"News of the World" initially received mixed reviews, mostly reflecting on the album's shift towards a more minimalist sound, and away from the band's previous predominantly progressive rock sound. "The Washington Post" commended the band's experimentation within a range of hard rock to soft rock, while "Rolling Stone" magazine's Bart Testa noted, "Most of the songs on News of the World either challenge Queen's artistic enemies or endeavor to establish a vision of the new order." He further dismissed the album as "the salient fictions of which today's Top Ten albums are made." For "The Village Voice" in 1977, Robert Christgau said that one side of the album is devoted to "the futile rebelliousness of the doomed-to-life losers (those saps!) (you saps!) who buy and listen", while the other is devoted to songs about indecent women.