousness.

There is some national affairs coverage, a smattering of international news and an increasingly large area for pop culture in “the back of the book.” Today, that term may refer only to where something appears in the magazine; it may say little or nothing about what magazine editors consider the material’s significance. In the May 23 issue, the cover story (Microsoft’s new game console) and the other piece teased on the cover (an interview with the comedian Dave Chappelle) reside in the “back of the book.” There is actually, by page count, more soft news than hard news.

The issue has three big interview subjects: Bill Gates, Chappelle and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel . Of those, it is Sharon who doesn’t make the cover, even though the interview with him is an exclusive.

What we found to be the main stories in our study of a Day in the Life of the News got little space in Time. King Tut got a two-page spread of photos and captions. The United Airlines story got about a quarter of a page and got the most space out of any of our big stories in the magazine by far. The plane that violated airspace got about 10 lines. And the Michael Jackson trial was handled in a quote from Macaulay Culkin.

Cover — The main cover topic is Microsoft’s new Xbox game console, and the dominant picture is Gates staring at the reader, Terminator-esque, the glowing “on” button of the new game box serving as his right eye. “Inside Bill’s new X-Box,” the text reads.

The cover-story package is 14 pages long, though the amount of text is considerably less than that. Graphics and large pictures (the hallmarks of the news weeklies nowadays) make for considerably less actual type. There are, for instance, only 16 lines of type on the first two pages of the piece, which carry a large picture of Gates playing with a controller. The piece itself is a trip inside “Xbox Headquarters,” where the machine was built, and a look at the thinking behind it.

Along with the main piece, Time includes a three-page spread full of pictures of video game “innovators” — or “visionaries,” as they are also called.

The package tries mightily to invest what many might consider an essentially light topic with extra heft. It isn’t just about the new video game system, the cover story says, but rather “about a sea change in American culture, which has embraced video games, formerly a despised hobby, as a vital force in pop culture.” Whether that is true is one question. Whether that is news because of the latest Xbox is another. The story offers some discussion of changing American culture, but is largely a commercial for the newest endeavor of Bill Gates, one of the people Time would eventually name a Man of the Year for his philanthropic activities.

The other piece teased on the cover, about Dave Chappelle, is the second largest package in Time, a six-page piece including a Q&A interview. Chappelle, who went AWOL early in 2005, has a new program on Comedy Central called “Chappelle’s Show.”

The piece doesn’t wade too far into any “larger significance” of the comedian or his hiatus, perhaps because it’s not clear what that would be. Pictures make up two of the six pages of the package.

Other stories — The third biggest story in the issue is the interview with Sharon . The lack of any reference to the piece on the cover suggests that the magazine now clearly sees itself less as a news magazine than a general-interest magazine with news included; Time’s current editors apparently are willing to forgo such items on the cover. That is also reflected in the division of space between the covers. The “front of the book,” the part of the magazine devoted to covering hard news, ends on page 42 with the end of the Sharon interview. The lighter “back of the book” takes up 38 more pages. Subtract the 15 pages for the table of contents, letters from readers and other items, and the back of the book accounts for more than half of the issue. Based on the topic page counts from Hall’s Magazine Reports in recent years, that appears to be fairly typical.

The names and images on the cover — Chappelle and Xbox — also probably have more relevance to younger readers than Ariel Sharon.

Elsewhere in the issue, Time devotes eight pages to national affairs. The pieces include one on President Bush’s ban on funds for stem cell research, the religious leaders behind a filibuster fight that was going on in the Senate, and the outed anti-gay mayor of Spokane, Wash. In World, the Sharon package also included a short piece about the relatively unknown ad man who helped soften the prime minister’s image and win him the election in Israel.

The magazine also features a three-page “Your Time” section in the back (a combination of news you can use, random facts and short interviews), a page of shorts on “People” and a closing essay.

The news of the week, the stories that pass through the public consciousness day-to-day, appear in the Notebook section in the front of the issue, a series of quick short items. It was here that the United Airlines story, the one about the plane that violated D.C. air space, and the Macaulay Culkin quote appeared, along with shorts on Arianna Huffington’s blog, military base closings, the successor in Pope Benedict’s old job, a book called “French Women Don’t Get Fat,” a contraption that vaporizes alcohol for quicker consumption, and plans to change the president’s daily intelligence brief.

Time is a magazine that seems caught in between genres. It feels compelled to pay attention to the news of the week, but only in passing, and to try and cover serious issues like the Middle East , but it isn’t clear if its audience really wants to pay attention. And Time looks as if it isn’t sure how much its audience wants to read.

Newsweek: Like Time, Newsweek is not really a summary of the past seven days but instead a complement designed to keep its readers apprised of news topics and trends that the magazine’s editors see as important. The world presented in the May 23 issue in many ways resembles the one offered by Time.

The current-events section, or the “front of the book,” is particularly short. There are just five hard-news stories, which go up to page 36, and a later two-column piece on the Illinois slayings. The rest of the magazine’s 84 pages are devoted to lighter trend stories. Removing the letters, cartoons and table of contents, the hard-news hole in the issue is 13-plus pages — including ads.

Three of the stories we saw in our Day in the Life study turn up in Newsweek. The plane violating D.C. airspace gets about two-thirds of a page in the Periscope section. North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are covered in a one-page column. And the slaying of two girls in Illinois is covered in a short two-column piece near the back of the issue’s hard-news section.

Cover — Newsweek’s May 23 cover isn’t news, it’s about a book excerpt. The cover face is more than 200 years old — a picture of George Washington looking defiant astride a white horse. The cover, “The Real George Washington” is based on an excerpt of David McCullough’s book “1776.” Also teased on the cover are a special section on “Design 2005: What’s Hot” and “The Filibuster Fight” in the Senate.

Inside, the four-page piece leading into the excerpt calls “1776” “powerful” and “vivid” and calls McCullough “America’s best-loved historian.” That kind of prose isn’t unusual for book excerpts. If Newsweek didn’t like the book or believe others would, presumably it wouldn’t have put it on the cover. The lead-in piece is mostly an essay on the author, his book and the nation. “For the country, the path ahead is never entirely smooth, but, as Washington’s story shows, faith and patience can see us through the longest nights,” it says near its end. The piece is followed by a five-page passage from “1776.”

The cover-teased “Design 2005” package looks at a variety of new product designs, from homes to video games to prescription bottles, in ways that range from multi-page stories to short items no longer than 15 lines. Design — in everything from Target products to iPods — has recently gained increased attention from the news media.

Rather than a searching exploration of design, however, the section, particularly near its close, turns largely into an advertising layout. A “Design Dozen” resembles a shopping guide — readers learn about the Mario Batali Basting Brush, Krups Espresso Maker and the hot colors for the year in paint. The subhead on this section: “Our pick of the names to know, stuff to covet, ideas to ponder. Wearables, listenables — even affordables.”

Also getting a cover mention is the filibuster showdown that threatened to erupt in the Senate. A large illustration of Senators Harry Reid and Bill Frist with dynamite around the Capitol dominates the opening spread, taking up five of the six available columns. The actual room for text is about four columns out of a 12-column spread.

The article delves less into the filibuster threat and more into the waning influence of moderate voices on Capitol Hill, in the Senate particularly. Much of the piece focuses on the moderate Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, whom it calls “a relic of a bygone era.” It notes that Specter and a fellow GOP moderate, Sen. Susan Collins, stopped their weekly meetings among moderate Republican senators because they were the only two people there. Almost lost in the shuffle are the judges who prompted the GOP to consider the “nuclear option” in the first place. They are restricted to a graphic.

