Television News Magazines

Christopher H. Sterling

A television news magazine is a program offering several (typically three or four) segments that each focus on a different story, often presented by a different reporter. Such programs generally focus on soft rather than harder cutting-edge news, on stories driven by personality, investigative reporting, crime news, celebrities, and social trends. Most of them have increasingly trended toward tabloid news. By the late 1970s, commercial network documentaries were disappearing given their reliance on a single hard news topic per program, their production cost, relative lack of advertiser interest, and the controversy (and sometimes legal actions) that often resulted from their airing. Only public television's PBS offered regular documentary series. As cable networks developed in the 1980s, they took over much of the documentary role from the broadcast networks. One question facing the broadcast news divisions was how to fully utilize the reporters and stories that often could not fit into ...

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