THE fourth time may be the charm for Life.
After being shut down three times over the past 70 years, most recently in May 2007, the venerable magazine appears to have found new life as an Internet destination.
Life.com, the new digital joint venture of Time Inc. and Getty Images, achieved 600,000 page views when it launched last Tuesday, and by Friday that number soared to 10 million. In terms of unique visitors, the site hit 1 million in its first week.
As part of the venture, Life and Getty combined more than 7 million professional photos that users can check out for free. Life, whose print edition was long known for its collection of iconic photographs, has more than 2 million photos in its archives, while Getty, a worldwide commercial photo agency, has its own extensive photo library that’s updated with over 3,000 new pictures daily.
The site is free to users, so long as the images aren’t used commercially. Rolex, the upscale watch maker, is the exclusive sponsor.
“More than 97 percent of the photos have never been seen by the public before,” said Bill Shapiro, editor-in-chief of the joint venture. “Everybody knows the Alfred Eisenstadt photo of the sailor kissing the nurse on V-J Day, but there were three other rolls of film shot that day in Times Square alone.”
Among the images included on the site is the work of Life photographer Henry Groskinsky, who was in Memphis covering Martin Luther King at the time he was killed in 1968. The now 75-year-old photographer offers some vivid recollections to go with the gripping photos.
The professional-quality photos are edited to appear in five general categories: news, celebrity, travel, animals and sports.
And they are also spicing up the mix with celebrity guest editors doing some of the selecting. For example, last week Ellen Degeneres picked her favorite dog photos from the archives. This week, Yankee legend Yogi Berra did the honors, choosing 11 photos and offering brief commentary on each.
One such shot features Berra arguing with the home-plate umpire after Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson stole home in the first game of the 1955 World Series — the only series the Brooklyn Dodgers ever won.
Berra always insisted that Robinson was out, but in the version accompanying the photo, he says only, “I knew he’d disrupt you if you let him.”
The site includes never-before-seen photos from the archives of Marilyn Monroe as well as the latest photos from this week’s devastating earthquake in Italy.
There are only 20 people working on the venture, and CEO Andy Blau thinks it will be profitable within two years.
“We’re utilizing the infrastructure of both companies,” he said. “It wasn’t a costly development. There’s no money going out for content — it’s all owned content.”
He said he expects the venture to be largely advertising-supported, but there will be an e-commerce component, ranging from selling professionally framed prints to letting consumers de sign their own custom-pub lished books.
“We think e-commerce will be a much bigger percentage of the mix than for most content sites,” said Blau.
Added Shapiro, “Image search is exploding — it’s up by 36 percent in the last year alone.”
US blues
And now back to our regularly scheduled program. There’s more bad news in publishing.
At the start of the year, Mort Zuckerman, tired of losing money with US News & World Report, made the one-time weekly go monthly. He accompanied the move with extensive layoffs.
But apparently, it wasn’t enough to push it into the black.
As a result, he just made another round of job cuts last week.
“It’s the last shoe to drop from the change of frequency,” said one source.
Added a former employee, “They’ve gone way beyond cutting fat and are cutting into the bone.”
Part of the problem appears to rest in the struggle to make the transition from print to Web. According to sources, the weekly Web version of the magazine has a limited number of paying customers, and efforts to make Web videos a new source of revenue are apparently not paying off.
As a result, three in-house Web-video producers were laid off by Editor Brian Kelly last week, along with two more people in the art department. About nine people in total were let go. keith.kelly@nypost.com