Other pieces — Next comes a three-page story about Newsweek’s disputed account of the reported desecrating of the Koran at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (an article that ran on May 9) — what the magazine got right and wrong and the violence that broke out in the Arab world after the story ran. The piece acknowledges possible inaccuracies in the earlier story, but adds that its source still recalls reports about Koran mishandling, including a toilet incident, but cannot recall where. There is also a one-page piece about the Defense Department’s base closure plans and a one-page column from International Editor Fareed Zakaria about the administration’s policy regarding North Korea .

Then comes a two-page report on Burger King’s plan to reach Americans by selling extremely caloric and fatty foods, including a new Enormous Omelet Sandwich. A one-page story explores how the runners-up on the TV show The Apprentice often did better than the winners. Another page and a third carries a piece on the rising star of the Miami Heat point guard Dwayne Wade, next to a two-column story about the slaying of the two young girls in Illinois.

The front and back of the issue are filled with briefs. The magazine’s four-page Periscope section contains its usual mix of short supposed insider pieces (an item about President Bush visiting battleground states after the election), short news-of-the-week pieces that don’t merit big play (the aircraft that entered D.C. airspace) and other news nuggets (the mayor of Las Vegas pursuing a reality TV deal). In the back, the magazine offers its “news you can use” section called The Tip Sheet, which covers everything from television season finales to safe cars of the future. Then there is the Newsmaker section, a place for gossip and entertainment shorts — an item on Dave Chappelle and one on Renee Zellweger’s engagement to the country singer Kenny Chesney.

By and large, Newsweek in this edition follows the same pattern as Time, though generally with a lighter and (it seems to hope) a hipper touch. Some of the editorial content hints of advertorials.

U.S. News and World Report: The world presented in U.S. News’s May 23 issue is heavier than the one in Time and Newsweek. Dave Chappelle doesn’t appear. Neither do the runners-up from The Apprentice. There are more stories, and more weightier topics, than in the other traditional news weeklies. The magazine is also written in a more direct, “hard news” style; anecdotal leads appear, but not as often. Still, even here there is no attempt to recap the week, but simply to focus on issues editors believe important. U.S. News’s editors seem more interested in a hard-news agenda — from stories on shipping terrorists overseas for interrogation to an article on the dangers of life in the commercial fishing business.

Of the three traditional news weeklies in this week, U.S. News covers the greatest number of the “big stories” from May 11 in its 96 pages. Most get short treatment. A large piece about the spike in violence in Iraq includes information about the security forces being attacked. The United Airlines strike winds up a brief, as do North Korea’s nuclear aspirations, fused with information about Iran’s nuclear gambit. King Tut gets a very brief four-line photo caption under what was basically a mug shot of the boy king. It is a no-nonsense issue of a no-nonsense magazine.

Cover — The image is a large picture of a slot machine and the words “You Lose” in between two sevens. The story? “Secrets of the Casinos, How new tricks and technology give the house a winning edge.” In the top left corner of the cover a stern secretary of defense looks down to tease a story about “Rumsfeld’s Lean, Meaner Military.”

The eight-page cover package is markedly different from recent examinations, in other news weeklies, of Vegas as racy cultural phenomenon. The stories here look at the unsexy side of gambling. In fact, one could make the argument that the report fits in with the magazine’s “news you can use” focus. It is decidedly negative and something of a warning about the dangers of gambling. The opening photo is not of showgirls or fountains, but a four-column close-up of a pair of hands pushing the buttons on a slot machine — the gambler’s “courtesy card” tethering her to the machine. The stories reveal that while gambling has become a hot pastime, with poker becoming particularly popular, the odds against winning are getting longer. The package explains how casinos use reward cards to gather data on gamblers in microscopic detail, and includes a piece on gambling addiction. Pictures play a role in the presentation, but they are not of the same emotive quality as the shots in Time and Newsweek.

The article teased on the cover is a five-page story about Donald Rumsfeld’s restructuring of the military and impending base closures. It is a straightforward roundup look at Rumsfeld’s efforts to make the military “nimbler” and how base realignment fits with those plans. The conclusion? “It is easy to talk about making the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines work together more closely. It is more difficult to make it happen.”

Other pieces — U.S. News groups its national and international sections together as “Nation & World.” As a result, readers bounce around a bit. Following Rumsfeld is a one-page piece on the spike in suicide attacks in Iraq, followed by a two-page piece on the U.S. practice of shipping terrorist suspects overseas for interrogation, followed by a “Letter from New York” on efforts to rebuild Ground Zero. Finally, Gloria Borger has a one-page “On Politics” column that looks at the perils of one party’s controlling the executive and legislative branches at the same time — there’s a lot of blame that can be heaped on the party.

The issue wanders into areas untethered to news of the week, but they are not necessarily light. A 24-page “Executive Edition” insert includes content tailored to the socio-economics of the magazine’s readers. There is medical news (about a hospital company that specializes in heart disease), along with some business news (a story about online stock trading companies) and some lifestyle news (a piece about buying wine) among others. And the issue offers a special four-page report on the dangers of commercial fishing: fishermen have the most dangerous jobs in America after loggers.

Many short items appear in the front and the back of the magazine. The opening pages feature Washington Whispers, a two-page section with lighter briefs on politics, on John McCain’s book “Faith of My Fathers” being made into a movie, and an item about Egg McMuffins being passed out a White House meeting to celebrate Chief of Staff Andy Card’s birthday. Next comes the White House Week page, which walks readers through some of the week’s more standard Washington fare: The state of the highway bill, the potential for departures of justices from the Supreme Court and how the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, is planning to reform the nation’s intelligence apparatus. After that the magazine still has a three-page section of briefs from the week featuring, among other things, a piece on the Newsweek Koran flap, John Bolton’s nomination to be U.N. ambassador, North Korean nuclear tensions, and the filibuster showdown in the Senate.

In the back of the magazine, following the gambling cover story, comes a series of short money and health items along with pieces on a range of topics — two pages on St. Augustine’s legacy, two pages on inner-city youngsters at elite colleges, two pages on animal hibernation — and columns from Lou Dobbs, John Leo and David Gergen.

In all there are 22 stories of a page or more in the May 23 issue, which means even with a shorter page count, it has, by far, the most long pieces (Time had 13 and Newsweek about 17).

In short, U.S. News seems the most serious, sober-minded of three main news weeklies. But it also seems bound by tradition. There is more news here, and less attitude, but also not much innovation of the kind found in some of the more serious alternatives that follow.

The Economist: The world represented in the pages of the Economist is big and sprawling. Different regions — the United States, Asia, Europe and others — are given their own sections and treated with roughly equal weight, suggesting to readers that the magazine looks at the news differently. There are no “national” or “foreign” sections in the Economist’s pages, there is just the world. Topics in Bhutan are given the same weight as those in Seattle . This absence of the “us and them” perspective leads to a decidedly different and perhaps more holistic view of the news.

The magazine is not just a recap of the week. Stories are joined together to try to make connections and create a larger context, even if they fall in different regional sections in the magazine. So a story in the “United States” section on terrorism might refer readers to pieces in the “Middle East” or “Europe” sections. There is also agenda-setting — stories on matters readers might know little about such as Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela , and biofuels. Lighter trend pieces, meanwhile, barely get space.

Beyond the personality differences, the magazine explicitly has a point of view; its editorials by themselves separate the Economist from its U.S. rivals. In American news weeklies it is what the writer thinks, not the magazine institutionally, that matters. The writers in American news weeklies, moreover, tend to have what journalists call a “take” on issues, but not clear positions. The Economist, by contrast, often urges actions and specific policies and makes endorsements. None of the pieces in the Economist even carry bylines. On its Web site, the Economist Group says the magazine “has no bylines, believing that what is written is more important than who writes it.”

