A History of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report
Published
in the Encyclopedia of International
Media and Communcations (Academic Press, 2003)
by David E. Sumner
Outline:
I.
Introduction
II.
Time Magazine
III.
Newsweek
IV.
V.
Conclusion
I.
Introduction
Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World
Report have dominated the newsmagazine genre of the 20th
century. Time
was started in 1923 followed by Newsweek in 1933 and U.S. News &
World Report in 1941.
With a combined circulation of 10 million, all three ranked in
the top 25 magazines in circulation by the end of the 20th century.
The success of newsmagazines has not been limited to the
The
first two American magazines devoted exclusively to news appeared in 1786—The
New Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Magazine in February and the Worcester
Magazine in April.
The first American newsmagazine to reach a large circulation and
last for more than a few years was the Niles’ Weekly Register, which
published from 1811 until 1848.
Other nineteenth-century magazines, notably Leslie’s and
Harper’s Weekly covered the news in pictures, but more closely
resembled Life than contemporary newsmagazines.
What distinguished Time and its successors from earlier
newsmagazines was that they reached mass national audiences, achieved
sustained success over many decades, and focused, generally, on breaking news
and news features. Their
success was due partly to advances in transportation and printing technology
that did not make mass-market magazines accessible and easily affordable until
the turn of the 20th century.
Prior to then, magazines were primarily regional, expensive, and
read only by the affluent and well-educated.
Circulation
of the newsmagazines rose steadily from the 1920s and 1930s until the 1970s
when it leveled out. They
faced threats to survival and advertising revenue with the news reporting
offered, first, by television and later by the Internet.
Total circulation of the three major newsmagazines increased
only 1.6 percent from 9,437,000 in 1980 to 9,586,000 in 2001.
Newsweek’s share of the market grew the most—from 31
percent to 34 percent—while U.S. News upped its share from 22 to 23 percent.
That meant that Time’s dominant share of the
newsmagazine market declined from 47 to 43 percent.
The
events of
“September
11 solidified the importance of a newsmagazine in times of crisis,” said
Jonathan Alter, a columnist and senior editor at Newsweek.
“Our sales were the largest in our 68-year history.
We sold special issues.
When a new medium develops, people make the mistake over and
over again and say ‘so much for the old media.’ People see the story on
television but they really want …to have somebody who pulls it together and
analyzes it in an intelligent way.
The news you get on television is very immediate.
It’s often very informative, but it’s not very contextual.
So there is still that hunger for context, which I think is
what newsmagazines provide,” said Mr. Alter.
The newsmagazines continue to struggle to find right mix to
attract a readership that has instant news available from dozens of electronic
outlets All three have embraced the Internet with their online editions.
Although the newsmagazines--like most magazines still struggle
to make their web editions profitable, their websites do offer a means of
providing additional in-depth content, developing reader loyalty with
interactive content, and attracting new subscribers.
Time’s 4.2 million average paid subscribers for 2001 was
the highest of any of the three newsmagazines and a 43 percent share of the
newsmagazine market. Time
is the flagship magazine of Time-Warner-AOL, which is the world’s largest
media conglomerate.
It had its origins
in 1923 when two young men started Time magazine. Henry Robinson Luce
(1898-1967) and Briton Hadden (1898-1929) were both Hotchkiss and Yale
classmates. Luce grew up in
After college, Luce became
a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and Hadden worked for the
In less than a year, they quit their jobs and moved to
Its prospectus stated: “People in
Later the prospectus read: “From
virtually every magazine and newspaper of note in the world, Time
collects all available information on all subjects of importance and general
interest. The essence of all this information is reduced to approximately 100
short articles, none of which are over 400 words in length (seven inches of
type). Each
of these articles will be found in its logical place in the magazine,
according to a FIXED METHOD OF ARRANGEMENT which constitutes a complete
ORGANIZATION OF ALL THE NEWS.”
They spent a year raising money and selling shares in their new
venture, mostly to former Yale classmates or alumni.
Mrs. William Harkness, the wealthy
mother of a Yale friend, made the largest investment. They made their sales
pitch and, without asking any questions, the kind lady wrote out a check for
$20,000. After
raising $85,000---$15,000 short of their goal—they decided to proceed anyway.
The first issue of “Time—The Weekly News-Magazine,”
containing thirty-two pages and selling for fifteen cents, appeared on
During the first six years, Hadden was editor-in-chief, while Luce was
publisher and business manager.
The founding partners complemented each other in both talent and
temperament. Hadden
was the mischievous extrovert and comedian—a hard-partying but brilliant
wordsmith. Luce
was the conservative and pragmatic intellectual who was voted “Most
Brilliant” by his Yale classmates.
Mutual respect made them a successful team.
Circulation jumped from 30,000 in 1924 to 250,000 in 1929.
Ad revenues increased from $13,000 its first year to $414,000 in
its fifth year when the magazine started making a profit.
In 1925, Luce insisted that Time’s operations be moved
to less-expensive facilities in
Hadden created one of Time’s
most enduring legacies: an acerbic and irreverent style of writing later
dubbed by critics and fans alike as “Timestyle.”
Some of Time’s words became familiar part of the
language: tycoon, socialite, pundit, kudos, guesstimate, male chauvinist, and
televangelist. Other
Time creations that didn’t become as popular included: culturecrats,
cinemactor, ecofreaks,
and Californicate.
Time’s executive editor Frank Norris was credited with
naming “World War II” in 1939.
The magazine’s “Timestyle” was
studied by academics and parodied by satirists and critics.
“Of all the journalistic phenomena of our age, the magazine Time
is linguistically the most interesting,” wrote a university professor in an
academic speech journal.
