But more than that, Time is the perfect manifestation of Trump’s attitude toward success. Trump became a public figure and a celebrity at Time’s apex. And in Manhattan in 1989, Time magazine was the king of the newsstand. Donald Trump is a man whose concept of wealth is all Manhattan circa 1989. It’s as simultaneously weird and unsurprising as if Trump started griping about room service at the Plaza, or bar service at Elaine’s, or pick-your-own-1990s-New-York-City-reference. On one hand, why on Earth would Donald Trump- the president of the United States, Donald Trump-care what Time magazine is doing? On the other, of course Donald Trump is fixated on Time magazine’s “person of the year” contest.
One way to force people to-if not actually care-pay attention: a defiant tweet from President Trump.
(To answer your question, yes, Newsweek does still exist.) Meanwhile, the Koch brothers are backing the Meredith Corporation’s possible purchase of the storied publication, according to The New York Times.ĭonald Trump and Marla Maples meet characters from the television show Dinosaurs during lunch at the Plaza Hotel in 1992. Remember Newsweek? It once routinely determined the national conversation. Time’s newsroom is still home to many great journalists, but the economic environment for newsweeklies is absolutely brutal. (And, by the way, Time actually did name Trump “person of the year” in 2016.) This, at a time when the print-magazine business is generally not thriving. One can only imagine the conversations that took place among the Time editorial team in the past 24 hours, but one thing almost certainly came up: Trump’s bizarre decision to insert himself into, of all things at this dramatic moment in American life, Time’s pick for a fading print-era tradition is decidedly good for business.
EVEN TV!” The real issue of Time magazine at the time featured the actress Kate Winslet on the cover. The fake cover featured a serious looking Trump with twin, glowing assessments: “Donald Trump: The ‘Apprentice’ is a television smash!” and “TRUMP IS HITTING ON ALL FRONTS. In June, The Washington Post discovered that what looked like a back issue of Time magazine featuring Trump on the cover-and displayed in at least five of Trump’s clubs-was, in fact, doctored. And not just because of Trump’s apparent obsession with appearing on the cover. “Man of the Year”-it became “person” in 1999-is arguably the Trumpiest possible tradition in magazine journalism. TIME does not comment on our choice until publication, which is December 6.” The magazine wasted little time firing back: “The President is incorrect about how we choose Person of the Year. I said probably is no good and took a pass. “Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named ‘Man (Person) of the Year,’ like last year,” Trump tweeted on Friday, “but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot. Now, as president, whipping the press into a frenzy is, for Donald Trump, muscle memory. Back then, he was still trying to figure it out. “I can only say that the press couldn’t get enough,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal in 1987. Well, they’re not news until the president of the United States gets involved, anyway.ĭonald Trump has always had a gift of making a big deal out of nothing. “Year-end wrap-ups,” he wrote, “simply aren’t news.” Yet the “person of the year” still creates a residual media buzz-attention that, as my colleague David Graham wrote in 2012, really isn’t justified. Now that the heyday of newsmagazines has receded, the spectrum of people who have ever held a physical copy of Time in their hands has shriveled. Time was once a scrappy upstart, but for decades it was a very serious must-read magazine. Time’s annual “person of the year” designation has always been a gimmick, going all the way back to Charles Lindbergh in 1927. That was when Time looked at the rise of open-publishing platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook, and decided the most influential person was the collective “you.” It was cheesy, trite, and had the exact effect Time wanted: Everybody talked about it. If you had to pick the year Time magazine’s “person of the year” jumped the shark, you’d probably start with 2006.