Luce also established business principles for conducting a journalistic enterprise, demarcating the famed line between "church and state," or the editorial and business operations. Today, many talk about the subtle ways that line has blurred over the years - it used to be that executives on the business side didn't even speak to those in editorial. While no one has made serious claims that Time Inc. has abandoned its ethical reputation, stories about AOL transgressions started swirling around newsrooms in the early days of the merger. In one tale, a hapless AOL salesman supposedly promised an advertiser favorable magazine treatment: "Don't worry, we're gonna guarantee you great coverage." Reports one editor, "He got his head served to him."
These concerns are overblown, say top editors - just as they were when Warner took over amid fears that Batman sequels would dominate magazine covers. The real issue is having the resources to do their jobs well. One Time Inc. editor worries that AOL execs "don't understand that there's a price attached to good journalism." Adds another insider: "I'm not worried about editorial integrity, [but] I don't know about editorial quality."
It's not the first time Time Inc. people have thought the apocalypse was nigh. Throughout the company's history, old-timers have been bemoaning the decline of "Time culture." Some veterans think the party ended when Time Inc. was first listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1964. To others, the downward spiral began in 1973, when Time Inc. first diversified in a major way, taking control of Texas' Temple Industries - a huge lumber and plywood concern - in exchange for a 30 percent stake in Time. The increasing importance to the bottom line of People - which launched in 1974 and quickly became the most profitable magazine in history - mortified some corporate purists. Others see the ascendancy of Teen People and InStyle - which displaced the hallowed Sports Illustrated into another building - as the tipping point.
While the future of post-AOL Time culture is being decided right now, Time Inc. staffers are acutely aware of their company's swashbuckling legacy. The firm was a bastion of ruling-class WASP mores, with an Ivy League staff, heavy emphasis on drinking and rampant intramural, extramarital affairs. "It was a glamorous and amorous place," says Ralph Graves, former managing editor of Life. John Gregory Dunne, who served as a Time staff writer from 1959 to 1964, once described the prevailing mood as "a corporate hubris ... a confidence in ourselves, and in our place in the world."
Time Inc.'s management did everything in its power to bolster this sense of entitlement. On late-working nights, white-gloved waiters served three-course meals that included beef Wellington and French wine. A rolling bar roamed the halls. Abroad, the magazine's staff lived even more lavishly. "When you were in a foreign capital and you saw some huge mansion, the joke was, 'That's either some Arab ambassador's residence or the Time bureau chief's house," says Calvin Trillin, who wrote for the magazine in early '60s (and again, as a columnist, in the '90s).
These extravagances are largely gone today, but the sense of entitlement has lingered. "The magazines are generously staffed and the top executives are generously remunerated," one editorial executive says. "That creates a culture of privilege and seriousness."
By far the most widely held view has always been that the 1989 merger with Warner Communications - the deal that gave birth to Time Warner - was the end of Time culture. "Anyone who was here pre-'89, they'll say, 'It's awful, it's gone to hell,'" a current editor says. Indeed, one editor who was at the company for close to two decades bemoans that, after the merger, there was "a creeping sense that if [something] made money, it was better than if it made headlines." One who objected to the merger was Andrew Heiskell, a Luce protégé who inherited half the founder's mantle as Time Inc.'s chairman and CEO from 1969 until 1980: "I thought our reputation for integrity would not be improved by it. I happen to think that's the most important thing you have."