“Here for the first time is a popular medium of information
whose editors are using the language so freely and boldly as to suggest
conscious experiment.”
Another professor wrote that the “trademark of Timestyle”
was its mixture of colloquial and highbrow words. “Our man from Time
thinks nothing of combining the most ordinary words with the most highfalutin
ones—even in the same sentence,” she said.
Hadden never lived to see the rich fruits of his labor. He
was stricken with a streptococcus infection in 1928 and died
After Hadden’s death,
Luce became editor and majority shareholder and started planning for other
magazines that he was to establish: Fortune (1930); Life (1936);
and Sports Illustrated (1954).
After his death in 1967, his successors at Time, Inc. continued
his creative legacies by starting Money (1972), People Weekly
(1974), Entertainment Weekly (1989) and Martha Stewart Living
(1990).
Time started its “Man of the Year” tradition in 1927.
During a no-news week late in 1927—and having neglected to put
Charles A. Lindbergh on the cover the previous May when he made his famous
flight—they concocted the “Man of the Year” idea to justify putting him
on at year’s end. The
choice became a national guessing game that became popular with readers and
advertisers. Every
president was chosen “Man of the Year” at least once except for Gerald
Ford. Some
choices stirred controversy since its criteria stated that the decision should
be made on the basis of the person who had the most influence on world events—for
good or for ill. Adolf
Hitler was named “Man of the Year” for 1938, Josef Stalin in 1939 and
1942, and Ayatullah Khomeini in 1979. The first
woman named was Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, while “American Women” were
honored in 1975. Instead of a person, the editors chose “the computer” as
the “Machine of the Year” in 1982.
Luce was a strong Republican and gave Time a conservative tone
under his leadership. There were times when the magazine clashed openly with
President Roosevelt, who also criticized the magazine.
Luce dismissed arguments for objectivity as meaningless.
“If everyone hasn’t brains enough to know by now that I am a
Presbyterian, a Republican and a capitalist, he should.
I am biased in favor of God, the Republican Party, and free
enterprise. Hadden
and I invented Time.
Therefore we had a right to say what it would be.
We’re not fooling anybody.
Our readers know where we stand,” he once said.
Luce’s successor, Hedley
Donovan, described his political views this way:
“His
political outlook was far more liberal than that of many self-made rich men,
and his own Republicanism was of the “Eastern progressive school” Harry
was, in fact, pretty much of a political independent most of the time, and
tended to get very Republican only every fourth year,” Donovan wrote in his
memoirs Right Times, Right Places.
Luce married Clare Booth
in 1935 after divorcing his first wife.
Booth had been associate editor of Vogue in 1930 and
managing editor of Vanity Fair from 1930-34.
Both were forceful, articulate and conservative in their
politics. In
the fall of 1942, Clare Boothe Luce won election
to Congress in
1943 until 1947.
She was appointed ambassador to
In 1959 after recovering
from his first heart attack, Henry Luce prepared to pass the title of
editor-in-chief to Donovan, who was then the managing editor of Fortune.
Although Luce did not fully retire until 1964, he began a management
reorganization that put a new generation of Time, Inc. managers in control.
Donovan became the new editor-in-chief of Time, Inc. The top
position at each of Time, Inc.’s magazines—including Time-- was
always given the title “managing editor.”
Otto Fuerbringer was Time’s
managing editor from 1960 to 1968, when he was succeeded by Henry Grunwald.
Although Time had
strongly supported Republican candidates for president throughout its history,
the 1960 election marked a turning point in its partisanship.
Luce always had a slight distrust of Richard Nixon and a mild
admiration for John F. Kennedy.
Donovan wrote, “The
attitude of the top Time editors reflected a lively journalistic
appetite of Kennedy as subject matter, an awareness of Luce’s relatively
tolerant attitude toward this Democrat.
Time, Inc. was in some respects closer to the Kennedy
administration than to the Eisenhower administration it had championed in two
elections.”
Luce died at his
Under Hedley Donovan’s leadership, Time moved towards a more
centrist niche. Donovan
wrote, “I considered myself an independent….
I had no particular interest in the fortunes of the Republican
party as such, or the Democratic party—except that each should win often
enough to sustain a vigorous two—party system.” The Time staff was
divided over
By early 1968, Time began to call for a change in
Time
wasn’t far behind The Washington Post in its investigative reporting
on the Watergate crisis.
Halberstam called Time’s
Watergate reporter, Sandy Smith, “Second only to Woodward and Berstein
[as] the top digging reporter on Watergate, particularly in the early stages.”
Some of Time’s reporters were dismayed when the
magazine named Nixon and Kissinger as Men of the Year in January 1973.
But with the China and Moscow trips, no one else qualified by Time’s
own standards. Nevertheless,
the magazine called for Nixon’s resignation ten months later in the first
clearly labeled editorial in its history.
The Nov. 12, 1973, editorial called for the president’s
immediate resignation, explaining, “He has irredeemably lost his moral
authority, the confidence of most of the country, and therefore his ability to
govern effectively.”
Time, Inc. expanded its
media empire during the 1970s and 1980s.
It launched Home Box Office (HBO) in 1972, Money magazine
in 1972 and People Weekly in 1974.
It acquired Southern Progress Corporation, publishers of Southern
Living, Progressive Farmer, Travel South, and Cooking Light in
1988, bringing its total number of published magazines to 24.
It paid $14 billion for Warner Communications, Inc. in 1989,
creating the world’s largest entertainment and media concern.
The first year Time Warner created Time Warner Publishing to
oversee all of the company’s publishing activities and launched new
magazines such as Martha Stewart Living and Entertainment Weekly.
