lead the way in the ongoing coverage. The new media publication to be analyzed will be Salon magazine, an on-line magazine published and available for free on the World Wide Web, which has covered the scandal extensively and has broken new stories in recent weeks. The analysis will cover the time frame from late January, when the story first broke, to late April, or a total of 14 weeks.
The analysis will consist of three sections. First, an examination of the organization and structure of each magazine will be conducted, with a focus on the amount of space devoted by each to hard news coverage. Second, the relevant articles published by each magazine will be surveyed and described. Additionally, the coverage of each magazine will be analyzed, discussing the angle, stance, possible biases, and goals of both stories in particular and the magazines in general. Finally, conclusions will be drawn about the coverage of the issue by each magazine.
Newsweek, along with Time, is one of the two most popular, if not influential, news magazines on the market. Published weekly, Newsweek provides timely, in depth coverage of major stories on the national and international scene. During the period analyzed, the magazine contained an average of 77 pages per issue, with a high of 80 and a low of 74. However, typically half of these pages consist of advertisements. Generally, about half of the remaining content pages are given over to national and international news; however, there are usually two or more opinion columns included within these sections. The remaining half of the content pages consists of sections covering letters to the editor, business, medicine, society, and the like. During the first weeks of the Lewinsky scandal, the national news section took up the bulk of the content pages, peaking during the third week when 29 of 51 pages dealt entirely with the scandal and investigation, and several of the smaller sections in...