On a bookcase in my office here at The Weekly Standard may be found a well-thumbed copy of a volume entitled Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (1968) by Robert T. Elson.
It is the authorized account of the world’s first (and by far most successful) “weekly newsmagazine” and was commissioned by Time’s surviving co-founder, Henry R. Luce. As it happens, Luce didn’t live to hold a copy of Time Inc. in his hands since he died the year before it came out. But it was published in the year I graduated from high school and, saving my pennies, I purchased a copy ($10) as soon as I could afford one.
I concede that in the annus horribilis 1968 the notion of an adolescent eagerly scooping up the corporate history of what was then regarded as a Republican press empire—and very much anathema in my parents’ household—must seem unconventional. But I had already settled on journalism as a livelihood, and while I had no aspiration ever to work at Time—indeed, at a distance, it seemed a little unpleasant—my scientific interest in the tribal rites of the East Coast/Ivy League/WASP world personified by Luce and his enterprise made it a must-read.
I should pause, at this juncture, to explain that Time—a weekly digest/compendium of news and middlebrow culture—was the bright idea of two well-heeled Yale graduates (Luce and Briton Hadden) who managed to raise enough capital among friends and family to commence publication in 1923. Few anticipated that a rewrite of the previous week’s events in a breathless, singularly wiseacre style—later brilliantly parodied by the New Yorker’s Wolcott Gibbs—would find an audience. But Time was a huge and unexpected hit and, after Hadden’s premature death in 1929, Luce proved to be an entrepreneur of genius.
Among many successful offshoots and enterprises, Luce invented a monthly magazine featuring business (Fortune, 1930), an oversized revue largely dependent on photographs (Life, 1936), and a weekly journal about sports (Sports Illustrated, 1954).
Partly because he has no contemporary equivalent, it’s difficult to describe in 2018 the ubiquity and influence of Henry Luce at midcentury. Of course, in those days, publisher-proprietors considered it a right and privilege to influence the editorial tone and decisions of their properties; and while some (William Randolph Hearst) were more prone to intervention than others (Arthur Hays Sulzberger), Luce’s hand was comparatively light but unmistakable.
Luce was very much a Republican of the pre-Goldwater school and, as the son of Presbyterian missionaries in China, a partisan of Chiang Kai-shek long after Mao Zedong had chased him to Taiwan. Still, in the 1930s and ’40s he was an ardent internationalist when the GOP was not—his essay on “The American Century” (1941) still makes for useful reading—and in the 1950s his magazines were politely hostile to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
As often happens, however, at precisely the moment when the empire seemed most formidable—signified by Elson’s comprehensive history—cracks had begun to appear in the façade. This might have had something to do with Luce’s own gradual withdrawal from the field but was largely a reflection of changing times and markets. Television essentially put Life out of business—it “suspended” weekly publication in 1972—and Newsweek had long been nipping at Time’s heels.
Something of the old Luce touch was reflected in the Time-Life corporation’s debut of the celebrity chronicle People in 1974, but the advent of cable TV, digital technology, and the Internet hastened Time’s “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.”
These reflections are prompted by the news last week that Time has been purchased from its latest owner, Meredith Corp., by a software executive named Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce, and his wife, Lynne. Meredith, a media conglomerate that bought Time Inc. last November, has been trying in the intervening months to sell off such individual properties as Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and Time—but with little success. The sale price of Time to the Benioffs ($190 million) puts it beyond the reach of the casual buyer, but it’s surely a bargain compared with the likely cost in Time’s heyday.
It is worth noting as well that Mr. and Mrs. Benioff purchased Time for themselves, not as a Salesforce acquisition. This is the same financial arrangement under which Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013 with his personal funds and Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, acquired a majority stake in the Atlantic last year. As of this past February my own onetime employer, the Los Angeles Times, is now the property of a wealthy South African-born transplant surgeon, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong.
To be sure, as a lifelong member of the guild, I am thankful for these various philanthropic gestures. The survival of publications is preferable to the alternative, and both the Times and Post have lately been spending money and hiring staff. But the operative word here is “philanthropic.” In the midst of the digital/cable revolution, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that these are charitable, not business, investments. The long-term prospects of print publications remain unclear, and who knows what the Benioff and Soon-Shiong heirs will think of weekly newsmagazines and venerable daily newspapers?
In that sense Time—and for that matter, its moribund competitor Newsweek—is a case in point. My own view is that, especially since the eclipse of the Luce tradition, the journalists at Time, like their brethren in the newspaper business, have sought to adapt to changing times not by appealing to the people who purchase their product but by publishing a magazine congenial to the editorial staff. It’s a slow-motion journey on the road to obsolescence.
Nowadays, reading Time is a little like picking up an issue of the Nation with corporate advertising. For a long time the enormous circulation and diversified wealth of Time Inc. made this possible and certainly insulated Time from the vagaries of the market. But the sands are running out of that particular hourglass, and the market forces currently throttling daily newspapers are, like market forces generally, inexorable—and distinctly unsentimental.
