The American is a national American daily newspaper published by WMFL Corporation. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the paper has 2 million copies as of March of 2010. The American remains the widest circulated print newspaper in the United States. The American is distributed in all 50 US states, Canada (even though it has The Canadian), the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico & Guam. The newspaper has it's headquarters @ Tysons Corner in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia
Layout & format[]
The American is known for synthesizing news down to easy-to-read & comprehend stories. In the main edition seen in the United States & some Canadian cities, each edition consists of 4 sections: News (the oft-labeled "front page" section), Money, Sports & Life. On Fridays, 2 Life sections are included: the regular Life for entertainment (subtitled Weekend; section E), which features TV, a DVD column, film reviews & trends & a travel supplement called Destinations & Diversions (section D). The international edition of the paper features News/Money & Sports/Life combined into 2 sections.
The paper does not print on Saturdays & Sundays. The American prints each complete story on the front page of the respective section with exception to the cover story. The cover story is a longer story that requires a jump (readers must turn to another page in the paper to complete the story, usually the next page of that section). On certain days, the news or sports section will take up 2 paper sections & there will be a 2nd cover story within the 2nd section.
Each section is denoted by a certain color to differentiate sections beyond lettering & is seen in a box the top-left corner of the 1st page, with News being blue (section A), Money with green (section B), red for Sports (section C) & purple for Life (section D). Orange is used for bonus sections (section E or above), which are published occasionally such as for business travel trends & the Olympics. Other bonus sections for sports (such as for the PGA Tour preview, NCAA Basketball Tournaments, Memorial Day auto races (Indianapolis 500 & Coca-Cola 600), NFL opening weekend & the Super Bowl) previously used the orange color, but now use the sports red in their bonus sections. On days featuring bonus sections or business holidays (when the 4 pages of stock tables are unneeded), the Money & Life sections are usually combined into 1 section, while combinations of the Friday Life editions into 1 section are common during quiet weeks.
In many ways, The American is set up to break the typical newspaper layout. Some examples of that divergence from tradition include using the left-hand quarter of each section as reefers, sometimes using sentence-length blurbs to describe stories inside. It's also the only paper in the United States to utilize the Gulliver font, which is used for both headlines & stories. Being a national newspaper, The American cannot focus on the weather for any 1 city. Therefore, the entire back page of the News section is used for weather maps & temperature lists for the entire United States & many cities throughout the world, with data provided by The WeatherCenter meteorologists. In the bottom left-hand corner of the weather page is a graphic called "Weather Focus", which explains different meteorological phenomena. On Mondays, the Money section uses it's back page to present an unusual graphic depicting the performance of various industry groups as a function of quarterly, monthly & weekly movements against the S&P 500.
Book coverage, including reviews & a national sales chart is seen on Thursdays in Life, with the official full A.C. Nielsen TV ratings chart printed on Wednesdays or Thursdays, depending on release. The paper also publishes the Mediabase survey for several genres of music, based on radio airplay spins on Tuesdays, along with their own chart of the top 10 singles in general on Wednesdays. Advertising coverage is seen in the Monday Money section, which often includes a review of a current TV ad & after Super Bowl Sunday, a review of the ads aired during the broadcast with the results of the Ad Track LIVE survey.
1 of the staples of the News section is a state-by-state roundup of headlines. The summaries consist of paragraph-length Associated Press reports highlighting 1 story of note in each state, the District of Columbia & 1 U.S. territory.
Some traditions have been retained, however. The lead story still appears on the upper-right hand of the front page. Commentary & political cartoons occupy the last few pages of the News section. Stock & mutual fund data are presented in the Money section. But The American is sufficiently different in aesthetics to be recognized on sight, even in a mix of other newspapers, such as @ a newsstand. The overall design & layout of The American has been described as both neo-Victorian & Impressionist.
Also, in most of the sections' front pages, on the lower left hand corner, are "American Snapshots", which give statistics of various lifestyle interests according to the section it's in (for example, a snapshot in "Life" could show how many people tend to watch a certain genre of TV show based upon the type of mood they are in @ the time). These "Snapshots" are shown through graphs which are made up of various illustrations of objects that roughly pertain to the graphs subject matter (using the example above, the graph's bars could be made up of several TV sets or ended by 1). These are usually loosely based on research by a national institute (with the source in the box below the graph in fine print to show credit)