From its text-driven nature to its U.K. headquarters, the Economist differs substantially from the other news weeklies, which may partly explain why it has made substantial inroads in audience here in recent years, while the U.S. magazines have struggled. Even the matter of how issues are dated is different in the Economist. It hits the newsstands three days before the Big Three.

Three of the “big stories” from May 11 make it into the May 20 Economist, though none is a stand-alone story. Instead, they are bits of information in larger stories about larger issues. For instance, there is a piece on Iraqi security forces that mentions the spike in violence in the country, and a short 10-line item in “The World This Week” in the front of the magazine touches the same topic. The news about North Korea bolstering its nuclear arsenal is part of the cover piece on the “Axis of Evil” as well as a nine-line item in “World this Week.” And the story about the obstacles to CAFTA is a 3-line brief and part of the larger article that opens “The Americas” section of the issue.

Cover — The Economist in this issue uses a week without a central headline to basically build one itself, based on two different events — North Korea’s announcement that it is preparing a nuclear test and Iran’s announcement that it is about to resume enriching nuclear materials. The cover line, “Return of the Axis of Evil,” and picture, a Muslim figure holding a mushroom cloud in his hands, are unlike the approach taken by the other titles. It is a contextualizing of different, not obviously related, events to create one story. And the four stories teased on the cover represent a diverse range of topics — “From Goldwater to Bush,” “Venezuela’s oil-rich troublemaker,” “A future for biofuels” and “ Detroit and the Unions.” All appear in different sections of the magazine.

The cover package is made up of two stories. A one-page editorial on the “Return of the Axis of Evil” outlines the stakes and urges action by the U.S. government. The Economist’s format also means that, technically, another part of the cover package is the lead story in the Middle East and Africa section later on that lays out specifically “Iran’s nuclear ambitions” — which frees up room for editorial commentary up front.

Other pieces — Listing all the articles in this issue would take up a lot of space. There are 71 — more than four times the U.S. average for this week — and the range of topics is vast, everything from the Los Angeles mayoral race to mining in China to French corporate governance.

In the May 20 issue the stories are, as always, short; three pages is a treatise here. The leads are taut and to the point, with lots of facts and figures. There are not a lot of scene-setting anecdotes or florid prose.

At the start of the book, the briefs are really brief, many less than 10 lines, and all are hard-news driven. The May 20 issue has no celebrity briefs, and international matters lead. Topics range from President Bush’s Russian trip to a summit of Arab and South American countries and the Senate’s passage of a resolution asking Nigeria to extradite the former Liberian leader Charles Taylor.

The Leaders section, where the magazine’s opening opinion essays appear, begins with the one-page “Axis of Evil” piece, then goes on to essays about India’s reformist prime minister, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, General Motors’ need to reduce labor costs, German shareholder activism and the Tories’ role in British politics. Following that is a three-page special section on Chavez, looking at the social gains his nation has made and the heavy hits democracy and economic development have taken. The nation has one foot in democracy and the other in autocracy, the article declares, adding that “Venezuelans must decide which foot they prefer to amputate.”

Even the United States section offers a different definition of news than U.S. weeklies. The first article is a one-page look at Antonio Villaraigosa, the new mayor of Los Angeles . It’s followed by a short piece on Jim West, the publicly anti-gay legislator in Washington State who was found to have engaged in homosexual activity, and a one-page piece on Paul Volcker’s investigation of the U.N. oil-for-food scandal. There also is a one-page report on the decline of American unions, a short piece on how poor Americans have never saved money, a two-column story on faulty DNA testing in Virginia and a story on Chinese businessmen who are making inroads in the Midwest. The one-page Lexington column, which comes at the end of the United State section, talks about Republicans abandoning a small-government approach to management. The Jim West story was the only one the U.S. weeklies also covered.

It is not until page 62, that the magazine digs into business news – and that content diverges dramatically from what would have been found in American news weeklies. Among business’s eight pages is a one-and-half-page article on Intel and its new head, a two-column story on how American businesses are starting to take global warming seriously, a one-column item on the battle over the mobile e-mail business and a short item on how Kodak is struggling in the digital picture age.

There follows a three-page special report on the rise of biofuels that suggests it is time to take them more seriously as oil prices increase, a five-page Finance and Economics section and a three-page Science and Technology section. One needs to get all the way to page 85 (already longer than the entire issues of Time and Newsweek from May 23) before arriving at a three-page “Books and the Arts” section. Even here there are no celebrity interviews or film reviews. There are four one-and-a-half-column book reviews, a two-column article on new Asian cinema and a short item about a gallery exhibit of previously unseen Marilyn Monroe photos.

The issue still has room for a one-page obituary of Bob Hunter, the man who founded Greenpeace, and the Economist’s usual three pages of numbers, charts and tables that look at financial and economic indicators — something one would never find in any of the traditional American news weeklies. Again, some of that has to do with the magazine’s mission. It is a hybrid business/news title. But even taking that into account, the Economist simply treats news and the world it covers differently.

The Economist’s slogan is “First published in 1843 to take part in ‘a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.’ ” That insistent attitude, aided by arch prose, sums up what the magazine aspires to.

The New Yorker: The outlier in this group of titles is the New Yorker, which isn’t really a news magazine but, as we’ve pointed out previously, has wandered further into the events of the week in recent years. The world as represented in the May 23 issue is both broader and deeper than the one examined in the traditional news weeklies. The articles may not be immediately topical (in a week where there was no dominant story) but the issues they deal with — AIDS, a young sports star, espionage during a war, and art and an artist are familiar in a larger sense. The magazine clearly isn’t aimed at filling in the reader on what’s happened in the last seven days, and the length of its pieces means that inevitably, fewer stories are covered. Still, the depth of the reportage and the broad topics serve to illuminate larger issues. None of the 11 Big Stories we saw on May 11 turned up in this issue of the May 23 New Yorker.

Cover — The cover, a break as always from photo journalism, was a drawing of a New York City cab with Sigmund Freud sitting stoically at the wheel while a passenger lay on the back seat, presumably baring his soul. (The magazine in recent years has used flaps to highlight pieces inside.)

Stories in the issue — Talk of the Town opens with a lengthy Comment article on the victory of Tony Blair and the Labor Party in Britain’s recent Parliamentary elections and on Blair’s close relationship with President Bush. The piece features the magazine’s usual left-of-center take on the elections and the drag Bush may have caused Blair. Beyond that, Talk of the Town is a usual mix of short pieces on scenes from New York and the world of the arts — a look at the United Nations Building renovation, at writer’s “habitats,” a count of trees in New York City, and Robert Goulet.

Following “Talk,” the magazine heads into matters at greater length. The news stories are less about the news of the week than issues and people of familiar gravity, but with an apparent emphasis on telling readers something they don’t know. First there is a seven-page piece on the rising H.I.V. rates in the United States and what’s behind the trend, foremost a return of casual sex among gay men. A seven-page piece on the 15-year-old Major League Soccer player Freddie Adu reports his struggles adjusting to the life of a professional athlete. Following that is an 11-page story on Pham Xuan An, a Time magazine employee in Vietnam during the war there who was also a double agent, and a 10-page profile of the artist Robert Rauschenberg.

The pieces all offer depth not seen elsewhere. The HIV piece opens with a long scene lead that lays the ground for a discussion of the relationship between crystal methamphetamine and unprotected sex, but still has plenty of room to step back and offer a broad picture of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. It explains how crystal meth works on the brain — what neurotransmitters are affected — and still comes back to talk about sex clubs. The New Yorker gives writers enough space to delve into topics at several levels and draw connections between different points.

