by Joe Owens

Created on: February 25, 2009

The title of this little weekly periodical is about as comprehensive as they come. Entertainment Weekly is an altogether comprehensive overview of the entertainment industry. There is a multitude of competition in this arena, both from print, television as well as internet sources, so being able to distinguish your offering from others is a vital task.

Entertainment Weekly does this extremely well, with the aid of regular writers and staff with the connections to bring the best, most current information straight from those we care to keep tabs on in the industry to us the fans who cannot ever know enough. We get equal portions of television, movie, music and literary coverage. There is a plethora of information from every corner of the entertainment world.

Each week the magazine presents the charts that are most relative to the individual segments we love to follow such as the box office charts, Billboard charts that track sales of music offerings, the Nielsen Television ratings as well as the charts that total books sold. In a world of numbers equating to dollars, these charts tell their own tale of success. For many people, there is a weekly ritual to monitor the success of their favorites, especially if it is a television program that may be teetering on the brink of cancellation.

Every magazine has a limited amount of real estate to work with. The front cover is basically an area the size of a normal sheet of notebook paper. It is the skill of editors in choosing the cover picture that determines the success in selling the magazine. I find Entertainment Weekly's editors to be quite skilled at this task. One of the issues I currently possess has a picture on its cover with Christian Bale's Batman side by side with Heath Ledger's Joker. It was certainly enough to capture my attention.

Keeping with the usual Magazine motive, EW will promote their feature articles on the cover. Usually there is at least one feature from the respective entertainment areas. Of course there are times of year that a specific genre will occupy more space, such as the summer when movies are usually king, or the early fall when television takes its bow.

Also nestled in the pages are reviews of movies, television shows, music and books. These overviews are meant to guide the entertainment enthusiast through the myriad of offerings pouring down the pike at us every week. It helps to have a little guidance, especially in this time of economic uncertainty. Just being able to know what is worth our money makes the cover price worth its value.

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