Ninety Five Years Ago Today …

TIME magazine was published for the first time, and, to date, has stood the test of time. It was the first weekly news magazine in the US and today has the world’s largest circulation for a weekly news magazine (with three quarters of its readers in the US).

The idea behind the magazine was brevity, with the original intent that a busy man could read it in an hour. The original slogan was Take Time — It’s Brief. Maybe that’s why it’s still around today, since it seems all the younger generation has time to read are short LinkedIn articles and Facebook Posts, and if they are on the go, you’re lucky if they get through the new, double length, tweet.

But it teaches us something … if you want to be widely read, or at least widely acknowledged, get to the point … fast. Add more in depth later when you have attention, bur brevity sells. Advertising revenue may be down (but it’s down in print across the board), but TIME is still surviving, and looks like if it does go down in the future, it will be among the last major print publications to fall. It’s a communication lesson for all of us, so let’s take time to understand it.