The
second mega-merger came with Turner Broadcasting in 1996, a move which saw CNN
founder Ted Turner join the group as deputy chairman.
The third came in January 2000 when American Online announced
its plans to acquire Time Warner for $160 billion.
The merger, which was approved by the FCC a year later, was the
largest corporate merger in U.S. history and resulted in a new company with an
estimated value of $350 billion.
AOL’s Steve Case became chairman of the board of the new
company, while Time-Warner’s Gerald Levin became chief executive officer.
Time
was the first newsmagazine to publish online beginning in 1993.
According to Nielsen NetRatings Time.com
is the most trafficked newsmagazine website, drawing more than 5 million
visits per month. Besides
breaking news content, the website offers archives of previous issues dating
back to 1985, biographies of editors and writers, a media kit with reader
demographics, an archive of “Person of the Year” covers and many other
reader resources not offered in the print edition.
In 1995, Time was also the first newsmagazine to initiate
targeted “cluster editing.” Once a month, subscribers who fit certain
demographic categories—youth, family, mature and professional/managerial—get
specific articles aimed toward their interests.
Walter Isaacson, managing
editor from 1996-2000, described recent innovations this way: “We’ve
brought more storytelling to Time, to try to get at great issues
through interesting tales, and also to create high impact journalism that
makes a difference. We’ve
tried to be at the forefront of the digital revolution. That’s the big story
of our time.”
James Kelly became Time’s managing editor in
January of 2001, the fifteenth chief editor since its founding in 1923.
Kelly joined the magazine’s staff in 1977 and worked his way
up through the ranks.
To cover the terrorist attacks on America Tuesday, Sept. 11,
Kelly produced a special issue of Time that hit newsstands just two
days later. That
September 14 issue sold 7.2 million copies—a record number of copies for a
single issue.
Time’s Managing Editors:
1. & 2.
Henry Luce & Briton Hadden, 1923-1929
3. John S. Martin, 1929-1933 and 1936-1937
4. John Shaw Billings: 1933-1936
5. Manfred Gottfried: 1937-1943
6. T.S. Matthews: 1943-1959
7. Roy Alexander: 1949-1960
8. Otto Fuerbringer:
1960-1968
9. Henry Grunwald:
1968-1977
10. Ray Cave: 1977-1985
11. Jason McManus: 1985-1987
12. Henry Muller: 1987-1993
13. James R. Gaines: 1993-1995
14. Walter Isaacson: 1996-2000
15. James Kelly: 2000 - present
III.
Newsweek
Newsweek
was launched in the depression year 1932 by Thomas John Cardell Martyn.
An Englishman and Oxford graduate, Martyn was a Royal Air Force
veteran who had lost a leg in World War I.
Henry Luce hired Martyn as Time’s
foreign news editor in 1923 for $60 a week, making him the magazine’s
highest-paid staff member.
They hired Martyn, who was then
living in Rome, on a mistaken recommendation that he was an experienced
foreign correspondent. As it turned out, he had virtually no reporting
experience, but nevertheless handled the job as foreign news editor
satisfactorily for the next two years. Martyn
resigned in 1925 after a dispute with Luce when the magazine moved to
Cleveland. Hadden
and Luce refused to pay moving expenses for Martyn and most other staff
members. Since
Martyn was married with two children and had just
bought a house, he resigned rather than move to Cleveland.
Martyn went to work for The New
York Times, which he quit after a few years to draw up a prospectus, raise
backing, and establish a news magazine.
He succeeded in raising $2.25 million in startup
capital from 120 individual investors, including such impressive backers as
John Hay Whitney and Paul Mellon.
With a staff of twenty-two, he launched a magazine, “News-Week,”
which guaranteed advertisers a circulation of 50,000.
Martyn’s original idea was for a
news digest that published seven photographs on its cover depicting an
important event for each day of the week.
After proving confusing to readers, he discontinued the practice
after a year.
Martyn’s prospectus argued that some
people felt “Time
is too inaccurate, too superficial, too flippant and imitative” and promised
a magazine “written in simple, unaffected English [in] a more significant
format [with] a fundamentally sober attitude on all matters involving taste
and ethics.”
When the first issue of News-Week
was published on Feb. 17, 1933, Martyn sent a copy to Henry Luce saying, “You
will take some degree of satisfaction from the knowledge that a former Time
man is competing with you…on the friendliest basis.”
Luce responded with a note offering “best wishes for a long
and useful life” for the magazine.
The magazine lost money during its first four years. Martyn,
underestimating the amount of capital needed to start the magazine, went
through the $2.25 million in four years.
During the merger and reorganization in 1937, he sold his
interests when News-Week was merged with Today,
another failing news publication. Today, with financial backing from
Vincent Astor and Averill Harriman, was launched in Nov. 1933 to popularize
the New Deal. It was edited by Raymond Moley, a
former senior adviser to President Roosevelt. Astor, who became president of
the new company, came from the wealthy American family of John Jacob Astor
whose fortune was rooted in the fur trade and real estate holdings.
Malcolm Muir became editor-in-chief of the new
magazine, bringing with him experience in publishing and sales acquired during
his years as president of McGraw-Hill.
The editors adopted the slogan “the magazine of news
significance,” and a new era was launched.
Muir changed the title to eliminate the hyphen and on Oct. 4,
1937, the magazine hit the newsstands with its new cover and new features.
The early Newsweek had
its successes. It
aimed to please those who didn’t like Time, which had already
established a reputation for its opinionated slant on the news and sometimes
irritating “Timestyle.”
Osborne Elliot, who was editor from 1961-78, wrote in his
memoirs The Land of Oz: “Its managers had the good sense, in those
simpler times, to decide that its mission was to ‘separate fact from opinion’—a
not so subtle dig at Time….
