Entertainment Weekly

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Entertainment Weekly

Cover of the February 8, 2012 issue
Managing Editor Jess Cagle
Categories sun
Weekly
Total circulation
(2011)		 1,797,384
First issue February 16, 1990
Company Time division of Time Warner
Country United States
Based in New York City, New York
Website ew.com
ISSN 1049-0434

Entertainment Weekly (sometimes abbreviated as EW) is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture. Unlike celebrity-focused publications Us Weekly, People Weekly, and In Touch Weekly, EW's primary concentration is on entertainment media news and critical reviews. Unlike Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, which are aimed at industry insiders, EW targets a more general audience.

Contents

[edit] History

Created by Jeff Jarvis and founded by David Morris, who served as publisher until October 2007[1], the magazine's original television advertising soliciting pre-publication subscribers portrayed it as a consumer guide to popular culture, including movies, music, and book reviews, sometimes with video game and stage reviews, too. ("the post-modern Farmers' Almanac").[clarification needed]

The first issue was published on February 16, 1990, and featured singer k.d. lang on its cover. The title word "entertainment" was not capitalized on the cover until mid-1992 and has remained so since. By 2003, the magazine's weekly circulation averaged 1.7 million copies per week. In March 2006, managing editor Rick Tetzeli oversaw an overhaul of EW's graphics and layout to reflect a more-modern look.[citation needed]

[edit] Typical content and frequency

The magazine features celebrities on the cover and addresses topics such as television ratings, movie grosses, production costs, concert ticket sales, ad budgets, and in-depth articles about scheduling, producers, showrunners, etc.

It publishes several "double issues" each year (usually in January, May, June and/or August) that are available on newsstands for two weeks; because the magazine numbers its issues sequentially, it counts each double issue as "two" issues so that it can fulfil its marketing claim of 52 issues per year for subscribers.

[edit] Layout

Cover of Entertainment Weekly issue Volume 1, Number 1, dated February 16, 1990. Featured on the cover is the singer k.d. lang.

Entertainment Weekly follows a typical magazine format by featuring a letters to the editor and table of contents in the first few pages, while also featuring advertisements. While many advertisements are unrelated to the entertainment industry, the majority of ads are typically related to up-and-coming television, film or music events.

[edit] News and Notes

These beginning articles open the magazine and as a rule focus on current events in pop culture. The whole section typically runs eight to ten pages long, and features short news articles, as well as several specific recurring sections:

  • "The Must List" is a two-page spread highlighting ten things (books, movies, songs, etc.) that the staff loves from the week; it usually features one pick from EW readers.
  • "First Look", subtitled "An early peek at some of Hollywood's coolest projects", is a two-page spread with behind-the-scenes or publicity stills of upcoming movies, television episodes or music events.
  • "The Shaw Report" is a small sidebar feature, written by Jessica Shaw that rates several trios of related trends: one that is "in"; one that is "five minutes ago" (recently fashionable but no longer so); and one that is "out".
  • "The Hit List", written each week by critic Scott Brown, highlights ten major events, with short comedic commentaries by Brown. Typically, there will be some continuity to the commentaries. This column was originally written by Jim Mullen and featured twenty events each week, and Dalton Ross later wrote an abbreviated version.
  • "The Hollywood Insider" is a one-page section that reports breaking news in entertainment. It gives details, in the separate columns, on the most-current news in television, movie and music.
  • "The Style Report" is a one-page section devoted to celebrity style. Because its focus is on celebrity fashion or lifestyle, it is graphically rich in nature, featuring many photographs or other images. Recently,[clarification needed] the page converted to a new format: five pictures of celebrity fashions for the week, graded on the magazine's review "A"-to-"F" scale (see Reviews section below). A spin-off section, "Style Hunter", which finds reader-requested articles of clothing or accessories that have appeared in pop culture recently, appears frequently.
  • "The Monitor" is a two-page spread devoted to major events in celebrity lives with small paragraphs highlighting events such as weddings, illnesses, arrests, court appearances, and deaths. Deaths of major celebrities are typically detailed in a one-half- or full-page obituary titled "Legacy". This feature is nearly identical to sister publication People's "Passages" feature.
  • The "celebrity" column, the final section of "News and Notes", is devoted to a different column each week, written by two of the magazine's more-prominent writers:
  • "The Final Cut" is written by former executive editor and author Mark Harris. Harris' column focuses on analyzing current popular-culture events, and is generally the most serious of the columns. Harris has written about the writer's strike and the 2008 presidential election, among other topics.
  • "Binge Thinking" was written by screenwriter Diablo Cody. After several profiles of Cody in the months leading up to and following the release of her debut film, Juno (2007), she was hired to write a column detailing her unique view of the entertainment business.
  • If You Ask Me..." Libby Gelman-Waxer (Paul Rudnick) was brought in to write his former Premiere Magazine column for Entertainment Weekly in 2011. [2]

[edit] Feature articles

There are typically four to six major articles (one to two pages each) within the middle pages of the magazine. These articles are most commonly interviews, but there are also narrative articles as well as lists. Feature articles tend to focus mostly on movies, music and television and less on books and the theatre. In the magazine's history, there have only been a few cover stories (e.g., John Grisham, Stephen King) devoted to authors; there has never been a cover solely devoted to the theater.

