Entertainment Weekly

• 1. Introduction

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  Entertainment Weekly hit newsstands on the 16th of February 1990, with a pitch that felt almost audacious in its simplicity: a weekly consumer guide that would tell ordinary readers what was worth watching, listening to, and reading. Not the trade secrets that Variety and The Hollywood Reporter traded in. Not the celebrity gossip that Us Weekly and People feasted on. Something in between, and unlike anything that had come before.

  The magazine was created by Jeff Jarvis and founded by Michael Klingensmith, who served as its first publisher. Its parent, Time Inc., would pour $150 million into the project before seeing a return. For six years, the bet looked shaky. Then, at the end of 1996, Entertainment Weekly turned its first six-figure profit. By its peak years, it was generating $55 million annually. What had been a gamble became a franchise. What had been a weekly magazine would, decades later, become something else entirely.

• 2. Finding the Niche

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  Early television advertising for Entertainment Weekly described it as a consumer guide to popular culture. That positioning was deliberate and carefully placed. The magazine sat in a gap no one had quite identified: it was not for people inside Hollywood, and it was not fixated on celebrity romance and scandal. It was for the curious general reader who wanted to know whether a film was worth twelve dollars, whether an album deserved their attention, and what the television landscape looked like heading into the fall season.

  Film, television, music, Broadway theatre, and books all fell within its scope. So did video games and new technology, at least in some issues. The magazine graded everything on an academic scale, running from A to F, with plus and minus gradations between each letter except F. The A+ rating was treated as genuinely rare. Two films had earned it as of the magazine's print run: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane and the 1989 film My Left Foot. That restraint gave the grades meaning. Readers knew that an A from Entertainment Weekly required earning it.

• 3. Awards and Milestones

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  In 1996, Entertainment Weekly won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors. That was the same year the magazine turned its first profit, a pairing that marked a turning point in the publication's standing. The award came again in 2002, confirming that the recognition was not an aberration.

  The 1,000th issue arrived on the 4th of July 2008, and the editors used the occasion to publish a top-100 list spanning movies, television shows, music videos, songs, Broadway shows, and technology from the previous 25 years. The range ran from 1983 to 2008. Beginning with its 1,001st issue, the magazine overhauled its look entirely, enlarging fonts and photographs and cutting the word count across its columns. The redesign signaled an awareness that readers were increasingly scanning rather than reading at length, a shift that would define the pressures bearing down on the magazine for the next decade.

• 4. Sections and Voice

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  Inside each issue, the architecture was recognizable and consistent. "Sound Bites" opened the news section, presenting media personalities alongside their recent quotes in speech bubble form. "The Must List" highlighted ten things the staff loved that week, with one pick drawn from readers. "The Hit List" had been written originally by Jim Mullen and featured twenty items per column; later versions, written by Scott Brown, trimmed that to ten and added brief comedic commentary.

  The back pages were dense with reviews, which could account for up to half the magazine's pages in any given issue. "Critical Mass" compiled grades from named critics in the American press, including Ty Burr from The Boston Globe, Todd McCarthy from Variety, and Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun-Times. The final page each issue was "The Bullseye", a graphic that placed the week's cultural events on a target, rating them as hits or misses. The edition of the 22nd of May 2009, for instance, placed Justin Timberlake's hosting turn on Saturday Night Live at the center of the target while the then-running feud between Eminem and Mariah Carey was judged to have missed the target for being, in the magazine's phrase, "very 2002".

• 5. Entertainer of the Year

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  Each December, Entertainment Weekly named an Entertainer of the Year chosen by readers at the magazine's website. The list reads as an informal chronicle of the cultural moment. Bart Simpson took the honor in 1990, the year the show became a phenomenon. Jodie Foster followed in 1991. Steven Spielberg won in 1993, Tom Hanks in 1994. Television casts appeared regularly: Saturday Night Live in 1992, Friends in 1995, Lost in 2005, Grey's Anatomy in 2006.

  J. K. Rowling won in 2007, and the magazine noted that she was the first honoree known primarily for writing. Robert Downey Jr. won in 2008. Sandra Bullock won twice, in 2009 and again in 2013. Taylor Swift also won twice, in 2010 and 2019. Starting in 2017, the magazine shifted from naming a single winner to recognizing between ten and sixteen honorees each year. The 2022 list, which ran to ten names, included Jennifer Coolidge, Bad Bunny, Harry Styles, Michelle Yeoh, and Jeremy Allen White.

• 6. Transition and Survival

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  By August 2019, Entertainment Weekly had already reduced its print frequency to a monthly schedule, even though the name still carried the word "Weekly." Before the switch, the publication had been putting out only 34 issues per year, well short of the 52 implied by its title. The change came as celebrity coverage had spread across digital platforms and print advertising had contracted. Meredith, which had acquired Time Inc. in a deal valued at $2.8 billion, briefly considered selling the title. It kept Entertainment Weekly in part because the magazine was deeply connected to People, one of Meredith's strongest performers.

  In September 2016, Entertainment Weekly and People had jointly launched an online video network, later rebranded PeopleTV in September 2017. The accompanying plan called for expanded digital coverage around the clock, weekly digital covers, a podcast presence, and events tied to stars and festivals. Editor Henry Goldblatt was replaced by JD Heyman, previously deputy editor of People, a change that resulted in the departure of roughly fifteen staff members.

• 7. Going Digital

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  On the 9th of February 2022, Entertainment Weekly ceased print publication. The final physical issue carried an April 2022 date on its cover. In May 2022, executive editor Patrick Gomez moved into the editor-in-chief and general manager role, overseeing a publication that now existed entirely online.

  The Greek edition of the magazine's website had launched on the 2nd of August 2021, making Greece the first country outside the United States where Entertainment Weekly was available. The magazine's website, EW.com, had been ranked in April 2011 as the seventh-most-popular entertainment news property in the United States by comScore Media Metrix. Alongside the website, the magazine had also established a radio presence on Sirius XM. One award EW created independently of its print operation was the Poppy Awards, formerly called the EWwy Awards, which honor television series and performers not nominated for the Primetime Emmy Awards across ten categories, with all voting done online and open to the public.