A news magazine is a typed, printed, and published piece of paper, magazine or a radio or television program, usually weekly, featuring articles or segments on current events. News magazines generally go more in-depth into stories than newspapers or television programs, trying to give the reader an understanding of the context surrounding important events, rather than just the facts.
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 up 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. These broadcasts serve as an alternative in covering certain issues more in-depth than regular newscasts. The formula, first established by Panorama on the BBC in 1953 has proved successful around the world. Television news magazines provide several stories not seen on regular newscasts, including celebrity profiles, coverage of big businesses, hidden camera techniques, better international coverage, exposing and correcting injustices, in-depth coverage of a headline story, and hot topic interviews.
In the United States, television news magazines were very popular in the 1990s, since they were a cheap and easy way to better utilize the investment in national television network Nightly News departments. Television news magazines once aired five nights a week on most television networks.[1] However, with the success of reality shows, news magazines have largely been supplanted. Reality shows cost slightly less to produce and attain a younger and more loyal audience than the news magazines they replaced. Thus, the audience once attracted to news magazine shows have largely drifted to Cable television in the United States, where common news magazine topics such as nature, science, celebrities, and politics all have their own specialty channel.
Most commercial broadcasting television stations have local news that refers to news coverage of events in a local context which would not normally be of interest to those of other localities, or otherwise be of national or international scope.
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