Time (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

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  Time magazine hit newsstands for the first time on the 3rd of March, 1923, priced at fifteen cents a copy. Two Yale-educated twenty-four-year-olds named Briton Hadden and Henry Luce had built it from scratch, convinced that a busy man ought to be able to read all the week's news in an hour. They had originally planned to call the thing Facts. The name they settled on came with a slogan: "Take Time - It's Brief." What started as a scrappy experiment in brevity would run weekly for nearly a century, shaping how Americans understood their world, popularizing words like "tycoon" and "televangelist", and creating one of the most recognizable covers in publishing history, ringed in red. How two college newspaper veterans built that institution, what their magazine invented along the way, and why its circulation has been falling ever since are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Founders and Their Vision

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  Briton Hadden was born in 1898 and died young, in 1929. Henry Luce was born the same year and lived until 1967. Before Time, they had worked side by side at the Yale Daily News: Hadden as chairman, Luce as managing editor. That apprenticeship shaped everything about the magazine they built together. Hadden was the carefree one. He liked to tease Luce and saw Time as important but also fun, which is why the magazine gave heavy coverage to celebrities, politicians, the entertainment industry, and pop culture from the very beginning. Critics thought that made it too light for serious news. Luce had a more commanding temperament, and after Hadden died in 1929, he became the dominant figure in the company, running it in what contemporaries described as an autocratic fashion. To raise the capital needed to launch, Luce and Hadden had turned to wealthy Yale alumni, including Henry P. Davison, a partner at J.P. Morgan and Co., the publicity man Martin Egan, and J.P. Morgan banker Dwight Morrow. The total amount they sought was $100,000. At the time of Luce's own death, his Time Inc. stock was worth about $109 million, yielding him a yearly dividend of more than $2.4 million.

• 3. Roy Larsen and the Radio Years

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  Henry Luce and Briton Hadden hired Roy Larsen in 1922, a year before the magazine even published its first issue. Larsen was a Harvard graduate in a company otherwise staffed by Yale men, and he would become the most important figure at Time Inc. after Luce himself. Raymond Fielding, writing in his book The March of Time, 1935-1951, described Larsen as "originally circulation manager and then general manager of Time, later publisher of Life, for many years president of Time Inc., and in the long history of the corporation the most influential and important figure after Luce." Larsen understood early that radio could carry the magazine to audiences who had never heard of it. In 1924, he put Time into the infant radio business with a fifteen-minute quiz show called Pop Question, which ran until 1925. In 1928, he launched a weekly ten-minute program of news summaries drawn from the current issue, broadcast over thirty-three stations across the United States. In March 1931, he went further, introducing a thirty-minute dramatization of the week's news on CBS called The March of Time. That program ran on CBS between 1931 and 1937, then shifted to NBC radio between 1937 and 1945, with a gap between 1939 and 1941. After Hadden's death, Larsen purchased 550 shares of Time Inc. stock using money from selling RKO stock he had inherited from his father, who had run the Benjamin Franklin Keith theater chain in New England.

• 4. Timestyle and the Language It Made

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  Time developed a writing voice so distinctive it earned its own name: Timestyle. The style leaned on inverted sentences, an acerbic tone, and a cheerful irreverence that made it recognizable at a glance. In 1936, the writer Wolcott Gibbs parodied it memorably in The New Yorker: "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind... Where it all will end, knows God!" Beyond its syntax, Time actively shaped the English language. The magazine coined or spread words that are now unremarkable parts of everyday speech: "socialite", "guesstimate", "televangelist", "pundit", and "tycoon" all gained wide currency through its pages. Some coinages did not survive, including "cinemactress" and "radiorator". In 1939, Time introduced the names "World War I" and "World War II", replacing older usages like "First World War" and "World War No. 2". The false title construction, placing a descriptor directly before a name without an article, was so closely associated with the magazine that it is sometimes called a "Time-style adjective".

