The editors and chieftains at Time Inc. can breathe a sigh of relief: Their magazines won’t be swallowed up by a pedestrian publishing company run out of (gasp) Des Moines, after all.
Never in the annals of writerly and editorial vanity could there have been a more discomfiting reversal of fortune. Time Inc. once bestrode the narrow earth like a colossus, its bureau chiefs arguably more important and influential than the US ambassadors in the same foreign capitals in which they served.
Its editor in chief was so powerful that when he went to check out a new magazine’s office in White Plains in 1983, half an hour by car from Midtown, he took a Sikorsky. And so, when he tired of the tour, he spoke these immortal words to a lackey: “Get me my helicopter.”
I worked at Time magazine as a researcher 30 years ago between the ages of 21 and 23, and I found myself dining at Lutece on the company dime, partying on the QE2, encouraged to drink free hard liquor to my heart’s content on the nights we worked late, scolded because my $32 monthly expense report wasn’t in the hundreds of dollars and in general made to understand that my grand institution’s resources were almost literally infinite.
Yes, that was then, and this is now; all media belts have tightened, everybody’s worse off. But even so, for Time’s “books” (as the magazines were known) to become just another set of properties in the portfolio of the company that made its mark with Family Circle and the Ladies Home Journal?
In Iowa, yet.
The deal fell through. Now it appears Time’s “books” will once again run independent and free of distant corporate overlords. Which they did for 66 years, until Time Inc. foolishly merged with Warner Communications in 1989 and forced its publications down the the road to utter irrelevancy.
And thereby hangs a tale. Despite all the talk about how the Internet destroyed the “model” for media profitability (which is the excuse commonly used to explain the decline of all print publications), Time Inc. could have saved itself, elevated itself and preserved itself for the ages.
It could have done this by doing two things: It could have gone upscale, and it could have gone right-wing.
Its advertising people pushed for the largest possible circulation numbers — reader eyeballs that they could sell to major advertisers at a huge premium. The problem was that “growing” the readership of Time and Fortune and Sports Illustrated practically required dumbing down the magazines to appeal to a wider and (by definition) less literate and less engaged audience.
Time could have resisted the lure of this pitch, and instead focused on its loyal readers and readers in general — people who liked magazines rather than those who wanted the Sports Illustrated football-shaped phone offered by the cute girl with the headset in the ads.
It could have doubled down on seriousness rather than draining its books of it — not to be pompous, but to define a new upscale mass market. But it went the other way and the serious market came to be defined instead by the Economist, which mints money and has managed to mint it even more effectively in the Internet era.
And had Time Inc. retained the right-of-center politics of its founder, Henry Luce, instead of simply becoming another anodyne tub of liberal mush, it could have seized the day there as well — before Rush Limbaugh, before Fox News and before the publishing houses that discovered a huge audience for information of interest to conservatives, meaningful to conservatives, or (at the very least) not offensive to conservatives.
It had both of these possibilities in its hand, Time Inc. did. And it tossed them away.
It could seize them still. But who imagines it will? Who imagines it even could? Now it’s not even good enough for Iowa.