Henry Luce, considered one of the most innovative and powerful mass communicator in the history of mass media, had some major impacts in the magazine industry with the creation of many well known magazines, such as Time and Life. He was six feet tall, blue eyes, bushy eyebrows and was very energetic yet always known to have a serious face on. His early career Luce and his partners raised 86 thousand dollars to start their first magazine Time, in 1923, which soon enough with the creation of other magazines he reached up to 45 million dollars.
Henry R. Luce was not just the owner of some of the most popular magazines in United States, but also had many achievements in the magazine industry. During the late 1930's Henry and his partners created Time, providing a "more gripping and coherent view of the world than was to be found in similar periodicals and daily newspapers." During the 1940's, Henry Luce created Life, a introduction for the readers to photojournalism, where pictured were used to make a summary of the week and causing major impact in society. In his magazines, Henry Luce always tried to show a more contradictory point of view, getting involved in politics and demonstrating his point of view without boundaries. When summarizing the news in words and pictures through Life and Time got old and started to decline, Henry decided to expand the reaches of his magazines and allow room for science, politics, art etc. This was quickly adopted but not only other magazines but by other types of media such as radio, TV and newspaper.
Henry Luce was a very important and very famous men in the 1930’s till his death, and will be remembered forever as one of the most influential and important names of the magazine industry.[54]
"During the general-interest era, national news magazines such as Time were also major commercial successes. Begun in 1923 by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, Time magazine developed a magazine brand of interpretive journalism - (assigning reporter-researcher teams to cover stories while a rewrite editor would put the article in narrative form with an interpretive point of view.
Time had a circulation of 200,000 by 1930 and increased to over 3 million by the mid-1960's. The magazine's success encouraged prominent imitators including Newsweek (1933- ), U.S News and World Report (1948- ) and more recently the Week (2001- )" [11]
"Despite the commercial success of Reader's Digest and Time in the 20th Century, the magazine that really symbolized the general-interest genre during this era were the oversized pictorial weeklies Look and Life. More than any other magazine of its day, Life developed an effective strategy for competing with popular radio by advancing photojournalism. Launched as a weekly by Henry Luce in 1936, Life was able to combine the public's fascination with images (incorporated by the movie industry), radio journalism, and the popularity of advertising and fashion photography."[11]
"By the end of the 1930s, Life had a pass-along readership- (the total number of people who come in to contact with a single copy of a magazine - of more than seventeen million, rivaling the ratings of popular radio programs." [11]
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.