News magazine

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 newscasts do, and aim to give the consumer an understanding of the important events beyond the basic facts.

Broadcast news magazines

Radio news magazines are similar to television news magazines. Unlike radio newscasts, which are typically about five minutes in length, radio news magazines can run from 30 minutes to three hours or more.
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, major interviews, and human-interest stories. The BBC's Panorama was one of the earliest examples, premiering in 1953. In Canada, CTV [Television Network|CTV] premiered W5 in 1966, running for 58 seasons before being cancelled in 2024 due to budget cuts by its parent company. 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,' while Sunday Morning typically focuses on human-interest stories 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 (American TV program)|A Current Affair], Hard Copy and Inside Edition—often had an infotainment skew with a larger focus on tabloid stories, 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. To compete with 20/20 and Dateline, CBS premiered a Wednesday-night edition of 60 Minutes known as 60 Minutes II in 1999; unlike its competitors, the program was positioned as having a similar style to its Sunday-night counterpart. 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. Westinghouse Broadcasting created the Evening Magazine format for its stations, and syndicated it to other markets as PM Magazine; the program used a hybrid format mixing locally-produced segments with national content. These programs largely been displaced by cheaper programming acquired from the syndication market, but there have been exceptions such as WCVB-TV in Boston—which has continued to produce the nightly news magazine Chronicle since 1982, and Evening on KING-TV in Seattle—which originally premiered in 1986 as the local franchise of Evening Magazine.
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.''