Henry Luce ‘got’ the Web before There Was a Web

At Time Inc., Man of the Year every day

I am reading The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley.

It’s the story of Henry Luce, who was once a household name in the US, but probably today is largely unknown by a generation of bloggers and tweeters.  Luce was the founder of Time-Life, Time Magazine, Life Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and many others.  This was once the most powerful and influential media empire in the world – and it was all Luce’s idea.

Luce was born in China, the son of American Presbyterian missionaries.  He was not born to money or power, but he worked incredibly hard, attended Hotchkiss and Yale as a work/scholarship student, and upon graduation from Yale, got the idea for Time Magazine – a weekly news magazine.

No one had ever published anything like this before.

Today, Time Magazine is an anemic shadow of its former self, but once it was the media center of not only the US, but the world.

Think of Time/Life as Google, but in print.

We tend to think of magazine like Time as ‘old’ media, but what was fascinating was that Luce was way ahead of his time. Way ahead. Further even than he knew.

When Luce started Time he didn’t have vast amounts of funding, and he certainly didn’t have reporters all over the world as he later would. Instead, he started cutting up The New York Times and other publications and simply taking his ‘news’ from them and publishing it weekly.  A kind of 1920’s media mashup.

Luce as Drudge before there was a Drudge, before there was an Internet. But the web is something Luce would have understood.

He was there first.

Now, contrast Luce with James Murdoch, who yesterday decried The British Library for digitizing the content of the many newspapers that it keeps in its archives.

Suddenly, for Murdoch, a stack of old and yellowing newspapers has value. Not that NewsCorp ever saw it before.

“Take the current controversy over the library’s intention to provide unrestricted access to digital material,” Murdoch said. “Material that publishers originally produced – and continue to make available – for commercial reasons. Like the search business, but motivated by different concerns, the public sector interest is to distribute content for near-zero cost – harming the market in so doing, and then justifying increased subsidies to make up for the damage it has inflicted.”

For most people, old newspapers are good for stuffing shoes or wrapping fish. What, after all, is the value of day-old news that everyone has already read?

Apparently a lot.

And while it might be a discovery to James Murdoch, this would be old news to Henry Luce.

Now, let’s extrapolate upon this for just one moment.

If there’s this kind of value to old newspapers, what value is there to old TV news shows?

I was once in the library at CBS News. I think Larry Tisch stopped funding it years ago.

Larry Tisch didn’t get it.

Henry R. Luce certainly did.

It’s the Long Tail…. and it goes both ways. For sales, but also for content.