WHAT’S NEXT: INNOVATIONS IN NEWSPAPERS

W.T. Dowell comments in Jeff Javis’s blog about the TIME magazine crisis.

This is an excellent lesson about how to kill a magazine.

Bolds are mine.

The original idea behind TIME was not a bad one.

It was essentially to deploy a battalion of crack reporters stationed around the world, and to see if they could come up with added value that the wires and everyone else had missed.

Luce’s TIME may not have been that great, but the magazine achieved real power under Henry Grunwald, probably its greatest editor.

It was an international platform of unprecedented power at a time when the U.S. was still regarded as a benevolent force.

It is an irony that TIME’s destruction came partly from People, a magazine that long ago invaded the darker realms previously inhabited by the National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids.

Publishing the combination of dolled up press releases from publicity hungry starlets and otherwise engaging in unrestrained vulgarity cost People a fraction of what serious reporting demanded in TIME.

Eventually, People’s financial success –even though based on a visit to the dark side–made its editors and publishing folk look more successful in pure business terms than their colleagues.

They were soon dispatched to TIME to produce similar profits.

With little or no idea of what TIME was about, they cut the ground out from under the magazine.

It became obvious years ago that the corporation wanted to put its money into ventures that were likely to pay more than print.

The question was how to kill TIME without being too obvious about it.

The solution was to make it irrelevant, which is by and large what they accomplished.

Mainstream American journalism today is largely a matter of repackaging, or rephrasing what other people have produced.

TIME’s managers have clearly decided to follow the trend and cheap it out.

The wonder is not that TIME’s current management succeeded in destroying what was once the world’s leading news magazine, but that despite all the damage that was done, it took so long to die.

Oh, boy, I couldn’t have said it better myself.