One of America's "big three" weekly newsmagazines, Newsweek was founded in 1933, the same year that saw the launch of its rival United States News (later merged with World Report), and just ten years after the newsweekly genre had been established with the appearance of Henry Luce's Time in 1923. The magazine was originally named News-Week by founder Thomas J. C. Martyn, Time's first foreign news editor. News-Week's first issue, on February 17, 1933, featured seven photographs of current events on its cover. Four years later, in 1937, the publication merged with Raymond Moley's Today magazine and, with Vincent Astor as its president, changed its name to Newsweek. Moley had been a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Brain Trust," and the editorial slant of the fledgling publication became generally more liberal than that of Time, though the two publications resembled each other in format and general appearance. Newsweek tried to distinguish itself from its older rival by introducing signed columns and avoiding the breezy language that had come to characterize the Luce publication. The publication was sold to the Washington Post company in 1961, whose liberal-leaning publisher Katharine Graham added journalists and features designed to further distinguish Newsweek from its two rivals.
By the 1950s, Newsweek had already been taking a leading role among American magazines in devoting more serious coverage to the issue of racial diversity in the United States, with in-depth coverage of the "Negro issue" and the struggle for desegregation in the South. By the mid-1960s, when the national consensus was strained by urban unrest and concern over the war in Vietnam, editor Osborn Elliott helped make the publication a vehicle for advocacy journalism. Without compromising its reportage of weekly news events, one of the magazine's issues in November, 1967 included a 20-page section entitled "What Must Be Done." In it, Elliott was quoted as saying, "The reason for this marked change of approach is that the editors have come to believe that at this particular time, on this particular subject, they could not fulfill their journalistic responsibility as citizens by simply reporting what X thinks of Y, and why Z disagrees." Public-policy experts and even rival newsmagazines applauded Elliott's approach, and it encouraged a new breed of advocacy journalists who questioned traditional notions of journalistic "objectivity."
Two incidents in the early 1980s were profoundly embarrassing to Newsweek. In 1981, an account the magazine published of "Jimmy," an eight-year-old heroin addict in Washington, D.C. won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporter, Janet Cooke, who was forced to return the award when she admitted she had embellished details in the story. And the May 2, 1983 issue of Newsweek devoted 13 pages to what were purported to be "Hitler's Secret Diaries"; the magazine was later forced to admit that the story was a hoax.
In the mid-1980s, when Richard M. Smith was editor, Newsweek, always seeking to distinguish itself from Time, underwent a major redesign under the direction of Roger Black. Its first foreign-language edition, in Japanese, was published in 1986, to be followed by a Korean edition in 1991 and a Spanish/Latin American edition in 1996. Also in 1996, Newsweek entered into a licensing agreement with the Most Group, a Russian publisher, by which it would provide material from current issues of the magazine for a Russian language newsweekly called Itogi ("summing up"), with a circulation of 50,000. Maynard Parker, then editor of Newsweek, was quoted as saying "it is the first news magazine in Russia and I'm sure it will be challenging because we are in a country where democracy is a new form and where the free press does not have that long a history." Newsweek further distinguished itself in this period by publishing special issues that offered comprehensive coverage of important news items, historical events, and contemporary ideas. Regular columnists such as Meg Greenfield, Jane Bryant Quinn, George Stephanopoulos, and George Will continued Newsweek's tradition of printing expert opinion side-by-side with its news stories. Its long-running "Peri-scope" column presented background perspective on the week's news, and its "My Turn" column—the only one of its kind among the newsweeklies—became a vehicle for readers to present their own views on important issues. The magazine was praised by observers for the depth of its reportage and for its journalistic restraint during the investigation of President Bill Clinton by Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr in 1998.
In the 1990s, Newsweek was in the vanguard of publications that began disseminating themselves via new digital technologies. It was the first newsweekly to introduce a quarterly CD-ROM version, a move that Wired magazine declared "Big Media's most valuable accomplishment to date." In 1994, the magazine was available online and, in 1998, newsweek.com became available on the World Wide Web with extensive archival material and daily updates. At century's end, Newsweek also had four regional editions (Atlantic, Asia, Latin America, and Australia), four foreign-language editions (Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish), and 22 bureaus around the world. Its circulation in 1999 was reported as 4.4 million worldwide and 3.27 million in the United States.
Further Reading:
Graham, Katharine. Personal History. New York, Alfred A.Knopf, 1997.
Tebbel, John. The American Magazine: A Compact History. New York, Hawthorn Books, 1969.
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