I want to encourage you to read an article at the New York Times on the decline of Time, Inc. The article is an “oral history”, i.e. it consists of a series of brief quotes from former researchers, writers, and editors. Very informative.
The print versions of Time and Life were fixtures in our house when I was a kid. My dad maintained subscriptions to two newspapers, Time, Life, National Geographic, and Consumer Reports. I recall being astonished at the stupidity of Time’s acquisition of AOL. I suspect that those with more inside knowledge felt pretty much the same way about Time’s acquisition of Warner’s.
My impression is that publishing in general not just newspaper and magazine but book publishing, too, tends to be extremely conservative. Not politically but in terms of business attitudes. Walking into McGraw-Hill’s executive offices in the 1980s was like a portal into the 1930s if not 1900. This article tends to support that view.
I cannot imagine how you came to such an impression. The main stream media a virtually entirely left wing extremists from the owners down to the janitors. Even Fox News is clearly a center-left publication, just as the Republican Party is clearly a center-left political party.
We have about reached the situation that Europe has been in for some time. Every political party in Europe, without exception, is a socialist party, and left-right there merely refers to positions on the socialist spectrum. Even Mussolini’s Fascists and Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party were socialist parties, differing from classical Marxism only by their prioritization of the nation over economic class.
I don’t mean politically conservative. I mean conservative in the sense of preserving the ways and attitudes of the past. I attribute it to how many Ivy Leaguers tend to be in publishing.
We had the same subscriptions at our house except for my Dad also got Mad Magazine. For Holidays and Birthdays various members of the family would aslo gift subscriptions to the Weekly World News.
I still maintain a subscription to Consumer Reports, and my wife subscribes to a couple of science journals, but that’s it. My Dad passed last fall and I received his collection of National Geographics. I haven’t gone through all of them yet, but I believe he has almost every issue going back to the 1920’s. National Geographic was what got me interested in maps, travel and exploring, three interests that have stuck with me.