Moving Time (Magazine)

It seems that Time magazine and others in its stable have been sold to Meredith.

I'm not sure what Meredith's business plan might be, especially for Time magazine itself.  Back around the year 2000 there were three American weekly news magazines -- Time, Newsweek, and U.S. New & World Report.  The Economist from England also could be found on many news stands.  Nowadays, U.S. News is an on-line operation and Newsweek is the same, but from time to time appears in hardcopy format.

Henry Luce's plan in Time's early days was to summarize the week's news so that people lacking The New York Times and New York Herald Tribune could better keep up with events, and this strategy was exceedingly successful.  When I was young I eagerly awaited the postman to stuff it into our mailbox every Thursday (it took a couple days to get from the Chicago printer to Seattle).  That was when there was reason for its existence.  Out in the provinces/sticks/backwaters, our daily newspapers were adequate, yet lacking depth on foreign affairs and -- especially -- big-time New York City based culture.  And those were gaps that Time filled.

Television by the 1950s and 24-hour radio news stations in larger cities by the late 1960s cut into Time's turf a little.  But it was the rise of the internet starting in the mid-1990s that largely wiped out the reasons for the existence of weekly news magazines.  That is, there was no reason to wait a week or so to stay informed.

Allow me to confess that for years I haven't read a copy of Time, so I don't know much about its current content.  A little Googling suggests that Time now features background-type articles and opinion pieces.

That makes sense.  But how large is the market for this?  Opinion and background information sources are all over the Web.  This suggests that Time needs to provide this in a unique, distinctive way.

I'm not sure that is possible.  If I were Meredith, I'd kill Time magazine and focus on the other titles it bought.