To: TIME Edit staff
From: Rick Stengel
Date: Nov. 4, 2009

Time Inc continues to look at ways to reduce costs and lower operating
expenses. As a result, there will be an opportunity for a limited number
(up to 12) of Time Edit staffers to volunteer and depart with a severance
package. We will entertain volunteers from all Guild-covered categories in
all geographic locations. The call for volunteers will expire on the close
of business November 18th. Anyone interested in knowing more details and
having a confidential conversation about a severance package should contact
Peter Vincent at x7294. Let¹s all meet in the bullpen at 9:45 this morning
before the regular 10 o¹clock meeting. Thanks, Rick

And a rumor from Editorialiste on Twitter: "Top Time Inc. editors willing to take salary cuts to save jobs." Admirable.

The photo comes from a shoot Greenberg — whom Beck has lambasted as a liberal photo-agitator — did for a GQ story on Beck back in June, in which she made the emotionally unstable Mormon cry. Hey, as long as she makes him look good, right?

Here's the deeply unsettling behind-the-scenes video we obtained of a bawling Beck at that shoot, which we first published exclusively in June:

And now a tear-free shot from the same series is on newsstands around the country promoting Beck's pudgy mug. Which is funny because Beck berated Greenberg almost exactly one year ago for photoshopping her Atlantic portrait of John McCain to make him look like a vampire, and for "terrorizing" children in her infamous series of crying toddlers.

As for the Time story itself, it's a masterwork of equivalence journalism. You can literally feel reporter David Von Drehle's terror at being accused of "taking sides" in the "debate" about whether Beck—who didn't consent to an interview—is a populist hero or a paranoid spinner of conspiracy theories. It's a bizarre, claustrophobic world that Time reporters inhabit, one in which it is literally impossible for the subject of one's reporting to make an objectively untrue assertion. One false move, and Von Drehle might be forced to actually defend a proposition to thousands of outraged, irrational commenters. Better to equivocate.

So we get tortured sentences like these:

Between the liberal fantasies about Brownshirts at town halls and the conservative concoctions of brainwashed children goose-stepping to school, you'd think the Palm in Washington had been replaced with a Munich beer hall.

• Liberal fantasies? Men armed with assault rifles and pistols and wearing shirts calling for the "blood of tyrants" to be shed have attended Obama's public events. A woman shouted "Heil Hitler!" at an Israeli Jew defending Obama's proposals at one healthcare townhall. But on the other hand, the president of the United States told America's schoolchildren to do their homework.

He is afraid that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" - which doesn't mean, he hastens to add, that he actually thinks "Obama doesn't like white people."

• Here's what Beck actually said, which, thankfully, was actually recorded by a video camera, a device that creates a record of objective reality: "This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture—I don't know what it is." [Emphasis added.] But on the other hand, Glenn Beck's characterization of his own thoughts at the moment that he expressed them ought not tell the whole story about what Glenn Beck thinks.

Like William Jennings Bryan whipping up populist Democrats over moneyed interests or the John Birch Society brooding over fluoride, Beck mines the timeless theme of the corrupt Them thwarting a virtuous Us.

• A Democratic populist once inveighed against actual, real wealthy people who wielded actual, real power over our political system. On the other hand, avowedly racist right-wing xenophobes once accused the U.S. government of undermining the Constitution by adding a common dentifrice to the water supply.

And so on. After discussing some of the truthful things that Beck has publicized, like Van Jones' trutherism, Von Drehle does another "on the other hand" pivot to examine just one of the many falsehoods Beck has promoted: "But he also spins yarns of less substance. He tells his viewers that Obama's volunteerism efforts are really an attempt to create a 'civilian national-security force that is just as strong, just as powerful as the military.'"

Von Drehle is correct in characterizing Beck's claims about Obama's attempts to create a civilian national-security force as having less substance than his claims about ACORN and Van Jones. Because they have no substance at all. They are lies. But saying that outright—as opposed to locating them on some mythical metric of truthfulness in which all claims seem to have some "substance"—would constitute an assertion about Beck's honesty and reliability. Time is clearly not the appropriate forum for such a conversation.

