Product Code Database
A news magazine is a typed, printed, and published magazine, radio, or television program, usually published weekly, consisting of articles about current events. News magazines generally discuss stories in greater depth than newspapers or do, and aim to give the consumer an understanding of the important events beyond the basic facts.
Television news magazines provide a similar service to print news magazines, but their stories are presented as short television documentaries rather than written articles; in contrast to a daily newscast, news magazines allow more in-depth coverage of specific topics, including current affairs, investigative journalism (including hidden camera investigations), major interviews, and human-interest stories. The BBC's Panorama was one of the earliest examples, premiering in 1953. In Canada, CTV premiered W5 in 1966, running for 58 seasons before being cancelled in 2024 due to budget cuts by its parent company (and being repurposed as a brand for long-form journalism across other CTV News programming and platforms). It was the longest-running program of its kind in North America.
In the United States, the Big Three networks all currently produce at least one weekly news magazine, including ABC's 20/20, CBS's 60 Minutes and Sunday Morning, and NBC's Dateline NBC; of these programs, 60 Minutes typically focuses on investigative journalism, 20/20 and Dateline focus predominantly on true crime stories, Eclipsing the Nightly News | American Journalism Review . Ajr.org. Retrieved on 28 May 2011. while Sunday Morning typically focuses on human-interest stories (up to and including stories on the arts) and has a more relaxed tone.
News magazines proliferated on network schedules in the early 1990s, as they had lower production costs in comparison to scripted programs, and could attract equivalent if not larger audiences. At the same time, newer newsmagazines—including syndicated offerings such as A Current Affair, Hard Copy and Inside Edition—often had an infotainment skew with a larger focus on tabloid stories (including coverage of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, and the Menendez brothers and O.J. Simpson murder cases), rather than the harder journalism associated with 60 Minutes and 20/20 at the time. CNN president Ed Turner argued that these shows had eclipsed the networks' evening newscasts as their flagship programs, at the expense of their news divisions' traditions of hard journalism.
By the late-1990s, Dateline would establish a niche in true crime to set it apart from its competitors—a format that would bolster its popularity, and lead the show to being on as many as five times per-week at its peak. NBC experimented with other news magazines in the 2010s, including Rock Center with Brian Williams—a more hard news-oriented program that aired for two seasons, and Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly—a short-lived primetime vehicle for the former Fox News correspondent. In 2025, CBS relaunched its weekday CBS Evening News with a more news magazine-like format, focusing on in-depth stories rather than summarizing top stories like its competitors.
Some local television stations in the U.S. have produced news magazines, although they have largely been displaced by cheaper programming acquired from the syndication market. An exception is WCVB-TV in Boston, which has continued to produce the nightly news magazine Chronicle since 1982.
In Brazil, TV Globo's Sunday-night news magazine Fantástico has historically been one of the top programs on Brazilian television, although its dominance is no longer as absolute as it was in the past due to competition from variety shows such as SBT's Programa Silvio Santos, and from Record's competing news magazine Domingo Espetacular.
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