I’ve read TIME since I was old enough to read, which would make it over fifty years now. My parents had a subscription when I was a child, and when I was a child, I liked to look at the pictures (especially of the Apollo moon landings), but I found a lot else in there–good news and commentary. Not that I could necessarily understand it, but TIME was a nice break from what we were assigned as homework in fourth grade, and I learned a lot from it.
Flash forward fifty-some years. I still subscribe to the print edition of TIME. I’m not exactly sure why, except I’ve always read it, and I like receiving it. The latest edition always finds a place in my briefcase, when I have to fly somewhere, or kill time in a courthouse, it is read. Otherwise, it is read at the dinner table.
I don’t subscribe to TIME but my workplace does. Nobody reads it, though so after a while, a colleague who’s in charge of the mail collects the unread issues and brings them to me.
I read them on my way to and from work when I don’t have a book at hand.
I haven’t subscribed in years, and I recently came across a current issue and was surprised at how skeletal it felt.
There was a period when I was 18 or so that I challenged myself to read literally every word of every issue, ads excluded. I kept it going for 6 months or so.
mmm
You know who else did this? John McCain.
When he ran for president, I read an interesting interview with him. He described how Time helped him adapt , when he came back from Vietnam, to the new, strange world of America in the sixties.The hippies, the drugs, the protests, etc…it was all incomprehensible to him after years of isolation and torture in a VietCong prison.
So he went to the library, and sat for days, reading every Time magazine from the previous 4 years in chronological order. He said he read every page of every issue, including the advertisements…till his eyes hurt.Every hour or so he read another week of history, and learn how his country changed, step by step.
Time magazine used to be a great source: easy to read, but good quality news coverage, with some popular culture mixed in. I used to look forward to each new issue every week.
Today, of course, with the internet, there’s no point in reading ancient news. So Time changed its format, and now, as you said, it feels “skeletal”. And I somehow lost interest in it.
Never was much for Time but I still get the Saturday Evening Post in print. Time, as a news source, just never caught my attention as much. I knew a lot of people who were major fans but I just never got to that point myself. It was more like People - something I would pick up and flip through in a waiting-room.
I don’t subscribe, but I take it from the library, and generally read it through. I find I often pick up something there that I didn’t while checking news online – there’s something to be said for reading a general news source straight through, as opposed to clicking just on the headlines that catch your eye.
I’m generally reading it at least a couple of weeks late that way, of course; the most recent issue doesn’t circulate, and I don’t get to the library every week. But that can actually also add a bit in an odd way, in that it keeps me reminded that whatever the news of the day is expecting the implications of something to be, that’s often not how it actually worked out.
My parents subscribed to Time throughout my childhood. I would generally read it as we received it. My parents would keep the back issues of all the magazines they got in the basement and at some point I started going through the old magazines, fascinated by the news and perspectives of … a few years ago.
And then I discovered at a certain age that in the early 1970s, Time used to include topless photos every once in a while—Miss Nude USA, Brigitte Bardot, …
I also learned about what I now know as polyamory from an old Time article. I recall a quote from a married woman along the lines of it was not her husband’s business whom she slept with. That line stuck with me my whole life.
Today I wouldn’t touch it. I don’t know what it’s for. If I’m going to pick up a magazine it will be the New Yorker, or New York, or the Atlantic, or Harpers, or something else with a reputation for quality journalism or writing.
When I was a kid almost everyone had one or more of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report. Whenever I come across one of those now I’m not impressed.
I first subscribed to Time in the early '80s when they ran the commercial of the man on the desert island. The commercial asked the question: If you were on a desert island, and could only have one source of news, what would it be? This was very compelling in the age before the internet, when Time provided you with a weekly review of all the important news you needed to know in a colorful, entertaining style. Yet even with the internet, I continued to subscribe throughout the '00s, because it was enjoyable to read. For a while, they tried to mimic the style of webpage graphics. But at the end of the decade, it seemed redundant when I was continuously getting what I needed from online news sources. Now I see they’ve switched to rather lengthy news columns, which most people don’t have the attention spans for, and print advertising has withered considerably, leaving the magazine rather deflated and less colorful. They no longer run Joel Stein’s entertaining column. It will be interesting to see how long they keep chugging along, like a parched man on a desert island.
How many people remember that back in the day, Time was considered the quasi-official right-wing news source, much as Fox News is today? Newsweek, which was then owned by the Washington Post, made a huge pitch to college students in the 1960s, positioning themselves as the liberal alternative to Time. Since college students were even more impoverished in the 60s than they are today, the subscriptions were dirt cheap and you could renew them at a huge discount. I subbed and was among the Newsweek faithful for decades.