But for all its sparkling jewels in ‘the back of the book,’ Newsweek’s basic offering was a bland and unexciting rehash of the week’s
events.”
Newsweek struggled along during the 1940s and 1950s.
Magazine historians Tebbel and
Zuckerman described Newsweek this
way: “It had no distinctive writing style and no particular approach to the
news except to digest it, yet it was cast in roughly the same format as Time
with the same kind of departmentalization.”
Media critic Ben Bagdikian criticized Newsweek
for taking its news from the New York Times in a 1958 article:
“Taking one issue of Newsweek at random (16 June 1958), one
finds that the National Affairs page carries information, which is 53 percent
identical with news in the New York Times for the days during which Newsweek
was being compiled…. In addition, the interpretation that Newsweek
puts on news events, particularly
foreign events, appears to follow closely the New York Times
editorials of that week.”
Nevertheless Newsweek shared in the big circulation gains of the
newsmagazines in the fifties.
Its circulation rose about 80 percent between 1950 and 1962 when
its circulation was 1.5 million.
That same year its publisher reported that the magazine had
earned a profit each year for the past twenty years.
Phil Graham, publisher of The Washington Post,
bought the magazine in 1961 for $8,985,000.
The Astor Foundation had been looking for a buyer since the 1959
death of philanthropist Vincent Astor when his 59 percent controlling interest
passed to the trust. Eager
to sell Newsweek, the foundation began hunting a buyer. Among the
serious bidders was Newsweek board chairman Malcolm Muir, 75, who hoped
to enlarge his family’s 13 percent share of the magazine.
But Graham’s offer of $50 a share was $5 better than Muir’s.
One of Graham’s first moves was to promote Osborn
Elliot, the magazine’s
36-year-old
managing editor, to editor.
Elliot wrote that at the time he became editor, “Newsweek
was in shambles. Not
only had the editor left, the whole staff was shot through with drunks,
incompetents, and hacks.”
Phil Graham managed the magazine for only two years
before he committed suicide in 1963.
The Washington Post Company was owned by his wife Katherine
Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer.
When Phil Graham died, Katherine Graham took over as publisher.
She gave the magazine the infusion of talent and capital it
needed to compete with Time.
The editorial budget, which was $3.4 million in 1960,
increased to more than $10 million by the time the decade ended.
Hundreds of thousands more was spent to improve its graphic
design and production capabilities.
Osborne Elliot wrote, “We…set out after Henry Luce’s Time;
we figured it was vulnerable because of its set ways, its predictable
politics, its snideness, and its cuteness of
language.” By the late 1960s, it surpassed Time in revenue for a few
years by appealing to a younger, liberal generation with ingenious slogans
such as “the newsweekly that separates fact from fiction” and “the most
quoted newsweekly.”
Chris Welles wrote in Esquire: “Over
the past few years Newsweek has
often been superior to Time in assessing the meaning, significance and
implication of the news…and in recognizing many of the major trends of the
1960s, such as awakening of black aspirations, changes in the mood of the
younger generation, the decline of the validity and belief in the Cold War
dialectic of anticommunism and containment….”
Newsweek
senior editor Jonathan Alter said that in the mid 1960s, Time editors
were pro-Vietnam war and not terribly interested in race relations. “So Time
missed the two big stories of the 1960s and Newsweek moved quickly and
effectively to fill the gap and became a vital newsmagazine.”
Magazine historians Tebbel
and Zuckerman wrote, “Under Osborn Elliott’s direction at the time, such
veterans of the magazine as Kermit Lansner and
Gordon Manning explored the problems of blacks, the counterculture, and other
tumultuous events of the time.
When the Vietnam War began to be a national concern, Newsweek
was ahead of Time in describing the way it was tearing the country
apart.”
One of Newsweek’s advantages over its rivals in the 1960s was its access to the
White House in both the Kennedy and LBJ years.
Katherine Graham was a personal friend of both the Kennedy’s
and the Johnson’s. Ben
Bradlee was Washington bureau chief for Newsweek
before he became executive editor of the Washington Post.
“He was JFK’s best friend
before Kennedy became the president.
So suddenly Newsweek had a pipeline to the White House.
People in the White House knew that Bradley and Kennedy were
close. So
suddenly Newsweek became must-reading in the Kennedy crowd,” said
Alter.
Newsweek published a cover story on the women’s liberation
movement titled “Women in Revolt” in March 1970 and became the first
newsmagazine to do so. Ironically, it was also the first to have a sex
discrimination lawsuit filed against it.
That same month forty-six women at Newsweek filed a
complaint with the EEOC claiming discrimination. Editor Osborne Elliot
admitted, “I’m sure the frustration of these women was fueled by the fact
that there was only one woman writer at Newsweek at the time and she
was judged too junior for the assignment, so a free-lancer, Helen Dudar,
the wife of one of Newsweek’s
writers, Peter Goldman, was hired to write the cover.”
Newsweek employed several women as researchers, but never
promoted them any higher.
Among the talents that Newsweek
overlooked were Ellen Goodman, Nora Ephrom,
Susan Brownmiller, Elizabeth Drew, and Jane Bryant
Quinn, all of who served the magazine in the traditional woman’s role of
researcher. The
complaint was eventually resolved by promising to hire more women as writers
and promote more to editor’s positions.
A disturbing sign at Newsweek, which was also to occur in later
years at U.S. News, was its history of changing editorships.
From 1972 to 1984, it had five editors: Elliott, Edward Kosner,
Lester Bernstein, William Broyles, and Richard Smith.
