Time Magazine | The New York Observer

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and Jeff Bezos To Save Journalism With $489 Kindle DX

Wed, 06 May 2009 11:45:53 -0400

This morning in the 743-seat basement theater of the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, Jeff Bezos, president, chief executive and chairman of the board of Amazon, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times and chairman of the New York Times Company, unveiled a device they hope will save newspapers: The Kindle DX, which features a 9.7-inch screen designed for newspapers and textbooks. That's 2.5 times the size...

Time-Lauded Toque Dan Barber Anticipates the Michelle Obama Effect

Mon, 04 May 2009 08:35:30 -0400

“I was shocked,” Dan Barber told the Daily Transom.

Last week, the 39-year-old executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill in Greenwich Village and Westchester’s Blue Hill at Stone Barns (and nominee for outstanding chef at tonight's James Beard Foundation Awards) found his name printed among those of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Tiger Woods, Arianna Huffington, Tina Fey and the founders of Twitter, to name just a few, when Time magazine released its annual 100...

Jim Kelly on Time Inc.'s Future (And His Own)

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 09:46:11 -0400

The Observer met up with outgoing Time Inc. managing editor Jim Kelly yesterday morning to talk about the future. We had breakfast in a second floor dining room in the Time Inc. building that overlooked Sixth Avenue. We put on our tape recorder and let Mr. Kelly, who spent 31 years at Time Inc, including five years as Time Magazine's managing editor and the last three as Time Inc.'s managing editor, for a bit...

Jon Stewart Literally Whistling Past Newspaper Graveyard

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:20:45 -0500

Walter Isaacson took his case for saving newspapers to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night, rehashing much of the micropayment proposal he makes in this week's Time Magazine.

He also retold his endearing yarn about going fishing with his friend Thomas who "had a theory that ice should be free," which he told in Time as follows:

When I used to go fishing in the bayous of Louisiana as a boy,...

The Time of Our Times

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:29:12 -0500

Lots of people seem to be thinking about The New York Times today. Or is it just us?

The future of the country's leading newspaper—which as recently as early January was called into doubt by The Atlantic's Michael Hirschorn—is touched on in this week's Time magazine cover story by Walter Isaacson, which was updated online after it appeared late last week with following:

Currently a few newspapers, most notably the Wall Street Journal, charge...

Walter Isaacson Doesn't Subscribe to The New York Times

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 11:07:10 -0500

In next week's Time magazine, Walter Isaacson turns his attention to the newspaper industry's troubles, asserting that the way publishers currently operate "is not a business model that makes sense."

Mr. Isaacson, the CEO of The Aspen Institute and the former top editor at Time, started his career in newspapers, and was also an engineer of Pathfinder, Time Inc.'s early—but failed—news portal, so you'd think he would be a hard-core print partisan....

Elizabeth Gilbert Tells The Guardian: 'I Have No Business Being a Journalist'

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:46:14 -0500

This weekend, The Guardian featured a profile of Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert. In the story, headlined Lucky Me, Emma Brockes offers a hard-edged take on the journalist-turned-memoirist, writing, "There are lots of paths to self-discovery, but most of them don't conflate so many lucrative book markets in one handy volume. Eat Pray Love elides self-help, self-improvement, mysticism and a strain of confessional publishing I once heard described as 'women who write about...

Change We Can Subscribe To

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 19:09:37 -0500

The day after the election, print writers giddily wrote how newspapers’ Extra editions were flying off the stand, requiring papers like The Times to go back to the printing press and get more copies on the streets—and then they were quickly sold on eBay at an inflated rate. It seemed like a reassurance that print mattered in the election, even if the election was probably proof of its marginality.

It takes more...

Garden & Gun Goes Full Ventral: Will Turtle Junk Score 2009 Cover of The Year?

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 11:12:25 -0500

As part of its year-end 'Top 10 Everything of 2008' package, Time Magazine's Arthur Hochstein recently compiled the Top 10 Magazine Covers of the year.

The New Yorker's austere post-Election cover featuring the Lincoln Memorial with a new 'O' moon was number one. Rolling Stone's wordless Barack Obama cover made the list at number 3, and Entertainment Weekly's attention-grabbing Barry Blitt/New Yorker parody cover featuring Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart was tapped at...

Resolved: Malcolm Gladwell Has Interesting Hair

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:40:21 -0500

- "Gladwell is pale skinned but famously Afro-haired."—Tim Adams, The Guardian, November 16, 2008.

- "Gladwell, who is slight of build, with an exuberance of hair and an oddly diffident manner..." Jerry Adler, Newsweek, November 15, 2008.

- "Slender, with elfin cheekbones and a distinctive bloom of spirally brown hair, Gladwell is one of those clever people who actually looks clever."— Lev Grossman, Time Magazine, November 13, 2008.

