TIME pushed out into the cold to die

Time needs to have its own swimsuit issue. The $ haul from that funds much of SI's annual budget.

Time's political bias might or might not have bought it more, ahem, time than it otherwise might have had. But that makes its impending disappearance a much more trivial event for me. Editors there marginalized the product as a legit news mag before it began to lose its audience and voice.

 

And to me, that makes zero sense at all.

The swimsuit issue is the one issue per year I probably spend the LEAST time with.

I mean, if you want to talk about "I can go somewhere else to find . . . ", well, pretty women wearing nothing are a lot easier to find on the web than good long-form writing. So what's the attraction to advertisers in this issue? Unless it happens to be, as it once was, an issue you tend to keep around all year. But for the past decade it's gone into the trash less than an hour after I take it out of the mailbox.

Seems that the issue accounts for 7 percent of SI's annual revenue. Which is a great deal. But how much does it cost to produce? What other issue involves flying dozens of people all over the world for weeks at a time?

 

Back in J-School, everybody always laughed at Al Neuharth and his idea for USA Today. Imagine! A newspaper that aimed to comprehensively cover the world and only take a half-hour to read. What an idiot!

Well, flash forward a couple of decades and I have so little time to spend on the news. Skim through the Times, skim through the Guardian, read the most interesting articles in the New Yorker. I could really go for a weekly magazine that caught me up, putting events in context, with lively writing, and only took me a couple hours to read.

TIME could well be that answer. Heck, it might be that answer. It simply needs to refurbish its brand (or refurbish it a little more, so dullards like me took notice.) Right now, when I think of the magazine, I think about my grandparents and dentists' waiting rooms. An absolutely cliché but it needs to change if it's going to survive.

 

I got a subscription offer for Time a few months back.

It was insanely cheap, like $10 for a year plus they were throwing in a digital weather radio, as I recall.

I still didn't subscribe mostly because if I did, I wouldn't read it and it would just end up in the recycle bin.

And I love print and always will. I just don't have the time to sit down and read.

 

Completely agree. Excellent insight on all counts.