Time Inc.

Time Inc. (also referred to as Time & Life, Inc. later on, after their two onetime flagship magazine publications) was an American worldwide mass media corporation founded on November 28, 1922, by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden and based in New York City. It owned and published over 100 magazine brands, including its namesake Time, Sports Illustrated, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Fortune, People, InStyle, Life, Golf Magazine, Southern Living, Essence, Real Simple, and Entertainment Weekly. It also had subsidiaries which it co-operated with the UK magazine house Time Inc. UK (which was later sold and since has been rebranded to TI Media), whose major titles include What's on TV, NME, Country Life, and Wallpaper. Time Inc. also co-operated over 60 websites and digital-only titles including MyRecipes, Extra Crispy, TheSnug, HelloGiggles, and MIMI.

In 1990, Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications to form the media conglomerate Time Warner (now Warner Bros. Discovery) with Time Inc. continuing as a subsidiary. In 2014, in order to focus on their three entertainment divisions: Warner Bros., Turner and HBO, Time Warner spun-off Time Inc. as a public company trading on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2018, media company Meredith Corporation acquired Time Inc. for $2.8 billion. Meredith was then acquired by IAC and merged with Dotdash to form Dotdash Meredith three years later, thus resulting in IAC gaining most of the former Time Inc. assets.

Nightly discussions of the concept of a news magazine led its founders Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, both age 23, to quit their jobs in 1922. Later that same year, they formed Time Inc. Having raised $86,000 of a $100,000 goal, the first issue of Time was published on March 3, 1923, as the first weekly news magazine in the United States. Luce served as business manager while Hadden was editor-in-chief. Luce and Hadden annually alternated year-to-year the titles of president and secretary-treasurer. Upon Hadden's sudden death in 1929, Luce assumed Hadden's position.

Luce launched the business magazine Fortune in February 1930 and created/founded the pictorial Life magazine in 1936, and launched House & Home in 1952 and Sports Illustrated in 1954. He also produced The March of Time radio and newsreel series. By the mid-1960s, Time Inc. was the largest and most prestigious magazine publisher in the world. (Dwight Macdonald, a Fortune staffer during the 1930s, referred to him as "Il Luce", a play on the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was called "Il Duce".) Once ambitious to become Secretary of State in a Republican administration, Luce wrote a famous article in Life magazine in 1941, called "The American Century", which defined the role of American foreign policy for the remainder of the 20th century, and perhaps beyond.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, aware that most publishers were opposed to him, issued a decree in 1943 that blocked all publishers and media executives from visits to combat areas; he put General George Marshall in charge of enforcement. The main target was Luce, who had long opposed FDR. Historian Alan Brinkley argues the move was "badly mistaken", for had Luce been allowed to travel, he would have been an enthusiastic cheerleader for American forces around the globe. But stranded in New York City, Luce's frustration and anger expressed itself in hard-edged partisanship. Luce, supported by Editor T. S. Matthews, appointed Whittaker Chambers as acting Foreign News editor in 1944, despite the feuds Chambers had with reporters in the field.

In the 1950s, the Time Inc. executive Brumbaugh made presentations to the Post Office Department to explain how Time Inc. was using a zoning system to speed the delivery of its magazines. Although the Post Office Department had instigated zones in 1943, they were inconsistently applied. As cited in FYI, Time Inc.'s internal newsletter "'Fewer than 40% of the cities were properly zoned,' he recalls. 'I went to the Post Office Department and showed them how we were making the zone system work.'" In 1963, the United States Post Office introduced ZIP codes.

Luce, who remained editor-in-chief of all his publications until 1964, maintained a position as an influential member of the Republican Party. Holding anti-communist sentiments, he used Time to support right-wing dictatorships in the name of fighting communism. An instrumental figure behind the so-called "China Lobby", he played a large role in steering American foreign policy and popular sentiment in favor of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling in their war against the Japanese. (The Chiangs appeared in the cover of Time eleven times between 1927 and 1955.

In 1961, Time Inc. entered the book publishing business that combined the resources of their magazines with the formation of Time Life (it later became the holding company for television and radio stations and had a film production division, Time Life Films and a record label). Time Inc. later acquired Boston-based Little, Brown and Company (later integrated into Time Warner Book Group following its merger with Warner Books, now known as the Hachette Book Group since its 2006 acquisition by Hachette Livre) for $17 million in January 1968.