According to the LA Times, the perpetrator is a 20-year-old University of Chicago Illinois student named Firas Alkhateeb who made the image during his winter break from school using PhotoShop, naturally:

Alkhateeb had been tinkering with the program to improve the looks of photos he had taken on his clunky Kodak camera. The Joker project was his grandest undertaking yet. Using a tutorial he'd found online about how to "Jokerize" portraits, he downloaded the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama and began digitally painting over it.

Four or five hours later, he happily had his product.

Alkhateeb says that he then posted the image to his Flickr page where it sat largely unnoticed for a couple of months. Then an unknown individual found the photo, removed all of the references to Time, added the word "socialism" across the bottom of the image and posted it all over the streets of Los Angeles. The original image was found on Alkhateeb's Flickr by the LA Times after they were tipped off to it by a reader, but he closed the account after they contacted him because he wanted to "lay low" in the "very, very liberal" city from which Barack Obama's political career was sprung.

"After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ," Alkhateeb said. "From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him."

"I abstained from voting in November," he wrote in an e-mail. "Living in Illinois, my vote means close to nothing as there was no chance Obama would not win the state." If he had to choose a politician to support, Alkhateeb said, it would be Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich.

So yeah, good luck wrapping your brain around this one.

Time's John Cloud spoke to a group of researchers at Louisiana State University (Geaux Tigers!) who claim that regular exercise may actually make it harder for people to lose weight. How? Because gym exercise makes us hungrier, which often leads to an increase in the consumption of food, much of which is not of the healthy variety by mere virtue of the era in which we live, as many of our foods are processed and filled with all sorts of things the human body has difficulty breaking down.

The researchers at LSU also found that exercising in a gym often also leads to increased levels of inactivity during the periods of time when we aren't at the gym. For instance, someone who spent an hour on the stairmaster is more inclined to take an elevator over the stairs, or take a cab instead of walking to a destination, either out of fatigue or an "I worked out today so I deserve this" sense of entitlement.

Dr. Timothy Church, LSU's "chair in health wisdom," and his team came to their conclusions after conducting an extensive study:

Church's team randomly assigned into four groups 464 overweight women who didn't regularly exercise. Women in three of the groups were asked to work out with a personal trainer for 72 min., 136 min., and 194 min. per week, respectively, for six months. Women in the fourth cluster, the control group, were told to maintain their usual physical-activity routines. All the women were asked not to change their dietary habits and to fill out monthly medical-symptom questionnaires.

The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised - sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months - did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.

Unfortunately, the Time piece doesn't disclose what types exercise (Weights? Running? Yoga?) the women in the three active groups participated regularly in, nor does it go into detail about the specifics of their diets (Carb-heavy? Lean proteins?), but really, doesn't this all just confirm something we all already know, that the key to losing weight is to burn more calories than you consume? Is it really all that complicated?

Nevertheless, if the results of this study have got you down, fear not — it's a virtual guarantee that another study will come along in the next few months to directly contradict all of the findings in this one. It's just the way things go.

Photo via Scoutj's Flickr

Everyone, it seemed, was friending everyone; Glenn Beck was even snapping fan pics of Michelle Obama and chatting up liberal internet publisher Arianna Huffington (see selected Time 100 tweets below).

Some on stage, where the founders of Twitter were honored, limited their remarks to 140 characters.

And, like the hot microblogging startup, the event was one of the few remaining bubbles where the world's economic problems could be forgotten: The champagne and food reportedly flowed freely.

Not that everyone appreciated the insulation. Page Six's Paula Froelich was as disgruntled at having to attend the event as she was thrilled getting out of last night's Met Costume Ball. Ann Coulter had trouble finding a safe table, according to some whispers overheard by Glynnis MacNicol. And Time's James Poniewozik, stuck in the cheap seats at his own event, brought word that host Jimmy Fallon was scared by visions of a drunken full complement of View ladies.

(UPDATE: Froelich emails to set the record straight, "LOVED the Time 100 — was a heck of a lot of fun - was just annoyed about having to deal with subway in black tie and changing shoes/putting on makeup on the D train due to security for M.O. (I'm not dumb - i remember the inauguration fracas, you couldnt take a cab within 50 blocks of the Pbamas!).")

