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In the first issue only five stories were over one column in length (Calvin Coolidge ever after referred to TIME stories as "eye-tems"), and although it was published in a busy week when Congress was winding up a session, spot news of the week received scant mention. Gradually TIME style developed. Gradually more and more news, with its background and significance, was put into TIME. As money was earned it was spent to improve the quality of the magazine. The editorial cost of producing an issue of TIME is today just about 50 times as great as 15 years ago. In fact the expert color photographs used nowadays on TIME'S cover often cost more than the entire editorial department in the first issue.
Editorial Wilderness. The two young editors who produced the first issue of TIME were fortunately armed with valor and a good journalistic idea, for they plunged into an editorial wilderness. Whereas TIME now draws on the services of 400 of its own correspondents all over the world; is a member (one of the biggest clients) of both Associated Press and
United Press; has a score of expert researchers; employs another score of specialists to operate a "morgue" containing 12,000 reference books, and where 1,400,000 reports and articles are filed under 110,000 headings; in 1923 TIME'S news source was a big bundle of newspapers dropped at the office door morning and evening. Whereas TIME today has a staff of 20-odd full-time associate and contributing editor-writers. TIME'S editors 15 years ago had a staff of three or four full-time associates (two of whom frequently wrote 50 to 70% of the magazine) and about ten contributors of occasional pieces. In order to get out the magazine at all every one had to work seven days a week. On Sundays pencils flourished with particular vigor so that the staff could keep warm, since there was no heat in the building.
The evening that the first issue went to press (and many press nights thereafter), the entire full-time staff got into a taxicab, carrying the entire editorial reference library (Who's Who, World Almanac, Congressional Directory} and drove to the printers on Manhattan's 11th Avenue.
There, bending over inky tables, amid torn newspapers, fried egg sandwiches, smudged proof sheets and pint milk bottles full of coffee, they read morning papers for late news items and about dawn put TIME to bed.
A few weeks after the first issue, TIME moved from its cubicles in the office of an advertising firm (just around the corner from Fifth Avenue and Manhattan's Public Library) to larger quarters on the second floor of an East-side loft building (No. 239 East 39th Street), which prior to Prohibition had been a brewery. Here on Sundays there was heat but it was sometimes hard to gain admittance. One contributor, bringing his weekly contribution and unable to get in, resorted to drastic means. He picked up a rotten turnip in the street, gave a heave, and it landed amid a shower of glass on the editor's desk.