[edit] Reviews

There are seven sections of reviews in the back pages of each issue (together encompassing up to one half of the magazine's pages). In addition to reviews, each reviews section has a top-sellers list, as well as numerous sidebars with interviews or small features. Unlike a number of European magazines that give their ratings with a number of stars (with normally 4 or 5 stars for the best review), EW grades the reviews academic-style, so that the highest reviews will get a letter grade of "A" and the lowest reviews get an "F", with plus or minus graduations in between assigned to each letter except "F".

The sections are:

  • "Movies" typically features all the major releases for that weekend, as well as several independent and foreign films that have also been released. Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman are the two primary film critics, with occasional reviews by Scott Brown and Gregory Kirschling. It also includes "Critical Mass" - a table of the grades that have also been given by a number of noted movie reviewers in the American press (such as Ty Burr from The Boston Globe, Todd McCarthy from Variety and Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun-Times). Additionally, this section includes the box-office figures from the previous weekend and some sort of infographic. The A+ rating is rarely awarded by EW. Two films to have received it are Citizen Kane and My Left Foot (1989). DVDs are now profiled in the one-page "Movies on DVD" section that follows.
  • "What to Watch", currently written by Jessica Shaw, features brief, one- or two-sentence reviews of several television programs on each night of the week, as well as one slightly longer review, usually written by someone else, with a letter grade.
  • "Music" reviews major album releases for the week, divided by genre. There is also typically at least one interview or feature, as well as a section called "Download This", highlighting several singles available for download from the Internet. A table displaying record sales and airplay for the previous week is also included.
  • "Books" features reviews of books released during the week. Sometimes, authors will write guest reviews of other works. There is also typically one interview or spotlight feature in this section per issue. Bestseller lists appear at the end of this section.
  • "Theater"* reviews productions currently playing, listed by the city where they are running.
  • "Games"* reviews current video game releases.
  • "Tech"* reviews new websites and products, and profiles current Internet or technology phenomena.
* Not in every issue.

[edit] The Bullseye

This section occupies the back page of the magazine, rating the "hits" and "misses" from the past week's events in popular culture on a bullseye graphic. For example, the May 22, 2009, edition featured Justin Timberlake hosting Saturday Night Live in the center, while the then-drama between Eminem and Mariah Carey missed the target completely for being "very 2002". At the time when this was printed on a small part of a page, events that were greatly disliked were shown several pages away.

[edit] Specialty issues

Every year the magazine publishes several specialty issues. These issues are often published as double issues (running for two consecutive weeks). Many times these features are so long that they replace all other feature articles.

Common specialty issues include:

  • Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter Preview issues — Generally each quarter the magazine reports on upcoming releases in movies, music, television, live shows and books. Typically the summer issue's focus will be on upcoming movies only unless major television series or events, music releases or book releases are occurring then.
  • The Photo issue — Once a year, an issue is dedicated to featuring (aside from the normal reviews and news content) only photographs of celebrities. Unlike tabloid issues, these photographs done with the celebrities' cooperation, and often they use some form of artistic expression. A wide variety of celebrities have been used, including Green Day, Reese Witherspoon, Morrissey, the cast of the television series Arrested Development, Tobey Maguire and Cameron Diaz. Generally, the photographs will contain some descriptive text, sometimes about the person or sometimes a commentary from the photographers who photographed them for a story.
  • Academy Awards issues — In the past the magazine devoted at least four cover stories per year to the Academy Awards; "The Oscar Race Begins" issue in January predicts the nominees, the "Nominees" issue in February profiles the recently announced Oscar contenders, the "Oscar Odds" issue predicts the winners the week before the awards, and the "After-Awards" issue covers the ceremony the week after it airs. Virtually every issue mentions the Oscars in some capacity, often on the cover, and a film or actor's Academy-Award chances are often noted in the magazine's reviews. In comparison, music's Grammy Awards, television's Emmy Awards, and theater's Tony Awards are given relatively limited coverage.
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