Smith, however, gave the magazine a stability for the
next twenty years that it had never enjoyed.
Said Jonathan Alter, “Since Smith became editor of the
magazine in late 1983, we’ve had very stable leadership, and that contrasts
sharply to the fifteen years prior to that when we had a revolving door series
of editors. What
Rick has done has exercised quiet but effective leadership in stabilizing the
magazine and simultaneously keeping it on a creative edge.
He manages both the business side and the editorial side
exceptionally well. There
used to be a church-state separation, but Rick bridged the two and did it
without compromising either.”
Mark Whitaker was named editor in 1998 when Smith was promoted to
chairman and CEO. Whitaker,
a 1979 summa cum laude graduate of Harvard, is the only
African-American to edit a major newsmagazine.
He joined the magazine in 1981 as an associate editor after
spending two years of postgraduate study at Oxford University. Whitaker
oversaw Newsweek’s groundbreaking coverage of the Monica Lewinsky
scandal, which was honored with the National Magazine Award in the reporting
category in 1999.
Newsweek holds more National Magazine Awards than any other
newsmagazine. It
earned the “General Excellence” award in 2002 with the judges praise of
the magazine’s coverage of September 11, 2001, and the weeks that followed.
Newsweek has earned nine awards while Time has
received six and U.S. News has two National Magazine Awards. Newsweek
has also earned twelve Gerald R. Loeb awards, business journalism’s highest
honor, while Time has earned only three and U.S. News has none.
Newsweek was the first major magazine to produce a quarterly
CD-ROM version sold by subscription and at retail in 1993.
Wired magazine called it “Big Media’s most visible
accomplishment to date.”
In the fall of 1994, Newsweek replaced the quarterly
CD-ROM with a combination of online service and special-issue CD-ROMS.
On October 4, 1998, Newsweek.com launched on the World Wide Web,
combining the weekly magazine with daily updates from MSNBC and
Washingtonpost.com.
Newsweek
editors:
1.
Samuel T. Williamson: 1933 - 1937
2.
Malcolm Muir: 1937-1961
3.
Osborne Elliot: 1961-1969 and 1972-1975
4.
Ed Kosner: 1969 – 1972
5.
Lester Bernstein: 1975 -1982
5.
William Broyles: 1982-1984
6.
Richard Smith: 1984-1998
7.
Mark Whitaker: 1998 – current
U.S. News & World Report
is the youngest of the “big three” among the newsmagazines.
While always trailing the other two in circulation, it has
enjoyed growth throughout its 55-year history. Circulation now reaches 2.2
million paid subscribers.
It has distinguished itself with its straightforward, hard news
reporting on national and international news with particular attention to the
business of government.
It has also emphasized service journalism with its “News You
Can Use” sections. The
magazine’s annual college rankings have become popular, sometimes making the
news in other newspapers and magazines and often causing controversy.
A.
David Lawrence and the origins of the magazine
Its historical reputation as the “conservative”
newsmagazine is probably inaccurate and based largely on the reputation of
founder David Lawrence, who was also a widely syndicated newspaper columnist.
Lawrence wrote a column for fifty-seven years—from 1916 until
his death in 1973—which was syndicated in more than 300 newspapers. Even
Arthur Krock, three-time Pulitzer Prize winning
Washington correspondent for the New
York Times, described U.S. News
as, “the unadorned presentation of facts on national and international
affairs. Any expression of opinion was confined to Lawrence’s signed
editorial.”
The magazine grew out of mergers between several publications founded
by Lawrence during the 1930s and 1940s.
Its first issue dated March 19, 1948, was the result of mergers
between Lawrence’s weekly newspaper United
States News and his weekly magazine World
Report.
David Lawrence was born on December 25, 1888, in
Philadelphia below the tailor shop belonging to his English immigrant father.
The family moved to Buffalo, New York, when Lawrence was a child.
In the Buffalo public library, Lawrence began reading the Congressional
Record, where the accounts of Congressional activities and speeches
fascinated him. His first newspaper work was as a sports photographer for the Buffalo
Express when he was fourteen.
Soon after enrolling at Princeton in 1906, he became the correspondent
for seventeen newspapers in New York and Philadelphia and eventually for the
Associated Press. This financed his education.
As he later recalled, “I had exactly $25 in my pocket and a
pass on the railroad given me by my newspaper when I left Buffalo.”
While Lawrence was a student, Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton
and occasionally lectured government and international affairs classes that
Lawrence attended. Lawrence later said that Wilson influenced his views of
life and politics and international affairs more than any other single
individual. Lawrence
subsequently covered Wilson during his election campaign and in the White
House, where he enjoyed an access to presidential aides not available to other
reporters.
Lawrence had a way of taking advantage of his setbacks.
The only course he failed was Spanish, which caused him to work
even harder on learning the language.
When the Mexican revolution hit, he was the only AP staff member
who knew Spanish. Consequently,
he was sent to Juarez to cover the fighting.
His energy and ingenuity in getting the news out ahead of his
competitors brought him a gold watch from the Associated Press for “exceptionally
valuable services.”
Lawrence left Princeton to work for the Associated
Press in 1910, where he stayed five years.
He left the Associated Press in 1915 to become Washington
correspondent for the New York Evening
Post, where he stayed until 1919.
He began writing a column for the Evening Post in 1916,
which enabled him to become the first syndicated columnist in the U.S. whose
columns were distributed nationally by wire.
He wrote this column from 1916 until his death in 1973.
In 1919, Lawrence left the Evening Post to found the
Consolidated Press, which furnished a feature and financial news service to
large daily newspapers. The financial service, which was carried by leased
wire to leading dailies from coast to coast, delivered market quotations and
important business news at a speed never before available.
