Subject: The Instant-News Age Leaves Time Magazine Searching for a Mission
Date: Published: 5/12/93 (340 lines)
Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

[Note:  This article has nothing explicitly to do with AIDS, but
has been included because the magazine is important in reporting
on AIDS stories. -- sysop]

    At a Crossroads:
    The Instant-News Age
    Leaves Time Magazine
    Searching for a Mission
    ---
    Impact Waned in Muller Era;
    Can New Editor Restore
    Weekly's Days of Glory?
    ---
    `It's the Reporting, Stupid'
    ----
    By Patrick M. Reilly
    Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

    When Bill Clinton took a commanding lead in the polls over George
 Bush a month before last November's election, Time magazine staffers
 proposed a major story on how Mr. Clinton might govern.  Reporting
 assignments were doled out, files gathered and cover headlines
 debated.  But as the election drew near, Time editors never felt the
 week was right to run the story.
    Rival Newsweek thought otherwise.  Using virtually the same words
 Time editors had debated, Newsweek's Oct. 26 cover read:  "President
 Clinton?  How He Would Govern."  Time's cover that week:  a skull
 illustrating findings from the unearthing of a frozen prehistoric
 man -- a discovery made a year before and reported in the press at
 the time.
    As Time celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, the magazine
 is finding it harder than ever to live up to its catchy slogan:  "If
 it's important to you, you'll find it in Time."
    Since its founding by Henry Luce in 1923, perhaps no other
 publication has been so dominant in the American imagination,
 society and politics.  Time monitored America's heartbeat before
 television, and has marked every milestone from the rise of Hitler
 to the emergence of the personal computer.
    But the past few years have been difficult.  Despite a series of
 editorial changes, exhaustive focus-group studies and a sweeping
 redesign last year, the magazine continues to grope for its mission
 in the age of 24-hour-a-day electronic news.  In Time's effort to
 remain relevant to a generation brought up to watch television, some
 critics say it has mistakenly abandoned the hard-charging news role
 that made it great.
    "Time was once the voice of the country, but the redesign was a
 great mistake, maybe a disastrous mistake," contends Roger
 Rosenblatt, a senior writer at Time in the 1980s.  "They should have
 stuck to their primary business of giving readers a comprehensive
 view of the news.  Today, it's almost an anti-newsmagazine."
    Gene Roberts, professor of journalism at the University of
 Maryland and former award-winning editor of the Philadelphia
 Inquirer, says Time is "groping for a mission and a role."
    "Once, Time had a real sense of what it was and was trying to
 do," he says.  Now, "I am not sure what it is that they see
 themselves doing that is essential."
    Other news weeklies have struggled to find their place in the era
 of electronic media, but nowhere have the problems been more acutely
 felt than at Time.  "We had become largely irrelevant in journalistic
 and political communities in this country," says Stanley Cloud,
 until recently Time's Washington bureau chief, and now a
 contributing editor.  "We weren't read as we used to be by decision
 makers, as often and with as much care.  We are trying to correct
 it."  Last November, Jason McManus, editor in chief of the Time Inc. 
 magazine group, removed managing editor Henry Muller, who had been
 in his job since 1987 and who redesigned the magazine in 1992.  Mr. 
 Muller was promoted to editorial director under Mr. McManus, a move
 that surprised even Mr. Muller.  "I was having a good time at Time,"
 he says.  "I would have known what to do with the magazine for
 several years and been happy to do it."
    Mr. McManus says that it was his decision alone to name a new top
 editor at Time, and that he moved Mr. Muller to prepare for
 succession in corporate editorial positions.  But many company
 insiders and editors believe the move was the result of mounting
 concern over Time's direction and was endorsed by Time Warner Inc. 's
 new chief executive, Gerald R. Levin, a veteran of Time prior to its
 1989 merger with Warner Communications Inc. Mr. Levin declines to
 comment.
    Mr. Muller denies that his transfer indicates the company was
 dissatisfied with his performance.  "Time Warner doesn't answer
 failure with promotions," he says.  "I wouldn't be here if there was
 any perception of failure at Time."
    Time's new chief, James Gaines, is already shaking things up.  As
 the 13th managing editor in Time's history, Mr. Gaines is the first
 never to have worked there -- and to have worked at Washington Post
 Co. 's Newsweek -- which he views as a distinct advantage.  "I have a
 fresh view," he says.  "I have no preconceived notion about how to do
 things."  In the 1980s he ran Time's celebrity-driven People, and had
 impressed superiors with a weekly edition of Life published during
 the Persian Gulf War.
