The Last Days of Time Inc(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
The Last Days of Time Inc
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/19/business/media/time-inc-oral-history.html
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I have a collection of war-time and after '45-'53 Time magazines. The sheer palpable weight of the government minders on the writers is clearly evident. The magazine has always been 'political'.
I subscribed to Time around then and tend to agree... it shifted from news to entertainment in my mind. I remember being puzzled why they gave ink to Joel Stein (?) writing an odd mix of comedy/irony as a news magazine feature. It seemed like an odd desperate grasp for new young readership but it alienated their base, even the younger ones of us. It wasn't what I signed up for and I let my subscription lapse.
Get some old magazine to compare with new ones.
I know that for all the ones I used to like I changed into liking their older releases more. But they changed so much that I can't stand any of them today.
I know that for all the ones I used to like I changed into liking their older releases more. But they changed so much that I can't stand any of them today.
I have to echo this sentiment. I described it to a friend as me losing confidence in using Time as a reference in a semi-formal graduate paper. It sort of became an entertainment classification in my mind after that too.
That was exactly the period when blogging came into its own and current events were happening at such a pace (9/11! anthrax in the mail! aluminum tubes!) that news-lite magazines like Time pretty much had to get out of the game.
Time Magazine in the days of Henry Luce was already politicized, for instance, being a strong supporter of Chiang Kai-Shek. I'm not sure what political turn you have in mind, though.
Is it that wild or political to support a leader trying to protect China from communist rule and the cultural destruction caused by Mao Zedong? It doesn’t seem political so much as just supporting basic human rights.
"Supporting basic human rights" is nearly always politicized. Consider how little we hear about human rights in Saudi Arabia, undoubtedly a repressive regime, versus other countries with which the United States has unfriendly relations.
Furthermore, the idea that Chiang Kai-shek was a supporter of human rights really doesn't line up well with reality.
Furthermore, the idea that Chiang Kai-shek was a supporter of human rights really doesn't line up well with reality.
Chiang Kai-Shek is not exactly known for his respect of human rights; he became a dictator notable for his brutal suppression of dissent and political opposition.
It does not get more political than human rights and supporting basic human rights is a genuinely political position. Not sure what concept of politics would be needed to manage to exclude such hot-topics from its plate.
gravis7777(2)
The article has a Mad Men -like quality to it. Ivy-elites white males running the business, women related to research roles. Amazon has a series which reflect the news business, based on Newsweek, from the 1960s.
Good Girls Revolt https://www.amazon.com/Good-Girls-Revolt/dp/B017AOY4WS
Good Girls Revolt https://www.amazon.com/Good-Girls-Revolt/dp/B017AOY4WS
From the article,
The culture was so “Mad Men,” even at the height of the
feminist movement, that my boss felt free, when we worked
late closing the magazine on Fridays nights, taking all the
young male writers out to dinner at the steakhouse
downstairs without a thought that they were walking past the
offices of the only two women in the hall — me and my
friend, the late Susan Tifft. Susan, a staunch feminist,
confronted the boss. But we never did get to that
steakhouse.I'm not sure why some people felt that was an unfair comment. I remember discussions in the late 70s (in a journalism class) over why you'd have these coincidental covers in Time and Newsweek.And the answer was basically that everyone was from the same background so of course they were seeing and hearing the same things.
I've been a Time subscriber in various ways for decades. It used to be the primary way that I ingested news. But times (ahem) have changed.
I've been a Time subscriber in various ways for decades. It used to be the primary way that I ingested news. But times (ahem) have changed.
If you're interested in this subject, Robert Hughes wrote a fantastic reflection about the mythic days of generous staff expense accounts at Time. Truly unfathomable today.
(1) https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/11/robert-hughes-the...
(1) https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/11/robert-hughes-the...
At some point in the future, the perks one finds today at Facebook and Google will someday be similarly unfathomable.
Someone will figure out how to capture the outsize profits they produce, or some technology will come along that they miss, and it will all fade similarly.
Don't know what that technology is, or when it will happen, but the fat days for nearly every industry eventually come to an end.
Someone will figure out how to capture the outsize profits they produce, or some technology will come along that they miss, and it will all fade similarly.
Don't know what that technology is, or when it will happen, but the fat days for nearly every industry eventually come to an end.
"Fat days" end for individual companies too. Google had much better perks/food in the early days. Same goes for many profitable startups (like Dropbox) who cut their lavish spendings once they realize they need to go public: http://www.businessinsider.com/cost-cutting-at-dropbox-and-s...
Some parts of the world would tell you those days have already come with the wages you'll find for engineers of any rank.
The last shop that contacted me ranged from 35k to 60k CAD. They couldn't even keep the appointment they had made with me in advance.
There's a rise in people who work with technology (procurement managers, for one), however, who are often paid 4x to 6x as much as that last shop. They are, in my experience anyway, half as informed as anyone who has directly worked on similar technologies. But I digress.
The last shop that contacted me ranged from 35k to 60k CAD. They couldn't even keep the appointment they had made with me in advance.