:

Some Twitter selections:

Pictures were taken, on and off the red carpet:

Michelle Obama was, naturally, sleeveless, and Stella McCartney requested she stay that way, forever, for the good of fashion. (Getty Images)

M.I.A. was sporting purple lipstick and a denim-y jacket. Glynnis MacNicol caught a shot of the singer mingling.

Liv Tyler, Stella McCartney and Kate Hudson were mingling, A-list style. (Getty)

Oprah always mingles A-list-style, by definition. (MacNicol)

A.R. Rahman and Falu perform. (Celebrity photographer (in a way) Evan Williams)

MacNicol becomes meta-paparazzo.

UPDATE: Keith Kelly from the New York Post put together a cool chart of who sat where at host Time Inc's tables. Highlights:

Power table: Michelle Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Time Inc. bigshots John Huey and Richard Stengel (Time editor).

Cool kids' table: Biz Stone of Twitter, hottie Obama speechwriter Jon Favreai, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels and model/designer Lauren Bush.

Geek table: Conservative pundit Ann Coulter, stats whiz Nate Silver, Ford CEO Alan Mullally and Time assistant managing editor Michael Duffy.

Arthur Sulzberger Jr., family steward to the financially-troubled paper, has written an embarrassing paean to its benefactor Slim. At least he had the good grace to publish it elsewhere, in Time magazine. Can you smell the butter?

I recently had the great pleasure of meeting Carlos Slim... It was obvious from the moment we met that he was a true Times loyalist... Carlos, a very shrewd businessman... has funded extensive public-health education programs and... helped thousands of students throughout Latin America...

Carlos knows very well how much one person with courage, determination and vision can achieve.

Sulzberger just finished examining 30 different online-news business models in hopes of making more money from nytimes.com. The publisher is well aware of how challenging it is to turn a profit online. So perhaps he should not be blamed for seizing the opportunity to exploit his real talent: Pleasing the rich and powerful people who own his company, through flattery and every other means.

Sulzberger is hardly alone: many in the traditional media find it easier to court new sugar daddies than to implement deeper forms of change. The Times scion is, however, the most conspicuous — and so, in many ways, the saddest.

Halperin is a well-compensated idiot. Here's what he said on MSNBC in January on why Barack Obama is an abject failure and exactly like George Bush:

This is a really bad sign for Barack Obama to try to change Washington.... He needs bipartisan solutions. They went for it and they came up with zero.... [This] does not bode well for a future that is supposed to be post-partisan... [Obama] could have gone for centrist compromises. You can say to your own party, "Sorry, some of you liberals aren't going to like it, but I am going to change this legislation radically to get a big centrist majority rather than an all-Democratic vote." He chose not to do that, that's the exact path that George Bush took for most of his presidency with disastrous consequences for bipartisanship and solving big problems.

But now Obama is dominating, because that's what it seems like now, so why not blast it from the rooftops as HALPERIN'S TAKE because people seem to listen to him?

Halperin's vapid weather-vane reversal spells doom for Obama, though, because as David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager who is known to concern himself with real things in the actual world as opposed to the contours of Mark Halperin's ego, used to say on the trail: "If Politico and Halperin say we're winning, we're losing."

Mr. President: You are now losing.

April Fool's is always a big event for Silicon Valley companies. The annual festival of pranks is a defining event for geek culture. When he worked at Sun Microsystems, colleagues of Eric Schmidt, now Google's CEO, disassembled a Volkswagen Beetle and reassembled it inside his office. Google's pranks over the years have ranged from Google Romance to a toilet-based Internet service provider.

Since he joined, a Google tipster tells us, Krantz has been the wordsmith behind Google's tomfoolery — "Google uses the same weird writer genius every year." He promises the prank will be "very good and totally insane." But isn't the ultimate April Fool's joke here that Google, which worships at the altar of the algorithm, actually employs a veteran of the world's most prestigious magazine?

(Photo by Ted Thai/Life)

Krugman leads with a Time cover from ten years ago featuring Most Loathsome Financial Villain runner-up Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers with a headline labeling the trio "the committee to save the world" from a then-impending global financial crisis.

How times have changed.

