Lesson #1: Out with the Old, In with the New

“I am all for titillating trivialities,” Luce once said. “I am all for the epic touch. I could almost say that everything in Time should be either titillating or epic or starkly, supercurtly factual.”

Before Time dared to break new ground, the other popular magazines of the day all dealt with news in the same way: objectively. Editors and journalists alike refused to take a stand on any issue no matter how big or small; that was not their job, they believed.

But Luce saw things differently. “Show me a man who claims he is objective and I’ll show you a man with illusions,” he would say. Since objectivity was impossible according to Luce, why pretend? It was along those lines that he founded Time magazine.

Time never pretended to present two sides to a story. After all, said Luce, “Are there not more likely to be three sides or 30 sides?” What Time did instead was weave news into simple stories that were told through people, stories that made judgments, and stories that entertained their readers. The magazine was in fact the first to invent the idea of the cover story, examining an issue or an individual that Luce deemed important and worthy of coverage. Details were never guaranteed to be complete, but they could always be found descriptive, saucy, and flavourful.

Much in the way Time changed the name of the game for news magazines, so too did Life bend the rules in its own way. For the first time, Life introduced readers to photojournalism. While Time strove to create excitement through words, Life had an easier time of doing so through pictures. It published photographs of babies being born, surgeries, soldiers at war, policemen clubbing protestors, and any other riveting material it could find, all in the hopes of exciting and luring the viewer in for more.

And Luce never restricted himself to covering the current events of the day. He made a name for himself in his ability to weave together aspects of medicine, art, business, religion, and more, and to create stories that he deemed newsworthy. Luce’s coverage of topics largely ignored by the mainstream media made his publications an almost instant hit.

Not everybody was a fan of the new way in which Luce was doing things. For instance, his pictorial essay on “The World’s Great Religions” earned him criticism from a wide array of religious groups. Politicians, companies, celebrities – anyone who was on the receiving end of Luce’s critical stories reviled him. And yet, the public continued to eat it up.

Luce was not the first publisher to ever have an opinion. But, he was the first to put his opinions down in print, and to allow his journalists to do the same. Luce knew that it would take more than a news story to excite readers. People wanted to be tantalized, people wanted to be excited, and people wanted to connect with the stories, and that is exactly what Luce gave them.



Lesson #1: Out with the Old, In with the New

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