For this assignment, I call students’ attention to the fact that styles of news presentation evolve. In the past, the Los Angeles Times was considerably more lurid than it is now. Of the old days at this paper, Iris Schneider (in Images of Our Times: Sixty Years of Photography from the Los Angeles Times) says that:

"In the early 30s and 40s, photojournalism was pretty cut and dried. Photographers covered society balls, and celebrity benefits, and now and then shot human interest, or 'feature' art—such as the little old lady who had sewn 10,000 buttons on her dress. But the bread and butter work was at crime scenes, accidents, and in the courts. They shot divorcées (if they were pretty), car crashes and train wrecks (if they were big), and court proceedings or trials (if they were scandalous). And they often were. Sensationalism ruled the front page."

Her use of past tense implies that this is no longer so, and perhaps for the L.A. Times it no longer is. But what about a newspaper’s sober uncle, the weekly news magazine? These are such publications as Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, or Time. Have these gone through a similar metamorphosis, only in reverse? As the dailies become less like tabloids, does sensationalism now rule the weekly’s front page? I ask the students to decide if Time magazine has less significant content now than it used to have, and, once they decide, to present their findings in a persuasive typed or computer-printed essay. I require that they look at least four back issues of Time, with each issue at least twenty years apart from the one before. They might pick the same date for each, such as a birthday or Bastille Day. Implied in this assignment is a consistent definition of what we mean by “significant content�; each essay should define significance at some point. After all, what to one person may be news lite may be to somebody else an essential update on Madonna’s marital status. As Seeing & Writing shows, they should consider not just the words and topics themselves but also font, layout, color vs. black and white, and the ratio of text to illustration.

Further questions to ask include these: Has vocabulary become dumbed down? What subjects do special essays and theme issues focus on? How many movie stars are there per issue, in comparison to how many civic leaders or novelists or revolutionaries? What in an issue (if anything) is controversial? What is an article’s average length? What has been cropped out of photographs? How many ads are there, and where are they placed? How has the cover evolved? Which magazines (e.g. People, Playboy, Foreign Policy Review, The Economist, and so on) most resemble the issue of Time you are looking at?