Page 160 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

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USES AND GRATIFICATIONS. See Elihu Katz.

U.S. NEWS was started by David Lawrence in 1933, 10 years after the start of
Time. Lawrence was already a well-known political reporter and columnist. In
1926 he had started U.S. Daily, which carried full texts of government an-
nouncements, court decisions, and documents. He dropped that when he started
U.S. News. Because he thought there was a need for a magazine devoted entirely
to world news, he started World Report in 1946. The two publications were
combined into U.S. News and World Report in 1948.
Lawrence's focus always was on political and economic news, and US. News
has never dealt with entertainment or human interest. It thus is a more serious
magazine than either Time or Newsweek. It has always lagged behind those two
in circulation, but currently it has 2.3 million subscribers. That is slightly more
than half of Time's circulation and about a million less than Newsweek's.
While the magazine is generally viewed as conservative, it has always sought
to be objective. Studies of its coverage of presidential elections have found it
to be in the middle between Time and Newsweek in favorability to the Repub-
lican candidate.
SOURCES: Philip S. Cook, Douglas Gomery, and Lawrence W. Lichty, eds., The Future
of News: Television-Newspapers-Wire Services-News Magazines, 1992; Theodore Peter-
son, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, 1964.
Guido H. Stempel HI