• 5. The Cover as Cultural Artifact

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  Time introduced its red border in 1927, and for nearly a century that border has been the magazine's most recognizable feature. It has only changed eight times since its introduction. The special issue published shortly after the September 11 attacks carried a black border to symbolize mourning; the next regular issue returned to red. The Earth Day issue of the 28th of April, 2008, used a green border. On the 31st of December 2012, a silver border marked Barack Obama's selection as Person of the Year. The issue of the 15th of June, 2020, covering protests after the murder of George Floyd, was the first Time cover whose border included the names of people; the cover was created by the artist Titus Kaphar and depicts an African-American mother holding her child. In October 2020, Time replaced its logo entirely with the word "Vote", with the editors explaining that few events would shape the world more than the result of that year's presidential election. Former president Richard Nixon appeared on the cover fifty-five times between the 25th of August, 1952, and the 2nd of May, 1994, making him one of the most frequently featured subjects in the magazine's history. Until the late 1960s, every cover showed a single person. The very first issue featured Joseph G. Cannon, the retired Speaker of the House of Representatives.

• 6. The X Covers

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  Seven times in its history, Time has published a cover showing a large X scrawled over a face, a year, or a national symbol. The first appeared on the 7th of May, 1945, a red X over the face of Adolf Hitler, published the week after his death. The second, on the 20th of August, 1945, used a black X over the flag of Japan to mark its surrender and the end of World War II; it remains the only black X in the series. Fifty-eight years passed before the third X cover appeared, on the 21st of April, 2003: a red X over Saddam Hussein's face, two weeks after the start of the Invasion of Iraq. A third red X appeared on the 19th of June, 2006, after the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and a fourth on the 20th of May, 2011, following the death of Osama bin Laden. The cover of the 14th of December, 2020, placed a red X over the year 2020 itself, with the declaration "the worst year ever". The most recent X cover, dated the 11th of November, 2024, showed the face of Yahya Sinwar following his killing by the Israel Defense Forces.

• 7. Person of the Year

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  Time's Person of the Year designation exists to recognize whoever has had the biggest impact on news headlines in the past twelve months, "for good or ill"; it is explicitly not intended as an honor. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin both received the title under its earlier name, Man of the Year. In 2006, Person of the Year was "You", a choice the editors acknowledged might have been a mistake, with editors Pepper and Timmer saying that if it was, "we're only going to make it once". In 2017, Time named the "Silence Breakers", the people who came forward with personal accounts of sexual harassment, as Person of the Year. The designation has evolved alongside a broader annual feature, the Time 100, a list of the one hundred most influential people of the year. In February 2016, the magazine mistakenly included the male author Evelyn Waugh on its list of the "100 Most Read Female Writers in College Classes", placing him at number ninety-seven. The error attracted wide attention. Professor Valentine Cunningham of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, described it in a BBC interview as "a piece of profound ignorance on the part of Time magazine".

• 8. Ownership, Circulation, and the Path Forward

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  In November 2017, Meredith Corporation announced the acquisition of Time Inc., backed by Koch Equity Development. Only six weeks after the sale closed, in March 2018, Meredith said it would explore selling Time along with sister publications Fortune, Money, and Sports Illustrated, because those titles did not align with the company's lifestyle brands. In October 2018, Meredith sold Time to Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne for $190 million. Benioff, the chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce.com, committed to keeping Time separate from that company and staying out of its daily operations. The magazine's circulation tells a sobering story. In 2012, Time had a circulation of 3.3 million, making it the second-most circulated weekly in the United States. By October 2017, that figure had dropped to two million. In early 2023, there were 1.3 million print subscribers and 250,000 digital subscribers. For the six months ending the 31st of December, 2024, combined print and digital circulation stood at one million, a decline of 7.1% year-on-year. Forbes COO Jessica Sibley, appointed CEO in November 2022, oversaw the removal of Time's online paywall in June 2023 as part of a pivot from consumer to business revenue. She also oversaw layoffs in 2024 that were criticized by The NewsGuild of New York and the Time Union. In December 2025, Time France became the first foreign licensed edition of the magazine, published quarterly by 360BusinessMedia with 100,000 copies per issue and distributed across France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Monaco.