The piece on Adu wanders through topics like soccer’s place in America and Adu’s “mental conditioning coach” while discussing the difficulties the boy has had developing as a player. The long article on Pham Xuan An isn’t just a profile of the man, but a history of the war and of how he played both sides. The piece paints a complicated picture. In 1997, it says, An was denied permission to attend a conference in New York . An says it’s because his government wanted to keep him silenced, but the reporter adds, “This is one possible explanation, but as always with An, there could be another figure in the carpet. All we know is that, for at least 27 years after the end of the war, An was still an active member of Vietnam’s military intelligence service.”

Photos do appear. Almost all are black and white and artistic in style. The three-photo montage that ran in the HIV story is pure art — of no one in particular, with images stacked atop one another to suggest the effect of a motion picture. And, of course, there is a certain amount of space devoted to the cartoons that appear every few pages. Over all, though, text dominates the New Yorker in the front of the magazine and the back.

The New Yorker’s editors might chafe at its being considered a news magazine, but today categorizing the magazine is difficult. Describing its approach, whatever the topic, as deeply reported and writer-driven is not.

The Week: The world presented in the May 27 issue of The Week is a broad but condensed picture of the world as seen through the eyes of others (the title is dated ahead the same way Time and Newsweek are, but is on a slightly different news schedule). The magazine doesn’t dispatch reporters to cover events or use them to work the phones; it culls through pages and pages of newsprint, magazines and Web sites to produce a summary of what others have offered as the week’s news.

The magazine, founded by Jolyon Connell, a onetime White House reporter, is modeled after the briefing created daily for the Oval Office. And The Week throws its net wide to get its content. The New York Times is heavily represented in its pages, but the May 27 issue carries excerpts and ideas from the Glasgow Herald, Turin’s La Stampa, Mexico City’s La Journada, even Cigar Aficionado. The excerpts are generally short, sometimes a few paragraphs and sometimes only a few sentences. But they offer a quick summary of what the main piece was about, and the brevity of the pieces allows for a broad look at the news of the previous seven days. Of all the titles we examined, the Week comes closest to offering a recap of the week’s news, and that is what it strives to do.

The Week features more of the Big Stories from May 11 than any magazine studied, more even than U.S. News. The May 23 issue has articles about, or at least mentions, five of the stories — Iraq , United Airlines, King Tut, the Blockbuster board and CAFTA. It also deals with the North Korea story in the previous week’s issue, since the magazine comes out on a different schedule from the traditional weeklies.

Cover — The main image is a sketch of a befuddled Charles Darwin sitting in a classroom holding up a paper entitled “The Origin of Species” graded with a large: F. The cover line: “Doubting Darwin, Should schools teach ‘intelligent design?’ “ The sketch shows the usual approach the magazine takes to its cover art, a cheeky take on what it considers the week’s biggest story. Down the left side of the cover are four teases: “Did Bush nominate extremists?” “When cousins fall in love,” “Has the Force run its course?” and “The return of the nasty boss.” The teases are notable for their variety — everything from court appointments to the movie “Star Wars Episode III” — and for their sheer number. Like the Economist, The Week likes to get as many subjects as it can on its cover.

The “cover story” is not much different or much longer than any of the other stories in the issue. It is a half-page discussion of the intelligent design debate consisting of three long quotations from other publications — a column by the Boston Globe’s Ellen Goodman, a post from Brian McNicoll of Townhall.com and a post from Slate’s William Saletan. The piece itself takes no position. Goodman is against intelligent design, McNicoll is for it and Saletan says the theory is an admission of defeat from biblical literalists because they have at least had to accept the basic premise behind evolution, change over time.

The article on Bush’s judicial nominees has the same format and is the same size — a half-page of quotations, this time from six different writers in publications spanning the political continuum from the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal and National Review Online. Those critical of the federal appeals court nominees in question (Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor and Priscilla Owen, all now confirmed to federal courts) find them too radical; quotes from the supporting publications emphasize their qualifications for the bench.

The pieces on “cousins in love” and “the nasty boss” are straight excerpts from other publications — in the former case a column by the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman about cousins who want to marry but can’t in Pennsylvania, the latter a business story from USA Today.

The piece about “Star Wars” rounds up reviews by A.O. Scott of the New York Times, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, Anthony Lane of the New Yorker, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Wilmington.

Other pieces — Everything else is brief, but the list of topics is long. A quick glance shows the breadth — military base closings, the fight over John Bolton, fighting in Iraq, Los Angeles’s new mayor, Lance Armstrong saving sperm to have children later, the formerly credentialed White House “reporter” Jeff Gannon and a one-page “Briefing” on the right to die inspired by the Terri Schiavo case.

That’s all in the front of the magazine’s news section, along with three pages called “The world at a glance…” which feature maps of the continents marked with dots and lines that connect to one-paragraph reports. The items consist of everything from a severed fingertip supposedly found in a bowl of Wendy’s chili to the launching of a television network backed by President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to the push in Rome to make Pope John Paul II a saint and the killing of hundreds of civilians in Uzbekistan by government troops.

After all that there are three pages devoted to the “Best columns” in the United States , Europe and elsewhere. Along with columns from the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, there are selections from Italy , the Netherlands , Iraq and Russia . There is also a short item called “It must be true… I read it in the tabloids.”

Then there are two more pages of “Talking points” where the big topics of the week, some heavy and some lighter, are boiled down to what people have written for and against them. This is where the Darwin piece appears, along with items about Yalta , Pope Benedict and the Rolling Stones. Then come two pages of editorial cartoons from the past week. At this point, not even half-way through the issue, the biggest stories of the last seven days have largely been addressed.

That still leaves the rest of the issue for a vast assortment of topics. The Week has sections for health and science, reviews of books, film, music and the stage, plus food and drink (recipes for lobster rolls and blueberry cobbler as well as an excerpt of a review on a new Chicago restaurant). A one-page travel section runs excerpts from stories on areas ranging from Uruguay to Bethesda , Md. and Madison , Wis.

The Week is Reader’s Digest meets the blogoshpere — an inclusive shorthand summary of the week’s events as seen through the eyes of others.

Topic Coverage Over All in the Traditional News Weeklies

The in-depth look at one issue allows us to make close comparisons of the nature and editorial choices of the various magazines. A broader look at the breakdown of topics year-to-year provides a sense of the shifts in coverage over time.

Through the first eight months of 2005 the data from Hall’s Magazine Reports show a big change from a year earlier in the topics covered. Looking at the three traditional news magazines combined, national affairs, while still the largest topic in the weeklies, fell off dramatically — down to 21% of all pages — and if the trend continued that would be a 9% drop from 2004.³ While it’s true that 2004 was a presidential election year, there were some notable national news headlines in 2005, from Tom DeLay’s court troubles to the retirement of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to the investigation of the White House adviser Karl Rove. (It should be noted, however, that the page tally took place before Hurricane Katrina, which was bound to increase the national affairs coverage.)

What filled the pages left open by the drop in coverage of national affairs? For the most part, it seemed to be cultural news, which increased 4%, from 11% to 15%. But it was not alone in seeing gains. Health and medical science, and global and international affairs, were both up 2%, to 10% and 17% of all pages, respectively. And business pages and entertainment and celebrity pages both grew slightly to 9% each.⁴

Title by Title

Amid those broad shifts, there were also some differences among the Big Three magazines, particularly in the light-news areas. Reflecting some of the same differences found in the May 23 issues we examined closely, Time and Newsweek devoted far more of their pages to entertainment/celebrity topics than did U.S. News (14% for Time, 10% for Newsweek and 1% for U.S. News). U.S. News’s “news you can use” predilections also showed up in page counts. The magazine was by far the leader in health and medical science stories, which made up 14% of the pages in the first eight months of 2005. The topic accounted for 8% of Newsweek’s pages and 9% of Time’s.⁵

U.S. News also led the pack in national affairs coverage (24%, versus 18% for Newsweek and 22% for Time) and global/international coverage (19%, versus 15% for Newsweek and 16% for Time.⁶

Those patterns bear watching, however. The page counts were done before the big announcements at U.S. News of layoffs and its plan to shift to more Web-based publication. What that will mean for the news content is uncertain. It’s possible that U.S. News could become even more hard-news based, focusing in on its core product in a leaner publication.