In 1926, he founded a newspaper, The
United States Daily.
“In the early 1920s, I became convinced that an
information gap existed between the American people and their government,”
he later recalled. “….
“I decided to establish The
United States Daily as a newspaper devoted entirely to the official
statements of all branches of the government.”
The United States Daily
lasted until 1933 when, he said, “I learned that a daily documentary
publication does not attract advertising because different sections were read
only by particular groups.”
Again turning adversity into progress, he launched The
United States News as a weekly newspaper on May 17, 1933.
This newspaper became the earliest forerunner of U.S.
News & World Report.
“The times were bad. A few weeks before, all the banks had
been closed and the gloom of the worst depression in American history
surrounded us,” Lawrence wrote.
This paper covered not only governmental activities, but also
general news of national affairs. The newspaper grew to 85,000 circulation
before Lawrence changed it to a magazine format on January 1, 1940.
The first and succeeding issues of the magazine called itself
“the only magazine devoted entirely to reporting, interpreting
and forecasting the news of national affairs.”
Following the end of World War II, Lawrence quickly recognized the vast
scope of U.S. role and influence in world affairs.
In May 1946, he founded World
Report magazine to focus on
international affairs and analysis.
The magazine reached a circulation of 125,000 within a few weeks.
Within eighteen months, however, he saw the advantages of
combining the two weeklies.
“By 1948, national and international affairs had
become so interwoven…that we combined the two magazines into one called “U.S.
News & World Report,” he wrote.
“By that time, our publishing enterprise had met practically
all of its financial problems, and we were out of the red and were making a
good profit.” At
the time of the merger, World Report
reached a circulation of 125,000 and United
States News reached 300,000 subscribers.
The first issue was published Jan. 2, 1948.
A “Memo from the Publishers” in that issue read:
In
fact, in these momentous times, a line can no longer be drawn between the news
of national and international affairs.
For truly they have become inseparable.
Since the Marshall Plan developed in recent months it has been
increasingly difficult for our news editors to classify an article as “national”
or “international.”
It will be our constant endeavor to present the news
objectively. Instructions
to the news staff have always been to report the facts without bias of any
kind.
In a 1969 speech, Lawrence summed up the history of his magazine by
describing it as a “two-way system of communication.”
He said, “It told the influential people of the country what
the government was doing. It turn, it told government what the citizens—in
business in the professions, on farms, in factories, in the field of
education, and the sciences, in urban and rural life-were doing throughout the
country. This
Two-Way System of Communication…is a connecting link between the government
and the governed.”
Lawrence claimed several innovations for the magazine.
First was “spot analysis,” which he described as “an
attempt to relate the news to the life of the individual—to put into
perspective what has happened and to project forward the consequences of the
day-to-day headlines as indicating short-range or long-range trends.”
Second was what Lawrence called the “pictogram.”
His friend and New York
Times reporter Arthur Krock wrote in Reader’s Digest,
“Excellent charts, graphs and maps became a U.S.
News & World Report trademark.”
Third, lengthy “Q and A” interviews were a U.S.
News & World Report innovation.
Krock wrote, “One of his [Lawrence’s]
most successful ideas was the broad-ranging question-and-answer interview,
each taped and edited from a lengthy round-table discussion conducted with U.S. News staff with a prominent figure. Information elicited from
these interviews has often made front-page news.”
In a 1959 New Republic article, media critic Ben Bagdikian
noted these features of U.S. News & World Report:
- Lengthy tape-recorded interviews with important news sources, printed
verbatim in question-and-answer form without comment.
- Generous use of full texts of important public declarations, speeches
by politicians, and other spoken news, also without comment within the text.
These plus the interviews may constitute as much as one third of
any one issue.
- Competent, on-the-scene reports by the magazine’s correspondents.
- Full scale analytical pieces on a single theme, with heavy emphasis
on economic reporting.
- Outstanding use of graphic illustrations to clarify economic and
other complex news.
“In 1957, it averaged 90 pages a week of news, double Time and
Newsweek. But
for political and economic reporting, Time and Newsweek plainly
are outdistanced in space and detail by their younger rival,” Bagdikian
wrote.
Lawrence was a charitable and deeply religious man.
In 1971, two years after the death of his wife, Lawrence gave
his 640-acre Middlegate Farm near Centreville,
Virginia, to the people of Fairfax County.
The land became a park named in honor of his wife: the Ellanor
Campbell Hayes Lawrence Park.
Even when he was barely making enough to take care of
his family, friends said, Lawrence engaged in philanthropies and charities.
Down-and-out old reporters always found a helping hand in their
colleague. Kemler
wrote in 1955, “Lawrence is widely hailed as an almost perfect employer; he
cares for the four hundred-odd workers on U.S. News with an
old-fashioned paternalism.”
Lawrence turned over ownership of the magazine to its
employees on June 30, 1962.
He became chairman of the board and profit-sharing trust and
continued has editor. A statement in the July 9 issue said, “All employees…with
at least one year of service with the company—at present numbering 285 out
of 435 employees—are members of the profit-sharing trust which now becomes
the largest single holder of the company stock.”
Lawrence had sold two previous companies to his employees: the
Bureau of National Affairs and McArdle Printing
Company.
Lawrence died on February 11, 1973, of a heart attack while vacationing
in Florida. Publisher
John H. Sweet wrote in the Feb. 26 issue, “Ten minutes before his death, he
had been on the telephone in a spirited conversation about the future of U.S.
News & World Report.
We who were close to him can take comfort in the thought that he
died as he would have wanted to die—vigorous, active, on the job right up to
almost the moment of his death.” At the time of his death, U.S. News had a
circulation of 1,940,000.