Never mind the fact that two members of the committee have since succumbed to the magazine cover curse, the plunge in reputation that so often follows lionization in the media. (Mr. Summers, now the head of the National Economic Council, is still going strong.) Far more important is the extent to which our claims of financial soundness - claims often invoked as we lectured other countries on the need to change their ways - have proved hollow.

Indeed, these days America is looking like the Bernie Madoff of economies: for many years it was held in respect, even awe, but it turns out to have been a fraud all along.

That was a Time cover. Newsweek covers, like the current one, picture aboved, are totally different.

Kelly's current job was invented for him in 2006, after the longtime editor concluded his tenure as Time magazine's managing editor. He'd been with the publication 28 years.

After being moved upstairs to the mother ship, Kelly was to oversee "standards, practices and ethics" and the "pre-publication vetting of controversial stories." He reported to Time Inc. Editor In Chief John Huey.

The reasons for his departure aren't clear, but one imagines that after laying off 600 staffers, Time Inc. has been looking for redundancies in the executive suite. As always, if you have any inside knowledge, we'd love to hear from you.

You see, Time's argument is that since Gawker grew up chronicling media barons, we're now doomed to go down with them. It's the sort of pat logic you might find in a newsweekly pitch meeting: "All that's left for Gawker is to report on its own demise."

The expansion of our coverage beyond the Manhattan media world —- and into entertainment, politics and, after last year's merger with Valleywag, technology — has been paying off. In fact, traffic has been booming around here: With nearly 23.5 million page views last month, according to our public traffic numbers, the site had its second biggest month ever. And last week on Quantcast we passed the 3 million unique visitors mark, a better than 50% increase from December.

Time political correspondent Karen Tumulty shared some Capitol trivia.

New York Times TV blogger Brian Stelter experienced a Christian Bale problem.

Federated Media online-ad huckster John Battelle had time to Twitter, but not to think. See how that works?

Wired.com editor Dylan Tweney went hungry after a colleague ate his lunch.

Could the sushi thief have been Wired writer Steven Levy, who confessed to feeling hungry? Nah — Levy was at TED and you weren't.

Anyone else's tweets we should keep an eye on? Send us more Twitter usernames, please.

In Time's latest cover story — which you can read without charge on the World Wide Web — Isaacson writes that publications cannot rely on advertising revenues alone, and should get their readers to pay per article instead:

A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment.

We ought to cheer the notion that publications will try to start charging for content online. Writers at ad-supported publications will pay the fees and deliver crisp summaries and analysis for free. Outlets which charge will end up reduced to the business of trade publications, which only manage to extract money from people who need the information for their job.

That's pretty much what Time did in its early years, when it was a fancy printed blog. Editors there subscribed to the New York Times and other papers, and wrote up a weekly digest, which Time's founder, Henry Luce, then sold for rather less money than one would pay at the newsstand for all their sources.

But we have to wonder where Isaacson got this idea? Here's a hint: In 1995, Josh Quittner, whom Isaacson had hired the year before, wrote an essay about "Way New Journalism" for the online arm of Wired. Quittner wrote:

Nearly two-thirds of the cost of putting out a newspaper or magazine is the cost of printing it (paper, ink, printing presses) and distributing it (trucks, delivery folks, mail). Uncouple the content from the production and distribution costs, and you see the kind of cash we're dealing with here. Introduce the possibility that by the end of the decade, 100 million people will be on the Net. Now, give those people the technical ability to pay 3 cents for each and every story they read. If only 1 million people read, say, one Time story on O.J. Simpson, that's US$30,000. Pretty soon, you're talking about real money.

When Quittner noted that the technical infrastructure for such micropayments was missing in 1995, it was true. When Wired repeated the claim a year later, it was still true. But when Isaacson mouths the verity in 2009, he makes a fool of himself. He writes that PayPal does not accept micropayments; in fact, it does. Amazon.com lets anyone build their own micropayments service using its billing engine. The existence of 99-cent iTunes songs and 10-cent text messages show that consumers are willing to pay small amounts for digital content.

