Time is an American news magazine based in New York City. It was published weekly for nearly a century. Starting in March 2020, it was published every other week. It was first published in New York City on March 3, 1923, and for many years it was run by its co-founder, Henry Luce.
A European edition, Time Europe, is published in London and also covers the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. An Asian edition, Time Asia, is based in Hong Kong. The South Pacific edition, which covers Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, is based in Sydney. Time France began publication in 2025.
Since 2018, Time has been owned by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, who acquired it from Meredith Corporation. Benioff currently publishes the magazine through the company Time USA, LLC.
History
20th century
Time has been based in New York City since its first issue published on March 3, 1923, by Briton Hadden (1898–1929) and Henry Luce (1898–1967). It was the first weekly news magazine in the United States. The two had previously worked together as chairman and managing editor, respectively, of the Yale Daily News. They first called the proposed magazine Facts to emphasize brevity so a busy man could read it in an hour. They changed the name to Time and used the slogan "Take Time – It's Brief". Hadden was considered carefree and liked to tease Luce. He saw Time as important but also fun, which accounted for its heavy coverage of celebrities and politicians, the entertainment industry, and pop culture, criticizing it as too light for serious news.
Time set out to tell the news through people, and until the late 1960s, the magazine's cover depicted a single person. More recently, Time has incorporated "People of the Year" issues, which have grown in popularity over the years. The first issue of Time featured Joseph G. Cannon, the retired Speaker of the House of Representatives, on its cover. A facsimile reprint of Issue No. 1, including all of the articles and advertisements contained in the original, was included with copies of the magazine's issue from February 28, 1938, in commemoration of its 15th anniversary. The cover price was 15¢, equivalent to $2.83 in 2025.
Following Hadden's death in 1929, Luce became the dominant man at Time and a significant figure in the history of 20th-century media. According to Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923–1941 by Robert Elson, "Roy Edward Larsen ... was to play a role second only to Luce's in the development of Time Inc". In his book The March of Time, 1935–1951, Raymond Fielding noted that Larsen was "originally circulation manager and then general manager of Time, later publisher of Life, for many years president of Time Inc., and in the long history of the corporation the most influential and important figure after Luce".
Around that time, they were raising $100,000 from wealthy Yale University alumni, including Henry P. Davison, partner of J.P. Morgan & Co., publicity man Martin Egan and J.P. Morgan & Co. banker Dwight Morrow. Henry Luce and Briton Hadden hired Larsen in 1922. Larsen was a Harvard University graduate, and Luce and Hadden were Yale graduates. After Hadden died in 1929, Larsen purchased 550 shares of Time Inc., using money he obtained from selling RKO stock he had inherited from his father, who was the head of the Benjamin Franklin Keith theater chain in New England.
After Briton Hadden's death, the largest Time, Inc. stockholder was Henry Luce, who ruled the media conglomerate in an autocratic fashion. "At his right hand was Larsen", Time Inc.'s second-largest stockholder, according to Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923–1941. In 1929, Roy Larsen was named a Time Inc. director and vice president. J. P. Morgan retained a certain control through two directorates and a share of stocks, both over Time and Fortune. Other shareholders were Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., and the New York Trust Company (Standard Oil).
After Time began publishing weekly in March 1923, Roy Larsen increased its circulation by using U.S. radio and movie theaters worldwide. It often promoted both Time magazine and U.S. political and corporate interests. According to The March of Time, in 1924 Larsen brought Time into the infant radio business by broadcasting a 15-minute quiz show called Pop Question, which survived until 1925. In 1928, Larsen "undertook the weekly broadcast of a 10-minute programme series of brief news summaries, drawn from current issues of Time magazine ... which was originally broadcast over 33 stations throughout the United States".
In March 1931, Larsen introduced a 30-minute radio program, The March of Time, to be broadcast over CBS. Each week, the program presented a dramatization of the week's news for its listeners. Thus Time magazine was brought "to the attention of millions previously unaware of its existence", according to Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise 1923–1941, leading to increased circulation during the 1930s. Between 1931 and 1937, Larsen's The March of Time radio program was broadcast over CBS radio. Between 1937 and 1945, it was broadcast over NBC radio – except between 1939 and 1941, when it was not aired. People magazine was based on Time's "People" page.
Time Inc. stock owned by Luce at the time of his death was worth about $109 million ($1.05 billion in ), and it had been yielding him a yearly dividend of more than $2.4 million ($23.2 million in ), according to Curtis Prendergast's The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Changing Enterprise 1960–1980. The Larsen family's Time Inc. stock was worth around $80 million during the 1960s. Roy Larsen was both a Time Inc. director and the chairman of its executive committee, later serving as Time Inc.'s board's vice chairman until the middle of 1979. On September 10, 1979, The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Larsen was the only employee in the company's history given an exemption from its policy of mandatory retirement at age 65."
In 1987, Jason McManus succeeded Henry Grunwald as editor-in-chief, and oversaw the transition before Norman Pearlstine succeeded him in 1995.
In 1989, when Time, Inc. and Warner Communications merged, Time became part of Time Warner, along with Warner Bros. Entertainment.