In 2004

The traditional news weeklies were a little different in 2004. National affairs, where the presidential election coverage normally appears, saw an increase of 5% in total magazine pages from 2003 to 30%, according to figures from Hall’s Magazine Reports. That is a large increase for one year, but still below the high figure of 35% in 1995, when there was no national election under way.⁷

Just as interesting is where the increase in national pages came from. Mostly they were taken from global/international coverage, which fell 4% in 2004, to 15% of all pages. That happened even though 2004 was a big year for international news, particularly the war in Iraq , where insurgent attacks increased and casualties grew. Also taking small hits in percentage of pages allotted was business coverage, which dropped from 9% of pages in 2003 to 8% in 2004, and personal finance coverage, from 3% to 2%.⁸

The New Yorker

While the New Yorker has become more “newsie” and political in the past 20 years, the general mix more recently has remained largely unchanged, according to Hall’s Magazine Reports.

Cultural affairs and entertainment issues remain the linchpin of the New Yorker, accounting for close to half of all pages. But as we saw above (LINK BACK), the magazine’s approach to culture and entertainment is deeper, with an emphasis on issue-based pieces or profiles. And the prominence given to “general interest” coverage demonstrates the latitude the magazine takes in covering more off-beat issues. Where the traditional news weeklies purport to cover the week’s news across many areas — politics, culture, business — the New Yorker does not.

The small shifts that did occur in 2004 and 2005 were likely tied to the 2004 election. Political coverage (as a part of national affairs) rose 12% during the election year, but fell back down again in the beginning of ‘05 to less than 10% of coverage overall.⁹

New Yorker Topics

2004 vs. 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Halls Media Research unpublished data

The election-year shifts suggest that even though the magazine isn’t a “news magazine” per se, its editors feel its content is at least tied to the news in some way, particularly where politics is concerned.

Summary

After a long stable period, the traditional titles may be facing serious challenges from two different models.

The Economist and the New Yorker, thick magazines that belie the suggestion that consumers want news more quickly, have been seen as models for smaller niche audiences. The question is whether the approach of The Week, a magazine with no first-hand reportage built as a kind of print-blog, can resonate with a bigger mass audience.

The Week counters many of the prevailing trends in the news media today. It has no bylines and is developing no “personalities” for TV or radio consumption. It has no reporters trying to get “exclusives” to trumpet on its cover. It does not rely heavily on opinion or its own point of view to win readers. But its style and approach seem tailor-made for an audience looking for easily digestible, even pre-digested, news.

It is difficult to point to any one audience trend for news magazines in 2005. Instead there are competing ones. The outlook for the smaller nontraditional titles is quite sunny as circulations continue to rise. The picture for traditional titles, however, is gloomier, with the numbers continuing to fall. The continuing growth of the nontraditional titles in our informal survey (the New Yorker, the Economist and The Week) along with the continuing growth of the Nation, is impressive in that it is occurring in a time when other print media, like newspapers, are losing subscribers. The success of these nontraditional titles, which are text-heavy, suggests there may indeed be a future for print publications. The biggest trend, moreover, may be occurring outside of the news. Entertainment titles are growing again, and growing fast. New titles are jumping into a market that was once thought to be saturated, some coming from Europe . Winners and Losers in News Magazine Circulation Among news magazines, the headline is the success of The Week. With its aggregation approach to the news weekly, it added more than 65,000 subscribers in one year. In total numbers, it is still relatively small potatoes in the news weekly world — 246,000 circulation as of June 2004 — but its rate of growth is impressive. In fact, if 2005 publisher’s numbers are correct, the magazine has since added another 100,000 in circulation.1 Other nontraditional news titles, the Economist and the New Yorker, continued to grow as well, but more slowly, according to June 2004 audit reports.2 The other steady story line in magazine circulation, the decline in audience numbers at the three traditional titles — Time, Newsweek and U.S. News — continued as well in 2004, according to audit reports and publisher’s statements.3 Circulation of Non-Traditional News Magazines 1988 - 2004 Design Your Own Chart Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations, annual audit reports & publisher’s statements *The Atlantic is a monthly magazine The growth among the new, smaller and different approaches to news gives fuel to the theory that Americans aren’t necessarily rejecting a weekly publication of news, they may simply want a different format. If one compares the paid circulation gains at the New Yorker, the Economist and the Week (164,000) with the losses at Time, Newsweek and U.S. News (150,000), there is a net circulation gain of 14,000.4 But if it is a different format they want, Americans don’t seem sure what it is. The magazines growing in circulation bear little resemblance to each other in content. It may be that no news magazine today will be able to command the kind of audience once garnered by the traditional titles. People read magazines for different reasons than 30 or 40 years ago, and people are awash in choices and information. So the dominating news weeklies may be a thing of the past, and the news weekly model may become more of a niche product. If so, expensive world-wide reporting staffs may be unsustainable. The Nontraditional Titles The Week, perhaps the most different of the three growing titles has seem its circulation skyrocket — up more 38%in 2004 from 2003.5 If the growth continues at that pace, the effects on the entire news magazine field could be significant. For now, the growing numbers are slightly more heavily based on subscriptions than those for the traditional titles. Time and Newsweek get 4% or 5% of their circulation from newsstand sales, U.S. News around 2%. The Week‘s newsstand sales are less than 1% of its total circulation.6 The Economist continues its impressive growth as well, seemingly unburdened by its high subscription price, which is more than twice those of Time or Newsweek. And its growth seems to belie the oft-heard theory that consumers aren’t interested in international news. There is no real “home country” in the magazine. Countries and continents are treated more equally in terms of space than in any other major title. If foreign news doesn’t sell in other U.S. publications, perhaps the Economist has found a niche with the audience that enthusiastically embraces global news. Over all, the Economist’s circulation was up 49,000 in 2004, or 11%, over 2003.7 The New Yorker, with its literate, long-form approach to news, also continues to see circulation growth. At 996,000 in 2004, it was just shy of the 1 million mark according to audit reports.8 That was an increase of 47,000 over the year before. That growth may not be as explosive as the growth of The Week, but considering the age of the New Yorker, it is in some ways even more impressive. People aren’t just learning about the magazine, they know what is in it and they are seeking it out. Again, while critics will note (rightly) that the New Yorker does not fit the traditional mold of a news magazine, its growth has come during a stretch when the title became more news-focused, particularly around politics. The other titles we track were mixed in their numbers. The up-again, down-again circulation bounces of Jet continued in 2004, with the upside winning again. The magazine was back to just over 900,000 after a dip in 2002 and 2003.9 It still isn’t where it was before the 2001 recession, but the gains of 44,000 in the last publisher’s statement suggest it may be in line to get there. The Atlantic Monthly, meanwhile, continued its slide. Its 2004 circulation of 439,137 is the lowest we have seen since 1988.10 What’s driving the drop? That is not immediately clear. Publisher David Bradley says his goal is to change the magazine’s audience base, shrinking circulation while increasing subscription costs, aiming for a more exclusive niche. Even with such a strategy, though, the drops are fairly steep. The last decline of 55,000 represented an 11% drop; over two years the decrease has been 17%. Some analysts believe that the New Yorker, which offers similar longer pieces about topical subjects, is drawing readers away from the Atlantic. The magazine is in the process of moving its headquarters from Boston to Washington, D.C. , and will be removing short stories from its content mix. It will be interesting to whether those changes help circulation, and if so, how. The Traditional Weeklies The most worrisome drops, however, were in the three traditional news weeklies. Taken together they lost 126,000 readers in 2004.11 With a total subscriber base for the three of nearly 9.5 million, that is only a 1.3% drop. Similar losses, however, have been occurring for several years now. All three magazines have fallen below their 1988 figures, and Time and U.S. News are sitting at new lows for that period. (Incidentally, unaudited Publisher’s Statements for 2005 show further declines among these titles. Time was down .2% to 4,026,000. Newsweek was off .3% to 3,118,000. U.S. News reported a 1% increase to 2,035,000.) Circulation Among the Big Three News Magazines 1988 - 2004 Design Your Own Chart Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations, annual audit reports and publisher’s statements And this year there are finally signs that the long, slow erosion of readership among them is taking a toll. U.S. News announced major staff cuts along with a plan to reposition itself in the market. The goal is to spend less time and money on the print edition of the magazine and more of both on its Web presence, which is also expected to mean spending less on newsgathering and features. “We’re trying to be a more fluid, responsive news organization because that’s what the times demand,” Editor Brian Duffy said.12 Some staff members joked about the magazine’s becoming little more than a newsletter with ties to a Web site, people close to the magazine told the Project. The problems at U.S. News make it timely to consider what, in fairness, is merely speculation. What would happen to the news weekly market if U.S. News suddenly became a completely different animal or stopped publishing altogether? The short-term result presumably would be a bump in subscriptions for Time and Newsweek — a substitution effect. But it’s unlikely the total circulation of the two magazines would reach the numbers the three currently do. Some readers might gravitate to the nontraditional titles. Or some could just stop getting a news magazine altogether. We noted last year that the number of people who say they regularly read news magazines had declined over the previous 10 years. If the overall downward trend continues for the traditional news weeklies, however slowly, it is hard to see a sunny scenario for them in the long term. The problems for U.S. News may help Time and Newsweek some now, but could be a harbinger of things to come for those two, as well. Entertainment Grows … Again Unlike the news magazines, the entertainment kind aren’t just seeing growth, but staggering growth. It seemed to many a few years ago that this field was fully mature and had no more room for growth in titles or audience. But the last few years have seen the rise of not just one but two new titles: In Touch and OK! As with the news magazines, the emerging star here brings a new approach to the content. But the success of the new and different titles has not (as yet) hurt the mainstays. OK! s the newest entry in a field already crowded with the likes of People, Us and The Star. The jury is still out on its fall 2005 debut, but the magazine, which has sister publications of the same name in the United Kingdom and Canada , has a format that has been successful elsewhere and a publisher, Northern and Shell, with deep pockets. OK! brings a different approach to celebrity journalism: much of the content has been openly bought — from the celebrities themselves. The tactic, which the magazine calls “relationship journalism,” has in the past granted the title exclusive access to stories such as the wedding of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones — to which American magazines have later bought the rights. There have long been suspicions that a certain amount of this checkbook journalism goes on in the entertainment world. The editors of the magazine maintain, however, that they actually pay only a fraction of the title’s content— about 5%, according to editor Sarah Ivens.13 Ivens says the magazine is “pro-celebrity,” not interested in gossip or hearsay, and that is why it gets the interviews and exclusives it does. One celebrity’s positive story, of course, can be another’s gossip, particularly where breakups are concerned. Whatever one calls it, in some ways OK!’s pay-for-access approach is a merging of the tabloid and entertainment forms of journalism. That merging has been growing in recent years in the launching of In Touch and the relaunching of the tabloid Star as a glossy magazine. In Touch is already a huge success, with much less of a “pro-celebrity” approach. It often carries cover stories about whether celebrity rumors are true or not. The magazine, which began publishing in late 2002, grew to boast a regular circulation of 887,000 by the end of 2004.14 Meanwhile the former tabloid Star, which remade itself as a glossy in 2004, has a circulation of about 1.3 million.15 Despite its re-launch, the magazine isn’t that different from what it was when it sat next to the National Enquirer at the supermarket cash register —who’s dating whom remains a hot topic. And all of that has not crippled the rest of the celebrity market. Consider, for example, People magazine, the godfather of the celebrity genre. In 1999, People had an average circulation of 3.59 million. By 2004, even with all the increased competition, it had grown slightly, to 3.7 million.16 Other titles have fared even better. Since 2000, Us Weekly has gone from 837,000 on average to about 1.4 million.17 Why do these magazines continue to do so well, seemingly immune from the pressure of the Web? Photos may be a key part of the answer. Reading about celebrity weddings on a computer screen is one thing, glossy pictures another, and many readers would rather hold them in their hands. It’s also worth noting that these titles’ scoops and exclusives (which often come from the celebrities themselves) are part of a larger public relations plan that has an interest in keeping exclusives exclusive. That is to say, if you are a celebrity with a deal with Us regarding your wedding pictures (big events have often operated by checkbook journalism rules), you are not likely to leak them elsewhere. The immediacy the Web provides can’t do anything about such deals — at least without risking lawsuits. But the primary reason these titles thrive, particularly the new ones that blend a tabloid approach with the old celebrity magazine, may be that they tap a different audience. Two key elements, price and point of purchase, suggest that the new magazines have different readerships than old-line titles like People. People and Us Weekly have a newsstand price of $3.49.18 In Touch rings in at $1.99.19 And while about 39% of People’s circulation comes from the newsstand — not bad in an era of declining newsstand sales — that figure is low when compared with the Star’s 71% and In Touch’s astronomical 97%.20 Those numbers seem to indicate that the new titles are impulse buys made at the cash register. And many of those purchases are from younger readers. Marc Pasetsky, general manager of Life & Style Weekly, still another celebrity title, says the average age of his magazine’s readers is 30, while the average age of tabloid readers is 50.21 Is there a limit to how many titles this field can support? Presumably the answer is yes — it may even be reached soon — but the time is decidedly not here yet. The Opinion Titles Settle Down In the simplest terms, the 2004 presidential race was good for the opinion journals. After a few years of big changes, drops and rises in circulation, the world of the opinion magazines, things seem to have stabilized and are even looking up. After years of decline, including a precipitous decline in 2003, the New Republic has seen a small climb, from 61,124 to 61,129, according to publisher’s statements — its audit report for 2004 was not available at the time of this report’s writing. Whether this marks a turnaround for the title, which had seen declines since 1999 (when its circulation was over 100,000), remains to be seen. In an arena that thrives on taking a side, the New Republic has moved back toward the left in the past few years, becoming more critical of the Republican administration. This content change may have helped. Circulation of Leading Opinion Magazines 1988 - 2004 Design Your Own Chart Source: Audit Bureau of Circulation, annual audit reports and publisher’s statements Two of magazines experiencing growth suggest that in the current climate a hard-line voice carries appeal. The Nation with its strong leftward tilt grew again in 2004, climbing from 160,029 to 173,473, keeping it the No. 1 opinion journal in circulation, according to audit reports. The title has come a long way since 2000, when it had about 96,000 subscribers, and is now reportedly profitable. Its top editor, Victor Navaksy, who had been with the magazine since 1978, moved on this year to focus more on other work, including his job as chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review. (Navasky, now publisher emeritus at The Nation, also volunteers as a reader for this study). National Review’s reliable rightward slant hasn’t hurt it over time, either. But its circulation dropped slightly in 2004, going from 156,157 to 155,271, according to audit reports. The magazine’s circulation is still down from its high in 1996, during the heart of the Clinton presidency, when it was over 200,000.22 The biggest trend in the numbers may not be about any single title, however, but about the numbers of the left-leaning publications. As we have noted in past years, the journals supporting the political party or point of view that is out of power often do better than the ones supporting those in power. This norm may be re-establishing itself. But early publisher statements from 2005 indicate that all the titles we examine were seeing growing circulation at that point. If those figures turn out to be verified in audit reports, they may suggest that the country is entering a more political phase again, one where at least part of the public is engaged in the national policy debate. The Nation and National Review seem to be seeing the biggest growth, so the ideological battle may be joined with ready fervor from both sides. In an age of information overload, perhaps well-reasoned opinion magazines that help citizens put news in some order have an enduring appeal. In a sense, it is the oldest kind of journalism enduring — literate, text-heavy interpretation and debate. Grayer and Greener, Over All, Again The aging of the U.S. population is reflected in the ages of the magazine readers, as well. And the slight and steady increase in the U.S. incomes also comes through in the magazine readership data (a sampling of some 27,000 households by the marketing firm MRI).23 Some small moves in the audiences of individual magazines seemed to counter those trends, but such changes might be caused by differences in the sample taken — particularly as regards smaller readerships, where even a small difference in sample can mean big changes. Every title we examined had a higher average-age readership in 2005 than it did in our baseline year of 1995, except the Atlantic . That wasn’t profiled by MRI until 1997 and had a baseline-year age of 51.5 years.24 In 2005 the average age of all the news titles we look at was 46.3 years, up from 45.4 in 2004.25 This marks the first time the average age has climbed over 46, and it is now more than two years above the average age of the adult U.S. population, which sits at 44.26 Average Age of News Magazine Readers Compared to U.S. population, 1995 - 2005 Design Your Own Chart Source: MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’ Among the more peculiar findings is the average-age decline for the Atlantic . It still has the oldest readership among the news titles we look at, but its average reader went from 50.9 years old in 2004 to 49.7 in 2005.27 Again, such fluctuations aren’t uncommon with the MRI data, and further years would need to point in the same direction to be a real trend. Still, the Atlantic was the only news title that saw a declining readership age. Jet’s readership age has changed the most over time, from an average of 33.6 years in 1995 to over 40 this year.28 Looking at other titles, the New Yorker’s average age rose from 46.8 in 2004 to 48.4 in 2005, Newsweek went from 45.9 to 46.6, Time climbed from 44.6 to 45.7, and U.S. News grew from 45.9 to 46.8.29 Average Age of Readership by Magazine 1995 - 2005 Design Your Own Chart Source: MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’ Taken together the readers of the news magazines continue to be a wealthy segment of society — and growing wealthier as they separate from the average American. The average household income for the news titles MRI gathers data on was $67,003 in 2005, up from $65,958 in 2004.30 Comparing 1997, the first year MRI gathered information on all six of the titles we study, with 2005 makes the trend pretty clear. The gap between news magazine readers and the general U.S. population is as high as it has ever been — about $15,000.31 Ten years ago it was only about $10,000. Average Income of News Magazines Readers Compared to U.S. population, 1995 - 2005 Design Your Own Chart Source: MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’ In 1997 the average income of news magazine readers was $50,807, while the U.S. Adult population had an average household income of $39,025 — a difference of $11,782.32 In 2005 the difference between those two groups was $15,537 in household income — $67,003 for news magazine households compared to the U.S. average of $51,466.33 When it comes to the individual titles, The Atlantic had good year according to the MRI survey. Not only did its readership get younger, it got richer — quite a bit richer actually. The household income of the average Atlantic reader climbed $4,000 in one year from $81,571 in 2004 to 85,572 in 2005.34 Jet, on the other hand, had double-barreled bad demographic news. Its readers not only got older, they got poorer. The readership saw a $600-plus drop in household income, from $36,755 in 2004 to $36,093 in 2005. But Jet wasn’t alone. Newsweek also saw a small dip, from $67,964 in 2004 to $67,842 in 2005.35 The other three titles we look at saw small bumps. The New Yorker’s readership went from $79,005 in household income in 2004 to $80,957 in 2005. Time saw an increase from $65,269 to $66,176. And U.S. News went from $65,181 to $65,379.36 Average Income of Readership by Magazine 1995 - 2005 Design Your Own Chart Source: MediaMark Research, ’’Magazine Audience Estimates’’ This trend showing news magazine readers coming increasingly from wealthier households reflects what may be a long-term problem for the nation in a larger sense. News magazines have traditionally occupied a special place among American news media. Time magazine was created by Henry Luce so that people living in areas where national and world news coverage was scarce could keep up with the events of the day. It made for a better, more knowledgeable electorate. If economic stratification of news magazine readership signals a broader economic stratification in news awareness, the implications for a democratic society could be stark. It could leave larger parts of the electorate uninformed, under-informed or misinformed. Add into this dilemma the growing age gap — not only in news magazine readership but throughout much of the news media— and there are even more troubling signs. But there are hopeful signs as well. Though there are no hard, audited figures, The Week, as it gains in circulation, reports it is doing particularly well with younger audiences. And its lower newsstand price could theoretically attract more lower-income readers.

