To answer some of the questions our subscribers have been asking about how TIME gathers, verifies, writes and distributes its news.
If ever a magazine was not born with a silver spoon in its mouth, that magazine is TIME. In the whole U.S. in 1923 we could not find enough faith in the newsmagazine idea to scrape together even $100,000 working capital. The editor remembers the first office as "chaos—but not even very much of that." The editorial budget for the whole first year was only about half what our editors spend every week now. And even when TIME was three years old its continued existence was still so touch-and-go that one week late in 1926 we had no money in the bank to meet the payroll until a flood of Christmas gift subscription orders arrived in the nick of time.
In these past few days since TIME celebrated its 20th Anniversary I have heard several of our old timers talking about those early years. And what they had to say was so interesting to me that perhaps it would be interesting to you too.
The first issue went to 12,000 subscribers—more or less. No one will ever know just how many, because the mailing wrappers for the first three issues got so mixed up that some subscribers got three copies of Vol. 1, No. 1, and some got none at all. Its printing standards were about those of a French provincial newspaper in 1910, and the pictures, in the words of Robert Benchley, "looked as if they had been engraved on pieces of bread." At the start we did not have even one salaried advertising salesman, for the chances of selling enough advertising to pay his stipend seemed too slim. We called TIME "the weekly newsmagazine" on the cover and "the weekly newspaper" on the masthead. By the second issue, however, the editors had made up their minds, settled on "newsmagazine."
The first issue had only six full-time editors—one of them at $40 a week, none of the others at more than $25. The rest of the magazine was written by ten "weekly contributors" who earned most of their living somewhere else. Two of the sixteen are still with us as TIME'S two top editors, five have died. Quite a few of the others have gone on to fame elsewhere. Two have won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry: Archibald MacLeish and the late Stephen Vincent Benét. Publisher John Farrar was our first books editor, and Wells C. Root, our first cinema reporter, is now one of Hollywood's top flight scenarists.
TIME'S first office was on the second floor of a musty building at 141 East 17th Street, New York City. Rent was $55 a month. TIME moved seven times in its first ten years because we kept needing more space—once we had offices in an abandoned brewery.