21st century
In 2000, Time became part of AOL Time Warner, which reverted to the name Time Warner in 2003.
In 2007, Time moved from a Monday subscription/newsstand delivery to a schedule where the magazine goes on sale Fridays and is delivered to subscribers on Saturday. The magazine was published on Fridays when it began in 1923.
In early 2007, the year's first issue was delayed roughly a week due to "editorial changes", including the layoff of 49 employees.
In 2009, Time announced it was introducing Mine, a personalized print magazine mixing content from various Time Warner publications based on the reader's preferences. The new magazine was met with a poor reception, with criticism that its focus needed to be more broad to be truly personal.
The magazine has an online archive with the unformatted text for every article published. The articles were indexed and converted from scanned images using optical character recognition technology. The minor errors in the text are remnants of the conversion to the digital format.
In January 2013, Time Inc. announced that it would cut nearly 500 jobs – roughly 6% of its 8,000 staff worldwide.
Although Time magazine has maintained high sales, its ad pages have declined significantly.
Also in January 2013, Time Inc. named Martha Nelson as the first female editor-in-chief of its magazine division. In September 2013, Nancy Gibbs was named as the first female managing editor of Time magazine.
In November 2017, Meredith Corporation announced its acquisition of Time, Inc., backed by Koch Equity Development.
In 2017, editor and journalist Catherine Mayer, who also founded the Women's Equality Party in the UK, sued Time through attorney Ann Olivarius for sex and age discrimination. The suit was resolved in 2018.
In March 2018, only six weeks after the closure of the sale, Meredith announced that it would explore the sale of Time and sister magazines Fortune, Money and Sports Illustrated, since they did not align with the company's lifestyle brands.
In October 2018, Meredith Corporation sold Time to Marc Benioff and his wife Lynne for $190 million. Benioff is the chairman and co-CEO of Salesforce.com. Time is to remain separate from that company, with Benioff not involved in the magazine's daily operations.
Forbes COO Jessica Sibley was appointed CEO of Time in November 2022. Stating that she intended for the company to be "cash flow positive" by 2025, Sibley oversaw a number of immediate changes. According to Sibley, her first focus was pivoting the company away from business-to-consumer revenues to business-to-business revenues, resulting in Time dropping its online paywall in June 2023. She also hired new executives, including new chief revenue officers, a new editor-in-chief, and a new chief strategy officer. She oversaw layoffs at Time in 2024, calling them necessary to improve the company's financial position. The layoffs were criticized by The NewsGuild of New York and the Time Union. The layoffs were part of a broader strategy to focus on covering leadership (Time's most commercially successful area) and to "provide journalism that serves these present and future leaders", including leaders in climate, AI, and health coverage.
Circulation
As of 2025, Time's circulation has been steadily declining. During the second half of 2009, the magazine had a 34.9% decline in newsstand sales. During the first half of 2010, there was another decline of 30%.
In 2012, Time had a circulation of 3.3 million, making it the 11th-most circulated magazine in the United States, and the second-most circulated weekly behind People. In July 2017, its circulation was 3,028,013. In October 2017, Time circulation dropped to two million. In early 2023 Time had 1.3 million print subscribers and 250,000 digital subscribers. Combined print and digital circulation was 1 million for the six months to 31 December 2024, down 7.1% year-on-year.
Style
Writing
Time initially possessed a distinctively "acerbic, irreverent style", largely created by Haddon and sometimes called "Timestyle". Timestyle made regular use of inverted sentences, as famously parodied in 1936 by Wolcott Gibbs in The New Yorker: "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind ... Where it all will end, knows God!" Time also coined or popularized many neologisms which became widespread, including "socialite", "guesstimate", "televangelist", "pundit", and "tycoon", and some less successful ones such as "cinemactress" and "radiorator". Time introduced the names "World War I" and "World War II" in 1939, as opposed to older forms like "First World War" and "World War No. 2". The false title construction was popularized by Time and indeed is sometimes called a "Time-style adjective".
Sections
Milestones
Since its first issue, Time has had a "Milestones" section about significant events in the lives of famous people, including births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. Until 1967, entries in Milestones were short and formulaic. A typical example from 1956:
Died. Lieut, (j.g.) David Greig ("Skippy") Browning Jr., 24, star of the 1952 Olympics as the U.S.'s dazzling three-meter diving champion, national collegiate one-and three-meter diving champ (1951–52); in the crash of a North American FJ-3 Fury jet fighter while on a training flight; near Rantoul, Kans.
A reader wrote a parody of the older form to announce the change:
Died. Time's delightful but confusing habit of listing names, ages, claims to fame, and other interesting tidbits about the famous newly deceased in its Milestones notices; then the circumstances of, and places where, the deaths occurred; of apparent good sentence structure; in New York.
Listings
Until the mid-1970s, Time had a weekly "Listings" section with capsule summaries or reviews of current significant films, plays, musicals, television programs, and literary bestsellers similar to The New Yorker's "Current Events" section.
Cover
Time is also known for the red border on its cover, introduced in 1927. The iconic red border was homaged or satirized by Seattle's The Stranger newspaper in 2010. The border has only been changed eight times since 1927: