Time magazine was almost called Facts, pitched at busy men with an hour
Two Yale graduates in their mid-twenties wanted a news digest a busy reader could finish in about an hour. They first planned to call it Facts, then settled on Time with the slogan Take Time, It's Brief, and in 1923 produced America's first weekly news magazine.
Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, both born in 1898, had run the Yale Daily News together as chairman and managing editor. They raised 100,000 dollars from wealthy Yale alumni, among them the J.P. Morgan partners Henry P. Davison and Dwight Morrow, and the first issue came out in New York on 3 March 1923. Its cover showed the retired House Speaker Joseph G. Cannon and it sold for 15 cents. From the start the magazine framed events around personalities, and for over four decades every cover carried a single face.
The partners had different temperaments. Hadden was carefree, teased Luce and saw the magazine as fun as well as important, which explains its generous attention to celebrities, entertainment and pop culture, a lightness critics disliked. After Hadden died in 1929 Luce became the largest stockholder and ran the growing company autocratically, becoming one of the defining media figures of the century.
His right-hand man was Roy Edward Larsen, a Harvard graduate hired in 1922 who rose from circulation manager to president of Time Inc. Larsen pushed the brand into new media. In 1924 he put a fifteen-minute radio quiz called Pop Question on air, in 1928 he began short weekly news summaries carried by 33 stations, and in March 1931 he launched The March of Time on CBS, a half-hour dramatisation of the week's events that introduced millions of listeners to the magazine and lifted its circulation through the 1930s. The magazine's People page later spun off into People magazine.
After nearly a century as a weekly, Time switched to publishing every other week in March 2020. It has editions based in London, Hong Kong and Sydney, and Time France began in 2025. Since 2018 it has been owned by Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, who bought it from the Meredith Corporation.
Source: Time (magazine)