    In his first address to staffers in January, Mr. Gaines called
 for a return to the strengths of Time's past:  getting "better facts,
 stories before the competition gets them, and detailed, illustrative
 reporting," one staffer recalls.  Mr. Gaines says, "I want the
 magazine to be something people can't wait to read."
    He has his work cut out for him.  Since the merger, the magazine
 has slipped in importance next to Time Warner's massive cable,
 record and movie operations.  That diminished stature has been
 painfully clear inside Time.  Morale reached a low in September 1991
 when Time bore the brunt of staff reductions at the magazine group,
 losing 39 positions, including 19 correspondents.
    More recently, Time's journalistic reputation has taken a
 shellacking.  In March, readers of the American Journalism Review,
 mostly journalists, were asked to vote for the "best magazine
 coverage of the 1992 presidential campaign."  Newsweek was the
 hands-down winner, a repeat performance from 1988.  Time came in
 third in a field of three, after U. S. News & World Report.
    Then in April, Newsweek won two National Magazine Awards -- one
 of them for "general excellence" among the country's largest
 magazines.  Time, which last won a National Magazine Award in 1986,
 was not nominated in any category.
    Meanwhile, Time has been twopunched by an advertising recession.
 Though it still commands among the industry's highest ad rates, its
 net profits, once the highest in the Time Inc. stable of magazines,
 fell from about $52 million in 1989 to $29 million in 1991,
 recovering modestly in 1992.  People is now the profit leader at Time
 Warner's magazine group, which also includes Sports Illustrated,
 Life, Fortune and Money.
    Though Time says its gross ad revenue and profit per ad page are
 still the highest of the three news weeklies, its total ad pages
 slipped in 1992 for the third straight year; once the leader in the
 category, Time ranked third.  Through the second issue of May, Time
 was down 10% in ad pages, according to Media Industry Newsletter.
 Newsweek and U. S. News had increases.  Time attributes the dip to its
 higher ad rates and what it claims is rampant rate cutting by
 rivals.
    Time's circulation still leads the pack at about 4.2 million, far
 ahead of Newsweek and U. S. News, which have been steady at about 3.2
 million and 2.3 million, respectively, for the past five years.
 Still, Time's circulation is down from 4.6 million in the late
 1980s, when it was expensively pumped up by discounted offers and
 electronic giveaways, such as telephones.  Circulation improved
 modestly in the second half of 1992, yet newsstand sales fell
 slightly despite the new redesign.
    That redesign was the culmination of sweeping changes Mr. Muller
 began when he took over in 1987, in the midst of an inexorable shift
 in the balance of power in the media world.  On television, Cable
 News Network was turning into an essential, world-wide media
 powerhouse.
    "Time had to have something to offer millions of readers who
 could turn on the TV and see events occur around the world," says
 Mr. Muller.
    Challenges to Time and the news weeklies were also coming from
 the print media.  USA Today was raising the standard for how color
 and graphics could help tell stories -- traditional magazine
 strengths.  The publishing world was exploding with newmagazines
 keyed to readers' special interests.  Even big-city daily newspapers,
 facing declining readership, were reinventing themselves, stressing
 analysis and stronger writing.
    The result was the news weeklies spent much of the past decade in
 fits of soul-searching, fearful they could become obsolete unless
 they made changes.
    At U. S. News & World Report, chairman and editor-in-chief
 Mortimer Zuckerman refocused the magazine on service,
 news-you-can-use journalism, increased its political and business
 coverage and played down stories on social trends and entertainment.
 In 1992, it carried 160 more pages of hard news than Time, according
 to Hall's Magazine Reports.
    At Newsweek, editor-in-chief Richard M. Smith introduced his own
 successful redesign, adding a simpler organization of six major news
 sections and increasing the use of graphics.  The magazine added
 unconventional news sections such as Health, Family and, more
 recently, Aging.  It juiced up its Periscope page with newsy gossip
 and short, funny takes on people in the news.  And it steered clear
 of ponderous big-theme stories, instead sticking close to the
 previous week's big story.  Undergirding its decisions was a 1989
 independent study of its future, which showed, Mr. Smith says, that
 readers "wanted news that went beyond TV, and valued our national
 news and analysis."
    At Time, Mr. Muller set about making fundamental changes soon
 after his arrival.  He began to dismantle Time's decades-old system
 of correspondents filing copy from bureaus to be rewritten in New
 York.  Instead, he pushed for reporters to write from the field,
 feeling their writing would carry more immediacy.