There's a rise in people who work with technology (procurement managers, for one), however, who are often paid 4x to 6x as much as that last shop. They are, in my experience anyway, half as informed as anyone who has directly worked on similar technologies. But I digress.
Most engineering jobs never had perks like those found at Google and Facebook, just like most journalism jobs never had perks like those found at Time, Inc.
Although the cases are quite similar: Magazines and newspapers once were solid industries with some highly-profitable companies and where one could at least get a solid wage, and, if one was lucky, one could live a luxurious life on the company's dime.
Now even the strongest newspapers and magazines are struggling, and one is lucky to have a job in the field at all, never mind a basic expense account.
Someday that will happen to the Googles and Facebooks of the technology industry, and similarly to the perks they once provided their employees.
Although the cases are quite similar: Magazines and newspapers once were solid industries with some highly-profitable companies and where one could at least get a solid wage, and, if one was lucky, one could live a luxurious life on the company's dime.
Now even the strongest newspapers and magazines are struggling, and one is lucky to have a job in the field at all, never mind a basic expense account.
Someday that will happen to the Googles and Facebooks of the technology industry, and similarly to the perks they once provided their employees.
[deleted]
> Someone will figure out how to capture the outsize profits they produce, or some technology will come along that they miss...
Bear in mind that with extravagant perks and 20% time, Google's strategy was explicitly to maximize the chance that this new idea would be produced by Google itself.
It's interesting to look back at to what extent this has and has not panned out. For example, how come Facebook and Dropbox were not developed at Google and it had to crash-create competing products? Do any of Google's non-search properties count as next big things? Arguably AdSense perhaps, but that depended on being Google to start with.
Bear in mind that with extravagant perks and 20% time, Google's strategy was explicitly to maximize the chance that this new idea would be produced by Google itself.
It's interesting to look back at to what extent this has and has not panned out. For example, how come Facebook and Dropbox were not developed at Google and it had to crash-create competing products? Do any of Google's non-search properties count as next big things? Arguably AdSense perhaps, but that depended on being Google to start with.
WRT Dropbox, Google has their cloud platform. It got off to a bit of rocky start but, today, it's clearly one of the handful of big public cloud platforms which is nothing to sneeze at. I'd argue that being a major public cloud is ultimately more important than having a relatively niche storage offering like Dropbox.
Google's big failure has been in social pretty much across the board. It's tried a bunch of things beginning with Orkut and it's all amounted to pretty much zilch. I suspect that there's some fundamental mindset mismatch going on.
GSuite/Gmail has been pretty successful (as has maps). Being very competitive with a company (Microsoft) that had a huge incumbent's advantage has to count for something.
We'll see if projects like Waymo ever amount to something. IMO commercial applications are further out than many think and it's unclear the degree to which it will be Goggle who makes a lot of money from it.
Google's big failure has been in social pretty much across the board. It's tried a bunch of things beginning with Orkut and it's all amounted to pretty much zilch. I suspect that there's some fundamental mindset mismatch going on.
GSuite/Gmail has been pretty successful (as has maps). Being very competitive with a company (Microsoft) that had a huge incumbent's advantage has to count for something.
We'll see if projects like Waymo ever amount to something. IMO commercial applications are further out than many think and it's unclear the degree to which it will be Goggle who makes a lot of money from it.
I would say it did panned out. Gmail, Google News, Google Reader, Orkut [released before Facebook and becoming a leading social network in South America for a while] and many other projects were built as part of the 20%.
The challenge wasn't to get people to build incredible new ideas, it was the same as in every large company with "an unit" generating ideas, like Xerox -> PARC, Bell Telephone Company -> Bell Labs, etc. The leadership doesn't care about any of this, they want to expand their main business.
No executive wants to be made obsolete and be replaced by the next thing run by other executives. Google is no different. For instance Orkut (person, not site) was running the site on his own on couple of servers the whole time. Google paid very little attention to it.
The challenge wasn't to get people to build incredible new ideas, it was the same as in every large company with "an unit" generating ideas, like Xerox -> PARC, Bell Telephone Company -> Bell Labs, etc. The leadership doesn't care about any of this, they want to expand their main business.
No executive wants to be made obsolete and be replaced by the next thing run by other executives. Google is no different. For instance Orkut (person, not site) was running the site on his own on couple of servers the whole time. Google paid very little attention to it.
There was a period in my life when that was what I would have liked to have done. But it was always a superstar type of industry and it was at the tail end of the culture in any case.
[deleted]
Time was always a very biased news source so good riddance.
Then either they changed or I did, I'm not certain which. Sometime along 2000 or so it seems their point of view took a pointed political turn. (I feel the same towards ESPN, CNN, etc.)
When that happened, it ceased to become news to me. It was more 'entertainment', and I admit they still had some interesting ideas. But I didn't really trust Time anymore. At that point, they had reached the point of no return, it was no longer 'must read' literature. I could easily skip it, and I often did.
I wonder if many others feel the same way.