Footnotes

1. Audit Bureau of Circulations publisher’s statements for The Week.

2. Audit Bureau of Circulations audit reports for the New Yorker and the Economist. Audit reports were used where possible — the Economist, the New Yorker and Newsweek had final reports as this was written — but for other publications publisher’s statements were the best available data.

3. Audit Bureau of Circulations audit reports for Newsweek, publisher’s statements for Time and U.S. News.

4. Audit Bureau of Circulations data.

5. Audit Bureau of Circulations publisher's statement for The Week.

6. Audit Bureau of Circulations publisher’s statement for The Week, Time and U.S. News. ABC audit report for Newsweek.

7. Audit Bureau of Circulations audit report for The Economist.

8. Audit Bureau of Circulations audit report for The New Yorker.

9. Audit Bureau of Circulations publisher’s statement for Jet.

10. Audit Bureau of Circulations audit report for The Atlantic.

11. Audit Bureau of Circulations audit report for Newsweek. ABC publisher’s statements for Time and U.S. News.

12. Brian Duffy memo as reprinted on the Poynter Online Forum http://poynter.org/forum/?id=32127

13. Soriano, Cesar, “British Mag Makes Scene,” USA Today, August 2, 2005.

14. Audit Bureau of Circulations audit report for In Touch.

15. Audit Bureau of Circulations publisher’s statement for Star, December 31, 2004.

16. Audit Bureau of Circulations audit report for People.

17. Audit Bureau of Circulations publisher’s statement for Us Weekly, December 31, 2004.

18. Davies, Jennifer, Gluttons for Gossip, San Diego Union-Tribune, September 3, 2005.

19. Ibid

20. Audit Bureau of Circulations audit report for People and In Touch, publisher’s statement for Star.

21. Davies, Jennifer, Gluttons for Gossip, San Diego Union-Tribune, September 3, 2005.

22. 2004 State of the News Media Report

23. Mediamark Research, “Magazine Audience Estimates” 2005. www.mediamark.com

24. 2004 State of the News Media Report

25. Mediamark Research, “Magazine Audience Estimates” 2005. www.mediamark.com, 2005 State of the News Media Report

26. Mediamark Research, “Magazine Audience Estimates” 2005. www.mediamark.com

27. Mediamark Research, “Magazine Audience Estimates” 2005. www.mediamark.com, 2005 State of the News Media Report .

28. Mediamark Research, “Magazine Audience Estimates” 2005. www.mediamark.com

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Mediamark Research, “Magazine Audience Estimates” 1997.