Rabbi Joshua O. Haberman said at his Feb.
14 memorial service at the Washington Hebrew Congregation Temple: “He
conformed to the sages of Judaism who taught that the inner man should be
identical with his outward appearance.”
Haberman said that Lawrence nurtured
his religious faith “not only by loyal participation in this Congregation
but by his unfailing participation in the Senate’s Prayer Breakfast.
He was the only non-Senator to be admitted to this weekly
religious fellowship.”
Upon the death of Lawrence in 1974, the board unanimously chose Howard
Flieger as the magazine’s second editor.
Flieger was born October 11,1909, in
Denver and started his news career twenty years later in Oklahoma. Formerly
the AP White House correspondent, he joined the staff of United
States News in 1945 and was named managing editor of World
Report in 1946. He
became executive editor of U.S. News
& World Report in 1969.
“Mr. Flieger at various times directed our international staff
and organized the coverage and writing of any of the major stories each week.
Several of the magazine’s features were his innovations,”
wrote Publisher John H. Sweet.
Marvin L. Stone became the third editor with the April 26, 1976, issue,
He joined the U.S. News staff in 1960 and had been managing editor for
three years at the time he was chosen editor.
On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Stone
recapped the growth of the magazine: “…from
a beginning 15,040 in 1933, it increased to 750,000 in 1955, to 1 million in
1958, to 1.5 million in 1966, and now tops 2 million.”
He also wrote: “The key to the enduring success of this
publication can be plainly stated: We not only give readers the latest news,
but we also analyze the news, explain its impact on the lives of the American
people and help them plan for the future….
There are news magazines and there are service magazines.
But there is only one news and
service magazine. And
that is U.S. News & World Report.
On June 11, 1984, the board of directors signed an agreement to sell the
employee-owned magazine to Mortimer B. Zuckerman, who paid $163 million to
stockholders and $13 million in notes to senior executives to make up for
deferred compensation.
That came to about $3,000 a share for 56,000 shares.
Industry analyst John Morton called the selling price “pretty
stiff based on the company’s $3.2 million earnings the previous year.”
Zuckerman grew up in Montreal as the son of a tobacco and candy
wholesaler. He earned law degrees from Harvard and McGill, a master’s degree
from the Wharton School of Business, and a bachelor’s degree from McGill.
Although his family worried about him becoming a perpetual
student, at age 24 he joined Cabot, Cabot & Forbes, the
prestigious national real estate firm with headquarters in Boston. Here he
displayed an amazing knack for stitching together real-estate deals and became
a multi-millionaire by the age of 30.
He struck out on his own in 1970 with partner Ed Linde.
They formed Boston Properties and made millions more in the
years to come. By
1985, Zuckerman owned and managed 71 buildings in Washington, Boston, New
York, and the West Coast.
He became a U.S. citizen in 1977.
Zuckerman first became involved with
U.S. News and World Report as a developer in 1981—three years before he
purchased the company.
The employee-owned company wanted to develop its four acres of
prime land in Washington as a long-term investment and chose Zuckerman as a
50-50 joint venture partner.
When the board decided to put the magazine up for bids,
Zuckerman won out over such media giants as Gannett, the newspaper chain, and Gruner
& Jahr, the West German publisher that owned
several U.S. magazines.
Zuckerman’s interest in publishing began with his
1981 purchase of The Atlantic and
the Atlantic Monthly Press.
Longtime friend Dorothy Zinberg, a
professor of government at Harvard, told Fortune: “Mort has a
tremendous desire to be a serious person, a figure of power himself, so that
someone making decisions about public policy says, ‘Gee, I wonder what Mort
Zuckerman thinks of that?’”
The first Zuckerman-chosen editor was Shelby Coffey III, 38, who became
the magazine’s fourth editor on April 1, 1985.
The grandson of a U.S. senator from Tennessee, he graduated from
the University of Virginia and joined the staff of The
Washington Post in 1968.
He moved up through the ranks and was assistant managing editor
for national news at the time of his selection.
Coffey’s tenure, however, was short.
Because of “bad chemistry” between him and Zuckerman, he
lasted only nine months until Feb. 10, 1986, when he resigned to become editor
of the Dallas Times Herald.
One of Zuckerman’s innovations in 1985 was the popular “News You
Can Use” section. The
section focused on personal finance, taxes, careers, and travel, health and
nutrition, etc. Advertisers
loved it. By
1992, U.S. News was selling more ad pages than either Time or Newsweek
and making between $12 and $15 million a year. The section made U.S. News
the fastest-growing newsmagazine for a few years. “It’s a key
differentiating feature that suffuses the whole magazine, said Stephen Smith,
who was editor from 1998 to 2001.
Another innovation at U.S. News was its
annual rankings of colleges and universities, which began in 1983.
The fall of 1987 marked the publication of its annual book, America’s
Best Colleges. The
magazine’s college rankings “cause bitter rivalries among colleges and
universities, which feel an effect in the number of applications each time the
institutions rise or fall on the list,” wrote New York Times reporter
Alex Kuczynski.
Among the controversial criteria the magazine uses in its
rankings include a survey of college presidents and amount of alumni giving.
Nevertheless, the list spawned a profitable side business for
the magazine. The
annual “best colleges” issue in September typically sells more than 50,000
copies—about 40 percent more than typical newsstand sales.
Following Coffee, former Reagan senior aide
David Gergen became the magazine’s fifth editor
beginning with the Mar. 17, 1986, issue. Gergen
was director of communications for the Reagan White House from 1981-84. He
left the Reagan post to teach at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government from
1983-85. After
leaving the magazine, he continued as editor-at-large until 1993 when became a
senior adviser to President Clinton for two years before returning as
editor-at-large.
