LIFE Magazine, Its Pages Dwindling, Will Cease Publication

Katherine Q Seelye
The New York Times
Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
pg C2
The Story
The Summary: LIFE magazine is closing, again, this time for good.

Time Inc. announced yesterday that LIFE magazine would cease publication next month, the third time since LIFE’s founding in 1936 that its owner has pulled the plug.

This time, the magazine’s demise looks permanent, largely because LIFE is moving its huge archive of photographs onto the Web, where consumers will be able to download them free.

I wish I would have been around when LIFE was in its heyday. I would have loved to be an editor at LIFE. People don't appreciate great photographs anymore. (or so it seems) The world has become about getting the story, not getting the story well. First it was the clock, now it's the camera... everything has a camera in it. It's not so much about taking a good photograph as it is about having proof. Some sort of evidence that this happened.

Time Inc., part of Time Warner, has been in turmoil with layoffs and an overhaul of its flagship Time magazine as the company shifts its attention to the Internet. It blamed the newspaper business for the demise of Life, which has been carried as a newspaper insert since October 2004.

“While consumers responded enthusiastically to Life, with the decline in the newspaper business and the outlook for advertising growth in the newspaper supplement category, the response was not strong enough to warrant further investment in Life as a weekly newspaper supplement,” the company said in a statement.

This really is the end of an era. Much of American history can be viewed in the photographic archives of LIFE. While the magazine hasn't actually existed for seven years, this final closing of LIFE is like someone dying in the nursing home. You knew it was coming, but you had kind of hoped that it would pull through and be better.

The newspaper supplement racket is hard to be sucessful in, since it isn't soley consumer driven. People can request that their newspaper carry a certain supplement on Sunday, but often newspapers are owned by a larger company that determines that. Our own Bemidji Pioneer is owned by the Fargo Forum. One can only imagine that the parent company makes such decisions.

Although rumors of LIFE’s impending death have persisted over the last two years, Bill Shapiro, LIFE’s managing editor, said that he “started hearing the drumbeat in the last week or so.” Mr. Shapiro had reinvented the magazine to be what he called “an antidote” to grim news headlines, but its reincarnation as a newspaper supplement had come at the wrong time.

“The pall cast over the newspaper industry didn’t make it a sexy sector in which to advertise,” he said.

The magazine began as a weekly and was first closed in 1972. LIFE was revived as a monthly in 1978 and shut down in 2000. In its heyday, it occupied five floors of the Time & Life Building in Midtown Manhattan; today its staff takes up a corner of one floor.

Goodbye LIFE!!! We'll miss you!!!