    In 1988, sounding a note of urgency, he launched a revamp of the
 magazine.  "We have to reinvent Time, to dare something more radical
 than the periodic renovations of Time through the decades," Mr. 
 Muller said in a press release.  Unveiling what he called a "1990s
 approach to newsmagazine journalism," he introduced sections such as
 Travel and Interview and a more dramatic combination of photos and
 text for big stories.  More important, he tinkered with the
 traditional approach to news.  The main text of Time's stories, he
 said, "will not be an obligatory regurgitation of familiar material.
 The stories will devote more space to ideas, to analysis; they can
 have a point of view...."
    Mr. Muller's hallmark would be Time's attraction to pursuing
 broad themes and trends, and sometimes cosmic questions, all in
 pursuit of his favorite dictum, that Time should "go beyond the
 news."
    How far beyond?  A cover on "Evil" in 1991 was an essay on the
 nature of evil in world affairs.  "What Does Science Tell Us About
 God?"  explored signs of a divine role in the creation of the
 universe.  Even when it reported important news, Time sometimes
 seemed off the news of the moment.  The week of Hurricane Andrew, one
 of the biggest domestic stories of 1992, Time featured on its cover
 the famine in sub-Saharan Africa.  Time gave the U. S. disaster
 relatively scant coverage in eight paragraphs, while Newsweek ran a
 dramatic and lengthy cover story.  John Stacks, Time's deputy
 managing editor, says Andrew had already been heavily covered by the
 media, and Time decided to go big with the original reporting and
 photography on Africa.
    At Newsweek, such decisions were seen as proof of its hegemony in
 the news-weekly field.  In a rah-rah memo to editorial and sales
 staff a week after the hurricane, editor-in-chief Mr. Smith
 gleefully stoked the fires of the cross-town rivalry:  "In the last
 few months, I've resisted the easy argument that Newsweek is the
 only true newsmagazine.  On the basis of this week's evidence, that
 resistance is weakening.  I'm proud that we know what our role is.  .
 .  ."
    Mr. Muller's high-minded editorial philosophy did not sit well
 with Time's business side.  By the late 1980s, there was real concern
 his approach was off the mark, sacrificing Time's leadership
 position to an increasingly aggressive Newsweek.  There were signs of
 weakness:  Time's internal research showed the median age of its
 subscribers rising steadily through the 1980s, to about 40 today.
 The magazine wasn't attracting enough younger readers.  The cost of
 getting and keeping subscribers was also soaring.
    Robert Miller, world-wide publisher of Time in the late 1980s and
 currently president of Time Inc. Ventures, was so concerned that he
 hired outside consultants.  After months of phone surveys and focus
 groups, the research results seemed to contradict Mr. Muller's
 approach of ideas and analysis over simple reporting.  The studies
 showed readers wanted "hard news-economic, political, and
 international news," Mr. Miller says.  "It was collectively
 management's interpretation that there should be a rededication and
 focus on that.  It actually gave us confidence that Time could be
 Time, concentrating on what it did best."
    By late 1989, Mr. Miller had cut back Time's towering costs by
 lowering the costly-to-maintain circulation level from 4.6 million
 to 4 million.  But he was also lobbying hard for editorial changes.
 While Mr. Miller declines to comment on Mr. Muller's work,
 internally he was harshly critical, colleagues say.  "The attack on
 Henry Muller was coming from the business side, and the business
 side was right," says one of Time Inc. 's top editors.  "The problem
 was the magazine was off the news, not sharp, not crisp."
    Walter Shapiro, a former Time senior writer who is now Esquire's
 White House correspondent and still contributes to Time, recalls
 that when he left Newsweek for Time in 1987 he was astonished by how
 far in advance Time decided what was news.  At Newsweek, top editors
 regularly ripped up story lists from Monday or Tuesday and scattered
 writers to cover late-breaking stories.  At Time, Mr. Shapiro says,
 "the Monday or Tuesday story list didn't change much as the week
 went on."  Some major political stories were approved by editors 10
 days in advance.  "The Newsweek approach can be taken to ridiculous
 degrees," Mr. Shapiro says.  "But of the two, it's certainly better
 for a newsmagazine to be willing to make enormous changes at the
 last minute than be locked in concrete."
    By late 1990, urged on by Mr. Miller, Mr. McManus, the Time Inc. 
 editor in chief, had convened an in-house committee of writers and
 editors to investigate the future of Time and of the news-weekly
 idea itself.  The report of the task force was never released, not
 even internally, but insiders say it hammered at the structural
 problems of Time.  "It said Time takes itself too seriously, it needs
 less pontificating, and wasn't reaching an audience that found it
 compelling or of urgency or import," says one executive.
