Newsweekly Magazines

Newsweeklies or news magazines have for over 80 years grown to become a journalistic mainstay in the United States and in many other countries. They typically seek to encapsulate the events of the previous week into digestible sections, helping to make clear what is important and often interpreting that news. The format was designed from the beginning to help busy readers with only limited reading time to learn of the most important (or at least interesting) news, trends, and people. In recent years, a pronounced shift from hard to softer news is evident in cover stories and overall content.

Newsweeklies have always emphasized good writing, sometimes erratic style, and a growing use of photos and graphics. Most such publications are careful with facts and offer opinion in a gentle rather than overt fashion. They are intended for a general readership that has many pulls on its time, and thus by the early 2000s, newsweeklies presumed less than an hour of attention from their typical reader. Further, growing competition from television, cable news networks, and the Internet cut into potential reader priorities and in the 1980s, newsweeklies began to lose their central place in American journalism. By the early 2000s, they had stagnant circulations and occupied an increasingly peripheral place in the news media.

Newsmagazines differ from another type of publication with which they are sometimes confused—the weekly or monthly opinion magazine. Journals such as The New Republic, The National Review, or, in Britain, The Spectator, all deal with current events and controversies, but within a context of commenting on them more than reporting about them. They are, in part, aimed at the “already converted” on the right or left, the magazines serving to reinforce a mindset already in place. Other weeklies of comment, including The New Yorker, include essays, fiction, reviews, and a heavier dose of culture than newsweeklies usually include.

The most widely emulated example of the news-weekly genre is Time, which has published for 85 years. But depending how one defines the genre, Time was not the first such weekly—that honor would seem to go to Britain's Economist, which dates to the 1840s.