The Story Of An Experiment: What Kind of Fights They Love

"People," said Briton Hadden, "talk too much about what they don't know."

When Hadden and Henry R. Luce, TIME'S cofounders, got down to writing a prospectus for the Weekly Newsmagazine, they put this thought in politer language. Said their prospectus:

"People in America are, for the most part, poorly informed.

"This is not the fault of the daily newspapers; they print all the news.

"It is not the fault of the weekly reviews; they adequately develop and comment on the news.

"To say with the facile cynic that it is the fault of the people themselves is to beg the question."

Their answer was: "People are uninformed because no publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend on simply keeping informed."

How did TIME propose to adapt itself to the "busy man?" The 16 pages of the prospectus, more prolix than the magazine it described, boiled down to three basic ideas:

1) The news could be "completely organized," i.e., laid out in a fixed pattern of departments, such as National Affairs, Sport, Foreign News (some of which could be further divided into sections such as Congress, France, Oil, etc.).

2) The news had to be added up and a balance struck "to point out what the news means." Said the prospectus: "TIME gives both sides, but clearly indicates which side it believes to have the stronger position." (For a period of partial heresy from this sound doctrine, see below.)

3) News is made not by "forces" or governments or classes, but by individual people. The world's movers and shakers, said the prospectus, are "something more than stage figures with a name. It is important to know what they drink. It is more important to know to what gods they pray and what kind of fights they love." Stories told in flesh & blood terms would get into the readers' minds when stories told in journalistic banalities would not.

Implicit in the prospectus was another idea, not directly stated: "The busy man," for TIME'S purposes, was to be regarded as an expert on nothing. The National Affairs department was not written for politicians, nor Foreign News for cosmopolites, nor Books for bookworms, nor Sport for sport fans. The whole magazine was supposed to be comprehensible to one "busy man"—a vastly different notion from daily newspaper departments (women's, sports, finance, etc.), each appealing to special groups. To get all of TIME into one man's head it had first to be put in language that one man could understand. Later, the idea was expressed this way: "TIME is written as if by one man for one man." A lot of TIME'S subsequent experiments grew out of the difficulties and opportunities in this notion.

Over the years, TIME developed practices that went beyond these precepts:

1) Telling the news as a narrative story. This was not standard practice in early issues.*