- "Gladwell was...

Report: Mexicans Role Play Illegal Border Crossing For Fun

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:52:47 -0500

This is like something straight out of a Don DeLillo novel. According to video report on Time Magazine's Web site, middle class Mexicans are paying to roleplay crossing the U.S. border illegally.

According to Ioan Grillo, who filed the night-vision green report from Parque Alberto, Mexico for the magazine's Web site, "A group of returning migrants have made their experience of dodging sirens, trekking over deserts, and wading through rivers into a kind...

Times Magazine Reveals You (Yes, You) Were Briefly Potential McCain Running Mate

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:33:53 -0400

Did you know that you could've been John McCain's running mate? If this quote from "a friend" of Senator McCain's campaign C.E.O. Rick Davis in Robert Draper's New York Times Magazine article this week is to be believed, "The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best —...

Economy's Littlest Winners: Stock Photo Agencies

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:13:02 -0400

These are bleak economic times. Everyone who's not listening to John McCain and Sarah Palin talking about Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright knows that. But amid bank closings, job losses, and belt-tightening, there's one field that's experiencing a bump.

We're speaking, of course, of stock photography from the Great Depression. Photo agencies like Getty Images, Corbis, The Associated Press, and others seem to be doing just fine if recent press clippings are any...

Time: 'Short Is In' as 'Mini-Lit' Thrives

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:18:18 -0400

This week's issue of Time has an article about how "Online Americans, fed up with e-mail overload and blogorrhea, are retreating into micro-writing." That means six-word memoirs, four-word film reviews, twelve-word novels, and, er, Twitter.com.

These things are like Japanese haikus, according to Time. Which is a charming argument, and one that would have been even stronger if the author of the piece had included the fact that in Japan lately a whole lot...

Jon Friedman Apologizes to Time Magazine, You, Me, and Everyone We Know

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:10:39 -0400

Jon Friedman is back with another amazing Media Web Minute as part of his MarketWatch column.

This week, an animated, gesticulating Mr. Friedman (has someone had some coaching?) address a nagging error on his part. It seems that he was wrong in rejecting Time magazine's selection of "You" as the person of the year in 2006.

Now, Mr. Friedman wants you to know that "the YouTube phenomenon has taken over the...

Coffee, Tea, or Me, Me, Me: Joel Stein Plays Flight Attendant

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:11:17 -0400

Mandatory luggage check-in fees. Canceled flights. Las Vegas party jets rerouted to Rochester. Can air travel get any worse?

In fact, it can. Joel Stein, Time's navel correspondent and lover of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, has become a flight attendant. Or at least he got to play one to get over his fear of flying for a stunt column.

Of course, he makes some hilarious xenophobic jokes ("My fellow future flight attendants...

Brothers in Arms

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:14:33 -0400

"It's really easy to get killed in Iraq," says Phillip Robertson, a freelancer who covered the war for Salon and wrote the introduction to the book Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq.

"They want to kill you. All you have to do is give them a chance and somebody will kill you or kidnap you." Mr. Robertson had his own near-kidnap experience, but he managed to get away. His...

60 Months in the Red Zone

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:10:48 -0400

“It’s the oft-stated phrase that truth is the first casualty of war,” said Michael Ware, CNN’s Baghdad correspondent, on the telephone from Iraq. “In this war, as in every other conflict, everybody lies to you. Your government is lying to you. The Iraqi government is lying. The insurgents are lying. The militias are lying. The U.S. military is lying. Even the civilians lie. Or in the best case, there’s confusion and exaggeration. The truth...

Putin Named Time's Person of the Year

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 11:21:15 -0500

Russian president Vladimir Putin has been named Time's 2007 Person of the Year.

Let's just get this out of the way now: Naming someone Person of the Year doesn't imply a positive judgment on the person by Time's editors. It just means they think he was influential....

Mark Halperin Tells Audience of Political Junkies What Non-Experts Need to Know About the Candidates

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 13:08:14 -0400

Last night, Time and ABC News political analyst Mark Halperin was talking to an audience at the at Barnes & Noble on West 82nd Street about his new book, The Undecided Voter's Guide to the Next President.

He said that his new book is geared toward people who "aren't particularly political," focusing less on the campaigns themselves than on "who can do the best job."

"I tried to say, with the information we have about the...

The Time 100 Double-Helix

Wed, 09 May 2007 10:40:51 -0400

“I’ve met an estimated 56 of 100,” said NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, surveying the crowd at last night’s Time 100 gala. “I always assumed I might come as a guest but not a lapel-wearing member.”

Oh, Mr. Williams, don't be so modest! Or quite so serious, either: he said he was most looking forward to meeting Elie Wiesel, author of Night.

When guests include the likes of Cate Blanchett, Martha Stewart, Michael J....