The longest editorial tenure under Zuckerman was the husband-wife team
of Michael Ruby and Merrill McLoughlin, who held
the co-editor position from 1989 to 1996.
They were widely seen by staff members as editors who
strengthened and improved the magazine’s news coverage.
Brian Duffy was named editor on June 2, 2001, replacing
Stephen G. Smith whom Zuckerman fired.
Mr. Smith, whose three-year tenure was the second-longest under
Zuckerman, fell out of favor with the owner in the midst of a decline in
advertising and circulation.
Zuckerman wanted Duffy to focus more on hard news and
investigative reporting than Smith had. He became the eighth editor since
Zuckerman bought the magazine in 1984.
Prior to joining U.S. News in 2000 as executive editor,
Duffy had been national editor for the magazine between
1986-1988 when he left to join the Washington Post. Prior to
1986, he had been a reporter for Wall Street Journal and the Miami
Herald.
Zuckerman’s management style has proved troublesome
as the magazine experienced rapid turnover of editors-in-chief. Since 1985,
eight editors held the job an average of just over two years each.
Insiders
describe Zuckerman as using a “hands-on” management style that limits the
autonomy and independence of his editors. “Mr. Zuckerman has long been known
for picking up the phone to weigh in on a coming article minutes before
deadline or to criticize an editor about something already published,” the New
York Times reported in 1998.
While all three newsmagazines have declined or barely
maintained their circulation in the last ten years, the drop at U.S. News
& World Report has been the most precipitous.
It has lost half a million readers since its 1989 peak of 2.6
million while its share of the newsmagazine market declined from 25 to 22
percent. The
future looks brighter under Brian Duffy, however, whose experience in hard
news and investigative reporting puts him more in sync with Zuckerman’s
goals for the magazine than previous editors.
Having worked as a reporter and national editor between 1986 and
1998 under Zuckerman, Duffy may have the right chemistry with the publisher to
make it all work and give U.S. News a stability
in leadership it hasn’t enjoyed since the days of David Lawrence.
U.S. News & World Report editors:
1. David
Lawrence: 1948-1973
7. Merrill
McLoughlin and Michael Ruby: 1989 – 1996.
9.
Stephen G. Smith, 1998 – 2001.
10.
Brian Duffy: 2001- current
V.
Conclusion
Total newsmagazine circulation peaked in 1989 at 10,381,000 and then
gradually declined to 9,586,000 by the end 2001 with all three sharing in the
losses. Whether
this eight percent loss is attributable to competition from the Internet is
debatable. There
is some evidence that the Internet has contributed to a circulation loss among
the largest circulation magazines.
Total magazine readership, however, is at an all-time high with
smaller special-interest magazines making up for losses from the larger
magazines.
The
newsmagazines have been a subject of investigation among many academic
researchers. Over
the years, hundreds of academic studies have compared how the three
newsmagazines covered various and sundry issues: women and minorities,
international news, labor unions, particular countries, gay rights, etc.
The majority of these studies, however, have focused around
political issues or presidential races seeking to determine bias in one
direction or another.
Generally, the results have failed to detect any consistent
patterns of bias in any of the three major newsmagazines.
For example, a 1989 Louisiana State University thesis studied
presidential campaign coverage from 1964 to 1988 and found, “No evidence of
coverage bias for or against any political party as a trend in news magazine
coverage.” A
1991 University of Pennsylvania thesis concluded: “In general, politicians
of each party were presented in a relatively even way by the news magazines A
1993 thesis, which focused on the 1992 presidential campaign, found “no
evidence that the magazines were biased with regard to any candidate or party.”
The
lack of bias reflects favorably on the high professional standards all three
newsmagazines have sought to uphold.
While Newsweek, for example, has historical ties to
Democratic leaders, it also publishes columns by George Will, one of America’s
best-known conservatives.
All three have tried to reflect a variety of opinion among their
columnists while separating fact from opinion in their news stories.
Television
and the Internet have forced newsmagazines to change their role from
summarizing the week’s news to one that is more complex and challenging.
Perhaps that new role was best summed up by Time’s
managing editor Walter Isaacson in its 75th anniversary issue: “We
no longer try to do a recap or digest of last week’s news, since we assume
our readers are familiar with most of the headlines,” he said. “Instead,
we try to put events into context, anticipate trends, add new insights and
facts, tell the behind-the-scene tales and explore the questions others forgot
to ask.”
Recommended reading
Busch,
Noel Fairchild. Briton
Hadden, A Biography of the Co-Founder of Time.
New York: Farrar and Straus, 1949.
Donovan,
Hedley. Right Places, Right Times. Forty Years in
Elliot,
Osborne. The
World of Oz.
New York: Viking Press, 1980.
Elson,
Robert T. Time Inc: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise,
1923-1941 (New York: Athenaeum, 1968) and The World of Time Inc., The
Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise—1941-1960 (New York:
Athenaeum, 1973).
Graham,
Katherine. Personal
History. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Halberstam,
David. The
Powers That Be. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.
Leonard,
Devin.”The Importance
of Being Mort, Fortune 142, 11 (13
Nov. 2000), See
also Gwen Kinkead, “Media’s New Mogul,” Fortune
112, 8 (14 Oct. 1985).
Nourie,
Alan and Nourie, Barbara.
American Mass Market Magazines. New York: Greenwood
Press, 1990.
Peterson,
Theodore. Magazines
in the Twentieth Century.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964.
Tebbel,
John and Mary Ellen Zuckerman.
The Magazine in America 1741-1990.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.