33. Mediamark Research, “Magazine Audience Estimates” 2005. www.mediamark.com

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

Economics

The uncertainty that continues to linger over the nation’s economy left its mark on the magazine industry in 2005. While some titles still saw gains — People and Us Weekly, for example, had increases in advertising pages and dollars — others suffered through a hard year. For all of 2005, ad pages were up a mere .5% and dollars 7% for all titles (not including the Sunday newspaper magazines) according to the Publisher’s Information Bureau, which tracks ads throughout the year.1 The bad news for magazine ads for yet another year may raise questions about the economic health of the industry in the long run. Economic times may be uncertain, but they are by no means bad, with growth in gross domestic product somewhere around 4%. Those kinds of numbers, combined with a relatively robust stock market, have meant good news for magazine ads in the past. It may be that the structural changes in the media environment — the growth of online outlets, readership and ads — are beginning to have a bigger impact on magazines. Indeed magazines, with niche readerships that allow targeted ads buys, are perhaps more directly in competition with the hyper-targeted world of online ads. The ad trend will bear watching in coming years, particularly if the economy grows stronger. Over all, newsstand sales numbers were poor in 2005. By mid-November they were down 3.4% for the industry as a whole. But again, celebrity titles seemed an exception to the trend; their sales grew by nearly 9%. In Touch Weekly saw its newsstand sales climb 49%, while Us Weekly was up 33%.2 If there were doubts about the depth of the struggles traditional news magazines are facing, they may have been clarified in December when Time Inc. announced it was laying off 105 people, including some high-ranking executives.3 One of the biggest casualties was Eileen Naughton, the president of Time magazine. The Time cuts followed on the heels of a reorganization at Business Week that sliced off 60 jobs.4 And a month later, as January 2006 came to a close, Time announced the layoff of another 100 employees.5 Even in a relatively gloomy year for ads in magazines, the biggest news magazines were particularly down. Time and Newsweek both saw double-digit dips in ad pages in 2005 and revenue figures were down almost as much. Many of the other titles saw a split year, with pages down and dollars up or vice versa. The exception was, again, the Week, where the numbers were all positive. Inside the News Group Positive indeed — while all the other news titles we examine saw a drop in either ad pages or dollars or both in 2005, The Week, now five years old, enjoyed significant growth. Ad pages were up 9% in 2005 and ad dollars were up a dramatic 63%. In absolute numbers, The Week still lags far behind its competitors. Its 568 ad pages are only a fraction of Time magazine’s 2,293 and not even equal to David Bradley’s National Journal, with 820 pages — a title where ads are an afterthought and subscriptions pay most of the bills. And in ad revenue The Week’s $17.8 million does not compare to Time’s $632 million.6 Still, the speed at which The Week is growing is impressive, and because of the low-cost, low-overhead, manner in which the magazine is put together — compiled from publications around the country and world — even relatively small increases in revenue can have a big impact on the bottom line. The magazine is not making money yet, but its staff reports it is on track to break even in 2006.7 Change in Ad Dollars and Pages, Select Magazines 2004 vs. 2005 Design Your Own Chart Source: Publisher’s Information Bureau Other nontraditional news titles had more mixed results in 2005. Jet had a 7% increase, or about $2 million, in ad dollars and a 9% increase in ad pages. A smaller increase in ad dollars than in ad pages (the reverse of what most magazines experience or, at least, announce) may suggest that the magazine will not be able to command the rates it would like.8 Four other titles saw the reverse advertising picture — pages down but dollars up, a little more favorable position once the economy improves. The Atlantic’s ad pages were down 13%, while dollars were up a small 0.3%. In actual dollars the Atlantic experienced a $73,000 increase in revenues.9 The New Yorker and the Economist suffered through small reductions in ad pages — 3% for the New Yorker and 2% for the Economist — but both also witnessed good-sized increases in ad revenues — 7% and 11%, respectively, in 2005. In dollar terms, the Economist had a revenues increase of about $7.5 million in 2005 to $72.5 million, while the New Yorker had an increase of about $15 million to $215 million. That number puts the New Yorker in the same ballpark as U.S. News and World Report ($256 million), the struggling bottom player among the big traditional news weeklies.10 It is not unusual for ad revenues to rise while pages decline; ad rates can increase even as pages fall. The ad revenue figures collected by the Publisher’s Information Bureau and cited here are determined by multiplying pages by each magazine’s stated ad rates. The rates advertisers actually pay are closely held secrets and are often not uniform. Actual rates can depend on anything from the advertiser and to the length of contract. Some industry insiders say the revenue figures are so inflated that the actual numbers could be only around half the amount the PIB figures indicate. U.S. News, also, saw pages down and revenues up in 2005. The revenue increases, though, were more in line with the Atlantic ’s, just 9%, to about $257 million. Ad pages dropped 0.6% following a year when they were up substantially.11 The question for the magazine now is what will happen as it embraces its new mission and becomes more of a Web-based publication? And how soon and how quickly will those changes occur? Some of the ads in the magazine may migrate to the Web, but it is unclear what the net change in revenue will be. If newspapers are any example, U.S. News is likely to be limited to much lower rates for online ads than for print ads. Both Time and Newsweek fared much worse in 2005 than in 2004. Ad pages and dollars both fell at both titles. Time had a particularly down year with a drop of 12% in ad pages and 8% in ad revenues — more than 300 ad pages and $55 million. Newsweek witnessed a 11% decline in ad pages and a 6% drop in ad dollars, or 247 ad pages and $30 million.12 News Magazines Ad Pages, by Title 1988 - 2005 Design Your Own Chart Source: Publisher’s Information Bureau annual reports   News Magazine Ad Dollars, by Title 1988 - 2005 Design Your Own Chart Source: Publisher’s Information Bureau annual reports What might explain the declines? Could they be attributed to a post-election year drop-off — numbers simply looking low in comparison to 2004? If you compare 2005 to 1997 — the year following the most recent presidential re-election — that theory doesn’t hold up. Time, Newsweek and U.S. News all saw increases in ad pages and ad dollars in 1997.13 All magazines, news and otherwise, saw a drop in 2001 (after the 2000 election); the industry suffered through a one-year decline in advertising pages of more than 10%.14 It may be that the ups and downs of the news titles have more to do with the nation’s overall economic situation than the news environment. From 1994 to 1999, when economic times were good, ad pages were rising at the traditional weeklies. From there they dropped, and not even the 2000 election could save them. But are times so hard in 2005 that pages should be falling the way they are? And why are the drops so much more dramatic at the big news weeklies? The nature of the 2005 economic situation may suggest at least part of the answer. Car ads make up a lot of the pages in the big titles, and the U.S. auto industry is in a slump. The question may not be fully resolved until the economy improves. If the advertising picture does not rise then, it will signal bigger problems for general-interest print magazines. A Look at the Ads in the News Titles Another way to understand the advertising appeal of a magazine is to look at the kinds of ads it carries. They reveal something about the nature of the audience, and the breadth of the ads may predict the ability of a magazine to weather difficult times. A look at the ads in one issue each of Time, the Economist, the New Yorker and The Week suggests that the magazines are aimed at different audiences and that some have a deeper pool of potential advertisers than others. The May 23 Time relies heavily on cars (9 pages of ads), banks and financial companies (6 pages) and computers and technology (4 and 2/3 pages). And the companies in the 28 total ad pages are names familiar to most c