    While admitting the task force was critical of some of his
 innovations, Mr. Muller says that "it didn't say turn back the
 clock, turn Time into a rewrite magazine."  The findings "were an
 endorsement of where we were already heading," he adds.  As the
 commission was still meeting in early 1991, Mr. Muller was moving
 separately on his own redesign plan.
    By the time the commission readied its report at midyear, Mr. 
 Muller had established an off-site "safe house" on Manhattan's Upper
 East Side where design work was done, and by August 1991 he showed a
 prototype to Mr. McManus.  Gone was the weekly department format Time
 invented-World, Nation, Religion and so on.  Instead, Mr. Muller
 proposed three distinct sections:  a tight recap of the week's news
 at the front of the book, followed by a "well" of feature stories,
 and finally an arts and reviews section.
    Mr. Muller believed the design would permit Time to give stories
 the space they needed rather than dicing up news into confining
 departments.  There was a distinct feeling among some others, though,
 that the magazine was abandoning its franchise, that the new
 three-section Time was too similar to other feature magazines.  Mr. 
 Shapiro contends the redesign was just part of the problem.  "The
 lack of imagination in presenting the magazine is far more
 important," he says.  "Time would have been a boring magazine in 1991
 and 1992 no matter what it looked like."
    Mr. Muller defends the direction the magazine took under him --
 including its 1992 presidential campaign coverage and the failure to
 run the planned cover on how Mr. Clinton would govern.  He says that
 the story "wasn't good enough to run" and that Time did a much
 better job with a post-election story.
    Top magazine editors judging the national awards took a different
 view:  They honored Newsweek in the "single-topic issue" category for
 its special election issue entitled "How He Won:  The Untold Story of
 Bill Clinton's Triumph."
    Yet the Time cover story on the prehistoric man that ran the week
 Newsweek went with the Clinton cover sold extremely well.  Newsstand
 sales were about 375,000 copies, well above the average of about
 200,000.  Newsweek also did well by sticking to politics.  Newsstand
 sales of the Clinton cover were about 210,000 copies, compared with
 an average of about 180,000.  But while newsstand sales are watched
 closely by all magazines, they represent less than 10% of
 circulation at Newsweek and Time.
    So far, Mr. Muller's successor, Mr. Gaines, is enforcing Time's
 new dictum of better, more thorough reporting.  Time staffers were
 amazed to learn that Mr. Gaines reads virtually all files as they
 come in from correspondents to check the development of stories as
 the week progresses.  Mr. Gaines says that in Time's previous efforts
 to go beyond last week's news, "we did substitute analysis for
 fact."  Borrowing a line from the Clinton campaign, Mr. Gaines says
 he told the staff, "Look, if I had a campaign slogan, it would be
 `It's the reporting, stupid.'
    "Mr. Gaines has begun to tinker with and loosen up Mr. Muller's
 design and concept.  Time plans to replace the gossipy Grapevine news
 column with a column called Informed Sources, while also cutting
 back the weekly news recap to five pages.  Mr. Gaines is adding
 shorter pieces inside Time, seemingly a partial return to the
 departmentalized approach Mr. Muller threw out.  Later in the summer,
 Mr. Gaines, a classically trained pianist, will rename the
 back-of-the-book Reviews section and add more cultural coverage.
    Mr. Gaines has already impressed staffers with his approach.  When
 former tennis star Arthur Ashe died of AIDS late on a Saturday
 afternoon in February, Time had already closed its issue for the
 week and was only hours away from going to press.  Mr. Gaines got
 word that evening after arriving at his Manhattan home from dinner
 out with his wife.  Within the hour, he arrived at Time's midtown
 offices with two colleagues, ripped out the back-page essay and
 began reporting and writing an eloquent tribute to the activist
 athlete, working well past midnight.
    Time's last three covers before this week-on dinosaurs, the
 deaths in Waco, Texas, and the ascent of Hillary Rodham Clinton --
 have been its three bestselling issues on newsstands so far this
 year.
    While most of Time Inc. 's top executives are watching such sales
 numbers closely, Mr. Gaines is taking a longer view.  Two years from
 now, he says, he hopes the magazine's readers will feel "they can't
 understand their world precisely without reading Time."
    He adds, "It's certainly not my goal to maintain the status quo.
 Time and the times ask for change."

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]