The problem with micropayments is not technology. It's that consumers are fundamentally uninterested in paying per article. Isaacson dismisses the problem of "mental transaction costs," but it's quite real. It's almost impossible to determine the value of an article before you read it. And the amounts we're talking about — 3 cents? 5 cents? 10 cents? — aren't worth the time it takes to decide how much one is willing to pay.

The advocates of micropayments also forget the basic law of supply and demand. Editors today increasingly talk about "commodity news" — the numbingly same mass of articles written about the same news event, adding nothing to the reader's knowledge. Why would anyone pay for those? The snobs of print media also forget that they have long competed with free radio and television news broadcasts. The news will come out, one way or another. It's the classic vanity of writers to think that they have created the one perfect story that exceeds all others. The clear-minded statistics of Web usage quickly reveal this as a delusion.

Quittner (who, full disclosure, was my boss for six years at Time and Business 2.0 and talked about micopayments incessantly) was right to note the liberating effect of getting rid of the costs of print media. But he was wrong about how we'd pay for it.

The article isn't online yet, but here's a taste from the little summary sent out by the magazine's P.R. department:

"The Village Voice was originally conceived as a living, breathing attempt to demolish the notion that one needs to be a professional to accomplish something in a field as purportedly technical as journalism," Dan Wolf, the editor of the Voice, wrote in the introduction to "The Village Voice Reader," in 1962. Similarly, as critics and columnists were permitted to inject themselves into their writing, Menand writes, the Voice showed that one could disrespect the journalistic idols of impersonality and objectivity and still sell newspapers. Norman Mailer's columns for the paper were "unprofessional on purpose: like Wolf, he wanted to poke his finger in the eye of objectivity and expertise," Menand says. "What Mailer learned at the Voice was the literary value of leading with your personality. He never forgot it."

Hey, what does sound like? Menand makes the comparison crystal clear: "more than other magazines and newspapers, the Voice was doing what the Internet does now long before there was an Internet. The Voice was the blogosphere . . . and Craigslist fifty years before their time."

"The Voice Was the Original Blog" may be the only way to explain to a generation whose memory only goes back to the days when the Voice was a thick and tired tabloid filled with predictably leftist polemics, escort ads, classifieds and movie listings. The vibrancy disappeared long before the business model.

The original formula Menand celebrates is basically the same one that blogs — you're reading one right now! — want to replicate. It can be summed up as this: attitude is cheap, reporting is expensive. When Britton Hadden and Henry Luce started Time magazine in 1923, it wasn't much more than rewriting New York Times clips in an idiosyncratic diction. The New Yorker launched in 1925 as a humor magazine for young Manhattanites that reveled in its insider-y tone. When advertising and circulation grew — and editorial budgets increased — these publications quickly dropped their finger-in-the-eye-of-the-establishment pose and signed up for full membership.

The Voice tried too. Menand notes of cartoonist Jules Feiffer's early works:

Feiffer's characters were sometimes business types and politicians, but they were also sometimes caricatures of the sort of people one would imagine to be Voice readers—beatniks, lounge lizards, modern dancers. The Voice was the medium through which a mainstream middle-class readership stayed in touch with its inner bohemian. It was the ponytail on the man in the gray flannel suit."

Their big, utterly predictable and therefore unreadable package includes a long interview by Time liberal media conspiracy member Richard Stengel and some stuff about how Obama is a nifty point guard. He beat out four other alleged "candidates" who were put forward for appearance's sake. Mostly Time liked the excuse to run these pictures of Obama, so that they could gaze upon them and imagine they might have befriended him back then when all were young and fancy free, and thereby be in a better position to receive a minor cabinet appointment in his administration. Hope lives.

[Time]

Stengel himself left journalism to go work on the presidential campaign of Bill Bradley—a liberal Democrat!—in 2000. Now he's back at the helm of a down-the-middle news magazine, naturally, because liberals run the media. With those credentials, it's impossible to doubt him when he says that Carney

“doesn’t have any kind of ideology.”

Really, no ideology at all? Was your Washington bureau chief a drooling child? Failure to embrace their own ideology is the single most annoying characteristic of media liberals. Own that shit!

Then again, Carney always had a reputation for being fair on the campaign trail, according to Politico's Michael Calderone, another member of the liberal media conspiracy.