The rare interview from the grounds of his private residence was a reminder of the tremendous access the venerable weekly newsmagazine still enjoys.
On Time.com, the story was packaged with a sidebar on how the author landed the interview, a listicle of things you may not know about the prince, a slideshow and a back story on photographing the cover.
The multilayered approach was a fresh reminder of the state of Time as it launches a campaign to enhance its relevance in the digital age. The power and prestige of the Time brand still emanate from the magazine. Although its print subscriber base is at a standstill, it's investing aggressively in Time.com, considered a laggard among major news sites.
Arevamped version of the site will debut this year, with more stories, photos and video. The hoped-for result is a newsroom with faster, digital-age metabolism without any damage to Time's magazine identity. "Demand for what we do at Time and online has just been growing," says Nancy Gibbs, the magazine's recently installed managing editor. "We keep on shifting and evaluating resources, because we are doing so many things we didn't do five or 10 year ago."
Time's mantra to produce more and move quickly on all platforms is hardly unique, not to say belated. But its stepped-up efforts to hone its digital chops renew questions about the hazy outlook for print weeklies and the fate of an iconic publication that still retains more than 3 million subscribers worldwide. Its chief rivals — Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report — were marginalized years ago as readers met their need for reflective pieces on the Internet and elsewhere.
Time magazine's ad sales in the first nine months of the year fell 4.7% from a year ago to $245.2 million, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Time won't say whether th! e magazine is profitable, although parent Time Inc. is.
Gibbs says all current editorial pursuits in print will continue. Meaty cover stories will remain at their typical length of five or six pages. News analyses and shorter features covering popular topics — tech, pop culture, demographics — continue to populate the back of the book. "I still think there's a real appetite for those who make sense of news," Gibbs says. "People are busy, and they don't have time to read 15 newspapers and websites."
Time's decision to jump-start its digital news operation is a tardy but much needed move, says Ken Doctor, a media analyst who writes about the industry on his site Newsonomics.com.
As a print product, Time has seen better days. And Time.com has largely failed to establish a singular identity, while trailing competitors in tapping social media, he says. "They've had so many strategies," he says. "The barrier to entry came down, and they have a lot more competition (online). And they've never figured out how to adjust to it."
CHANGING WITH THE TIMES
The task of juggling the newsroom's operations now falls to Gibbs, a legendary Time cover story writer who was promoted to her job in September.
With more than 100 cover stories under her belt, she has plenty of street cred among the rank and file. And her appointment was generally well received among the troops, according to a source who is familiar with the newsroom but wanted to speak anonymously in discussing internal matters.
Gibbs is not wrapped up in her own ego, says the source, who describes her as perhaps the most organized managing editor in the storied magazine's history.
She has increasingly empowered her deputies when it comes to making decisions for the final layout, the source says, resulting in fewer last-minute changes.
Gibbs' vaunted efficiency will be fully tested as she implements the new strategy. The ceaseless weekly deadline to produce the magazine isn't dissipating, but the pressure ! to genera! te more content online will only intensify. "We're looking to operate at much higher velocity and greater depth," she says.
Gibbs notes that she is the first editor to take over the magazine at a time when its digital audience is larger than the print subscriber base. Time.com's U.S. desktop traffic totaled about 13 million unique visitors in October, according to comScore. That's up 18% from a year ago, but it is still far behind industry leaders. The Huffington Post, for example, had about 61 million in October.
In citing data from Omniture, Time says its website had more than 40 million unique visitors from all devices in October, a new record and up 58% from a year ago.
Time.com already has bountiful content and features a steady, if not comprehensive, stream of breaking news. Only about 5% of what's on the site ends up in the magazine. But top editors' recent decision to create a continuous news desk underscores the urgency of the mandate to step up real-time news coverage. The move is meant to convince readers to think of Time.com as a source of breaking news, says Edward Felsenthal, who was named managing editor of Time.com in May. "The mission is the same. The time frame is massively stepped up," says Felsenthal, who co-founded The Daily Beast in 2008. "We are a full service news provider."
With all writers and editors housed in one unified newsroom, all will be asked to contribute to all platforms. Time's best known writers, such as political columnist Joe Klein and TV-media critic James Poniewozik, will post quick-turn analyses.
Time declined to reveal the size of its staff. But about 30 newsroom staffers have been hired since April, when it offered buyouts to veterans. The number of national and international correspondents is still a fraction of what it was a decade ago, the newsroom source says. Time Inc. laid off about 500 employees, or 6% percent of its workforce, this year. (To shield its more profitable businesses, Time Warner said in March it plans to spi! n off Tim! e Inc. as a separate company.)
REAL-TIME? TIME WILL TELL
Time says the new site will showcase more video, including new series on hot social media topics, explaining news, tech tips and newsmaker interviews. And photos will be displayed more prominently.
Digital-only content will remain free. Magazine articles are available online only to print subscribers, a policy that's been in place since 2011.
Time's cover-all-bases approach has its skeptics. With a reputation shaped over decades as a smart decoder of the week's news, Time's emphasis on real-time developments may be a case of "putting a square peg in a round hole," Doctor says. "The breaking news part of it makes no sense to me. There's brutal competition there."
Rather, he says, Time may be better off employing a strategy applied by Atlantic Media to its new online business publication, Quartz, marking a competitive advantage with fewer but smarter stories and distinct voices. "Readers don't expect Time to tell you what's happening. They expect context," Doctor says. "They've got to pick and choose. They have to climb that food chain rather than doing what everyone else is doing."
Meanwhile, devoted fans of the magazine wonder what the accelerated shift to digital may mean for the already diminished print product. Samir Husni, director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism, says he wrote to Gibbs' predecessor, Rick Stengel, several years ago lamenting the increasing thinness in coverage and the proliferation of "evergreen" cover stories that aren't tied to the news.
Noting that the vast majority of Time's revenue comes from the magazine, Husni, aka "Mr. Magazine," advocates refocusing its efforts on what it does best — providing time-constrained readers with elegantly written analyses of the week's news, laid out colorfully and printed on quality paper.
"Digital is important, but what is more important for survival of Time is to go after the reader! s who (sa! y), 'If I give you half an hour, can you give me a story or two that makes sense of what's going on in this world?' " he says. "Can you be a curator who can make me say, 'Wow, I know everything I need to know about Syria'?"
As Gibbs settles into her job, plenty of such editorial advice will doubtless flood her inbox. One thing seems clear: There won't be much wistful looking back at the past. "We are operating so far beyond the boundaries of Time magazine," she says. "This is the golden age, if you love stories. We've never had better tools."
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