It is one of the most read magazines from people around the world; We examine the magazine’s history and features and discuss their current position among fierce competition and new technological advances that make other printed media cripple.
Time magazine is one of the most recognized weekly publications in newsstands after more than 85 years. It was first issued in 1923 and was the first weekly magazine in the US. focusing on news commentary and presentation of political and celebrity personalities. Needless to say that the most important aspect of the magazine is the ‘Person of the Year’, featuring political and celebrity figures; many times the selection of the person that made it to the front page has raised a lot of criticism that brought a steep increase in sales.
The magazine became exploited very successfully the beginning of the radio and cinema eras and advertised heavily back in the early thirties. Possibly this is the reason for the widespread recognition of Time magazine across the US and worldwide, together with the coverage of World War II and other main events (Korea war, Vietnam etc.)
From the beginning of the new Century the magazine is part of AOL Time Warner Media giant; there were steep editorial and format changes from 2006 and beyond, causing the loss of editorial jobs (almost fifty); the Canadian edition of Time magazine discontinued its publication in the late 2008, after a continuous presence in the country for sixty years.
The magazine’s style has remained more or less constant overtime; the characteristic red border has only changed a couple of times since the first issue was published. The most important change was on September 11 terrorist attack and the death of Michael Jackson recently. Other than that, the magazines overall writing style has remained constant. In 2007 the magazine show a significant amount in changes as regards to the size of the red cover border – in order to promote featured stories – size of the titles, space around the articles themselves, and introduction of photos of the writers. The change was discussed greatly and there was significant criticism as well as praise.
Time has moved to the new Internet era successfully; they introduced a Web site that serves as News portal for users around the Web originating either from US or around the world. Their site serves as a shop for buying a time magazine subscription, getting RSS feeds for news, and tapping into mobile Web by distributing content through specialized mobile applications and Web 2 (Blackberry, Widgets, Twitter etc.)
The site is among the top 100 with nearly 21 million visitors every month, the majority of which come from around the world. The majority of visitors are male, above 35 years old, with no kids and an average salary ranging from $20,000 to $35,000.
The time is distributed electronically through digital book readers; it appears that the magazine is active to new technologies; this is an obvious reaction to the losses of nearly one million issues on their circulation during the past decade.
Author Resource:
Kostandinos Papahatzis lives in Athens, Greece and specializes in Associate marketing through Web and mobile channels; one of the most recent projects was the complete revamp of his web site at http://www.time-magazine-reviews.com