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"People are uninformed because no publication has adapted itself to the time which busy men are able to spend on simply keeping informed," said TIME's prospectus. "TIME is interested not in how much it includes between its covers but in how much it gets off its pages into the minds of its readers. To keep men well-informed—that, first and last, is the only ax this magazine has to grind." Even so, declared Hadden and Luce, "the editors recognize that complete neutrality on public questions and important news is probably as undesirable as it is impossible, and are therefore ready to acknowledge certain prejudices." Among them: "Faith in the things which money cannot buy; a respect for the old, particularly in manners; an interest in the new, particularly in ideas."
Luce and Hadden decided that they needed $100,000 to start TIME, but after a grueling year of canvassing friends and relatives, they could raise only $86,000. They went ahead anyway and somehow, with a small but aggressive staff of writers, turned out the magazine's first issue. An extraordinary number of prominent men plunked down the $5-per-year price to receive TIME, including Theodore Roosevelt Jr., Walter Lippmann, Herbert Bayard Swope, Edward W. Bok, the Catholic Archbishop of Baltimore, and half a dozen college presidents.
Eel-Hipped Runagade. TIME was full of innovations in journalism. It was the first national weekly that tried to be both comprehensive and systematic in its coverage. It packaged the news of the week into departments, hired researchers to provide background, and soon began to develop what came to be known as TIMEstyle. This was a fresh, sassy and sometimes impudent way of writing marked by double adjectives, alliteration, inverted sentences and frequent neologisms. Hadden was the chief inventor of TIMEstyle, and he peppered the young magazine with it. TIME called George Bernard Shaw "mocking, mordant, misanthropic," and Erich von Ludendorff "flagitious, inscrutable, unrelenting." It coined "Mussoliniland" for Italy and called drugstores "omnivenderous." When Red Grange appeared on TIME's cover, he was described as an "eel-hipped runagade" and G. K. Chesterton became "a paradoxhund."
TIME's first months were rough, but circulation gradually rose until, in 1926, it had reached 118,661. In 1925, TIME moved briefly to Cleveland, where it first used color on the cover and adopted the red border. Hadden did not like Cleveland, and the magazine was back in New York a little more than two years later. Hadden and Luce agreed to alternate as editor and business manager, each doing his job for a year. Then, on March 11, 1929, the partnership ended in tragedy. Hadden died, at 31, of a strep infection. TIME was just six years old.