When Newsweek died its horrible death a few years ago, I switched over to Time. It was pretty good for while. But Time-Life sold the magazine in 2017 and the quality nosedived. I got rid of it not much later.
Like thorny locust I pick it up from the library occasionally. But there is seldom any real reason to do so. It’s barely a shadow of its former self.
I’m like Spoons. My parents had it and I read it all the time growing up, along with Macleans (Canadian newsmagazine) and Reader’s digest.
Still have a Time subscription. And, like other posters, I find it’s not as interesting nowadays as it used to be.
Haven’t had a subscription to Macleans in years, because they adopted a snarky/snooty attitude, that the editors of Macleans know better than all politicians and the general public what should be done on the major issues of the day, and looking down on people who just don’t get it. Their loss.
Reader’s Digest i still pick up from time to time.
Another one here who grew up with Time, thanks to my parents’ longtime subscription. I find Exapno’s observation that “*Time *was considered the quasi-official right-wing news source” interesting, given that my parents were (and still are) lefties, so I wonder if it really was as clearly (or stridently) right-wing as all that.
Anyway, I read it voraciously (I pretty much read anything I could get my hands on when I was a kid), and I imagine it meant I was a little more well-acquainted with politics and culture than most of my classmates.
When I moved out on my own, after college, in '89, I wound up with a subscription to *Newsweek *(I think I got some sort of a very low subscription rate at some point), and I kept that subscription for many years, though it’s now probably been at least a decade or longer since I finally let that lapse.
Other than in waiting rooms, or on the newsstand at the airport, I don’t think I’ve seen an issue of *Time *in years (even my parents finally dropped their subscription at some point). In recent years, I keep seeing “special issues” of *Time *at the checkout lines in the supermarket, which are essentially just fluff pieces dedicated to a particular topic (e.g., the royal family, music artists, movie series, etc.)
I don’t recall any implication in the 1970s or 1980s that Time was “right-wing.” It was establishment, mainstream, moderate. U.S News and World Report was the one of the three main newsweeklies that was considered to have a rightward bent.
I still subscribe to TIME. Lately the news section has started going to longer, essay-type articles, rather than the traditional “here’s how we explain what happened last week.”
I would recommend slogging through David Halberstam’s incredibly long 1979 masterwork The Powers That Be for a look at how TIME WORKED. Henry Luce wanted a magazine with a point of view that was:
Pro-American and vigilantly anti-Communist
and pro-Vietnam War until the reporters they sent there eventually convinced the editors what was actually happening
Sensible
Republican
although the editors often wrote flattering stories about Kennedy and Johnson hoping to get access
Culturally middle-brow and middle-class
Pro-government
-until The editors were finally convinced that Watergate was a real thing, at which point they tried to catch up by throwing more resources at it than Newsweek, which was owned by the Washington Post
I remember seeing an interview with an African - American journalist (can’t remember the name - was a long time ago, when Newsweek folded) who said that his father told him that throughout the Civil Rights era, his father thought Newsweek was more sympathetic to the cause of African - Americans than Time was.
Henry Luce died in 1967. All the things Kent Clark talks about are after his death.
During the 1950s and early 1960s he turned rabidly right, mostly because of his hatred of Communism. He was the son of missionary parents in China and he was furious that the U.S. “lost” China to the Communists. He supported McCarthyism in that witch hunt that was actually a witch hunt, and was part of the crowd that turned “pro-American” into a badge that defined who was accepted and who was a traitor. Of course he was pro-Vietnam. By that time he was pro-everything that became the modern right-wing movement.
He did hire a wide range of bright young things for his magazines, many of whom were fine journalists. After his death they did not find it difficult to move Time more toward the center, and to the left of U.S. News and World Report. But you have to wonder what would have happened if he didn’t die at that moment, at the early age of 68, and before Nixon.
Henry Luce hired Otto Fuerbringer, who was managing editor until 1968, as well as Henry Grunwald, who succeeded Fuerbringer and was managing editor until 1977. The editorial philosophy of the magazine did not instantly change when Luce died.
According to Halberstam, Luce was actually lukewarm about Nixon, as was the* Los Angeles Times*, another staunchly Republican voice.
Two things can both be true. I said that Luce hired good journalists who were not all as conservative as him. We can never know what he would have done if he lived to have Nixon as president, but a lot of Republicans were unhappy about Nixon until he miraculously became the leader of the free world and put them back into power.
None of that negates what Luce and his magazines were in the years before Nixon.